Hollywood: A Love Story - Magazine - The Atlantic: FOR THE NTH time, one rains impatient questions on David Thomson’s iconic, sometimes archaic, often well-nigh manic reference book, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Why is there nothing in you about Janice Rule? Admittedly, in The Chase, she was only a supporting actress, but as the leading lady in that wonderful lost Western Invitation to a Gunfighter, she was so graceful she drove Yul Brynner to extremes of behavior that verged at times on acting. Haven’t you seen that movie? If you’ve seen 10 times as many movies as I have, how come you haven’t seen that one? Used to being shouted at, the book disdains to reply.
After five editions in 35 years, Thomson’s famous compendium of biographical sketches about the movie people—hey, it’s read by the movie people, the movie people are fighting to get into it, male stars measure their manhood by the length of their entry—is still a shantytown with the ambitions of a capital city. It gets bigger all the time without ever becoming more coherent. But with more than a thousand pages of print to wander in, only the most churlish visitor would complain about lack of cogency. Better to rejoice at the number of opportunities to scream in protest at what the author has left out, put in, skimmed over, or gone on about with untoward zeal. As a book meant to be argued with, it’s a triumph.