First published in 1975 and updated here with new entries, David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary remains not only one of the essentials of any self-respecting film book collection, but one of the most difficult film books to put down! When my first book prompted British reviewer Chris Roberts to kindly compare my writing style with Thomson's, I considered myself extremely lucky. But the fact is no writer has managed the alchemy of encyclopedic knowledge of film history tempered with resonant but easy-going style quite like Thomson does. In an era in which it has become difficult to separate film criticism from poster hype, his insights and turns of phrase ring in the mind.

Good film writing can be as clarifying as a torch in an archive and Thomson really knows how to make the people behind his entries stand out. Obscured by the long shadow of screwball and the towering reputations of Lubitsch, then Lubitsch acolytes Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, Mitchell Leisen's specific appeal was "too reliant on feeling to be screwball, too pleased with glamour." The entry ends with a challenge to writers to do Leisen justice that is sorely tempting. For me, reading Fred Zinnemann spoke to the inner self who secretly preferred the unpretentious movies: Act of Violence (1948), The Men (1950) to the stolid films: From Here to Eternity (1953), A Man for all Seasons (1966), Julia (1977). Thomson's bemoaning a social realist road not taken liberated me from paying lip service to the middlebrow Zinnemann became. This also reminds us that Zinnemann was the camera assistant on the Berlin realist People on Sunday (Siodmak/Ulmer, 1929), co-written by Billy Wilder. Catching up with Wilder's death last year, the new edition also lends focus to his protracted retirement. "He was not just a survivor, but the survivor, our last link with the merry, wicked talk of the golden age."

Adept at catching the individual face in quintessential mode, yet aware of the limits of idolatry, Thomson's introduction to Juliette Binoche is breathtaking as it sees her in Three Colours: Blue (Kieslowski, 1993): "How many ways are there of watching her grave face? Are the cheeks carved by love's gaze? Did that hair fall on her head like night? And the eyes - are they part of her life, or their own living creatures? And yet…if only this had just a touch of….Debbie Reynolds?" Grief and a woman's looks have a distinguished pedigree in film history. Without utterly desecrating the tradition, Thomson's abrupt defusing invites you to take the long view, to see La Binoche as the product of an obsessive rapport between diva and auteur which has become something of a film-historical cliché. He's right. Too much of this can make you yearn for more commonplace fruit. A Catherine Zeta-Jones perhaps: "there is a very Welsh look to Jones, a kind of Polly Garter flash, full of flirt, anger and sauce." Or a Holly Hunter maybe: "she easily offered the look of a modern Southern shopping-mall belle."

Thomson crisply delineates whole careers. He shows how the meanness of Bogart's '30s gangster and the indifferent Warner vehicles in which he marked time, segued into the hard-boiled '40s romantic and the singular opuses in which his star peaked, before the sporadic dissolutions of the '50s. For an actor whose career was his image rather than his oeuvre, the entry pays tribute to the shadow Bogie cast over postwar generations. In a nicely organic piece, notice how Raoul Walsh provides the thread linking Bogart's programmers to the existential turn signalled by High Sierra (1941). Elsewhere, another long and complex trajectory is joyously summarized: "Chabrol's strength is a unique sense of the unspoken shifts of character in human relations."

These are well-rehearsed reputations, however. Perhaps the test of this endlessly quotable book resides in its appraisals of elusive exotic talents such as Jane Campion's. "But her films exert their power through the mysterious or the cryptic collisions of their structure. The slightly fractured air leaves the films to heal in our minds, knitted together by the appetite for life and the invisible guidance of performance fromactresses…who come from so far away they are like people we are meeting." It is rare for men to write with such sensitivity about films directed by women. Rarer still for a writer to capture whatever it is that makes World Cinema characters seem simultaneously real and strange.

Descriptions of individual films stand out like serendipity. Of Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1969): (it) "studies human tenderness with an almost Oriental dispassion within a plot that involves horrifying murder." Of Deliverance (Boorman, 1972): "The wishful return to nature of four city men canoeing down an Appalachian river relates Thoreau and the world of ecological Cassandras." You don't go to a book like this for judgements of individual films, but that doesn't mean that Thomson's views aren't often blessedly more insightful than the glut of contemporary film guides. Last summer, I kept returning for some reason to Limbo (Sayles, 1999). Thomson casts his eye over "a film with the richness of a novel and a genuine feeling for untidy people." Yes, that was it.

Occasionally, he makes mistakes. Sheldrake's putting live flies in the nose cone of a toy rocket in The Apartment (Wilder, 1960) is not exemplary of Wilder's throwaway misanthropy. It is Sheldrake's son, on the cusp of puberty, whose curiosity is piqued by the prospect of flies "propagating in orbit", whilst Sheldrake's shocked response testifies to his hypocrisy. (He is currently screwing a girl at the office behind Mrs Sheldrake's back.) Whether or not you agree with Thomson is less important than the light he throws on your opinions. Since writing my book on Wilder, my attitude towards the director has become increasingly disenchanted by his misanthropy and misogyny. Thomson puts much of this not uncommon disenchantment into eloquent prose. I may, of course, change my mind again next year. Either way, as opinionated as Thomson is, his opinions are invariably true.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002