The decline of the West?

David Thomson is one of a handful of highbrow film critics writing today, along with Ron Rosen- baum and David Lane, whose work will still be read decades from now. He is best known for his amazingly ambitious Dictionary of Film, an ocean of mini-essays about every major figure in international film in the past century, and the best toilet-side reading on earth. Somehow Thomson has come up with an even more daring agenda for his follow-up performance.

In Scott Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, he writes that Hollywood ‘can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.’ Thomson aims, in just 400 pages, to show us this whole equation: the story of a town, an art-form and an industry. And there’s more: Thomp- son describes his mission as to tell ‘not just the history of American movies, but the history of America in the time of the movies’.

If Thomson doesn’t pull it off — his telling is too eccentric, too unfocused, too prone to digression — it is terrific fun seeing him try. The history he has to tell is best understood as a succession of genre flicks. The opening chapters are a Western — a strangely Jewish Western — about a group of cowboys and refugees who wash up in the early 20th century in Los Angeles, a largely empty town, and ‘rise in a slow dissolve from shtetl to palace’. As Thompson explains, ‘In a little over 20 years, a band of foreigners, mostly Jewish, uneasy with the English language, had arrived and found a trick of light.’