As the author of more than 20 books and far more magazine pieces. David Thomson is one of the most prolific and respected writers on cinema. Hell, he’s even responsible for the must-have reference The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
But at age 85 he’s ready to take a much more critical look at that media—and even his own reputation. By yet again looking back at the history of Hollywood. But this time, he’s bringing a flamethrower instead of an editing loop. And he’s got opinions.
In his new A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies (384 pp., $30, Simon & Schuster), Thomson goes polemical. Mainly dealing with what he sees as how what we see in the movies makes us have unrealistic expectations about real life. And how many situations similar to plots would actually play out on the looking-in side of the silver screen.
That includes the rise of the far-right globally, misleading models of sexual identity, and the creation of a fantasyland that he says deepens both the isolation and disconnection of real people in modern times.
So, as acting legend Bette Davis is (almost) accurately quoted in 1950’s All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
Thomson frames his thoughts in the context of specific films from a more than 100-year span. They include (among many others) The Birth of a Nation, Metropolis, Gone with the Wind, Grapes of Wrath, Casablanca, Psycho, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, and Schindler’s List right up to the more recent The Brutalist and Anora.
There’s also a bevy of snippet stories of actors, writers, directors, and executives from bold names to those forgotten to all but the biggest of buffs. And don’t look for any straight lines in Thompson’s narrative. One paragraph could be about movies, the next sports, the next casualties of war, authors, then coming back to an auteur foreign director.
Indeed, there is more about directors in this book than any other job in the movies. And not just American, but French and Italian. Thomson doesn’t assume the reader is familiar with every film name-dropped, but he explains enough to make for one very lengthy homework viewing syllabus.
He casts a wary glance on how the advent of television and how we consume television shows has affected what we look for in movies. Even as “prestige TV” blurs the lines between “Cinema” and “The Idiot Box.”
“Freewheeling” and “Ping-Pongy” are just two inarticulate ways to describe how Thomson zooms from topic to topic—something even he admits late in the book. And despite its subtitle, A Sudden Flicker of Light is geared far more to the seasoned cineaste than a general reader wanting a D.W. Griffith-to-Jordan Peele history of film.
But Thomson is an impassioned, articulate, and knowledgeable threader of stories and observations. It’s a challenging book to digest, but by a writer who believes the reader is up to that challenge. Think of it as My Dinner with David.
