The prolific and brilliant film critic David Thomson has a new book-length study of “Psycho” in stores, but he also found the time to produce four wonderful small critical studies of Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper that have just been published by Faber and Faber.
The books launch a new series called “Great Stars.”
Thomson is the perfect writer for this assignment because he is a historian with a remarkably clear-eyed view of movies. The writer’s admiration for his four subjects is quite obvious, but he is also very aware of each star’s career mistakes.
The tight volumes are packed with sharp insights, such as this assessment of Bette Davis’s hold over female moviegoers during the star’s heyday:
“American women loved to love her, and to pretend they might be as brave or reckless as she was. But they got the same amount of satisfaction when they could disapprove of her. That simple fact says everything about the appeal of Bette Davis in the great age of movie dreaming.”
Here’s another Thomson gem on the star’s screen persona:
“Bette Davis made women’s pictures, to be sure, and some are gentler or more yielding than others, but to the point of stridency in the ’30s and ’40s she asserted this war cry — that women do not have to take it, or be seen crying. Neither our movies nor our society have yet lived up to this intimidating example.”
In the Cooper book, Thomson shows how the star created a template of the quiet man of action that has been followed by such contemporary stars as Clint Eastwood.
The four careers examined are very different and give Thomson the chance to write about Golden Age Hollywood from multiple vantage points. While Cooper became a star very quickly — based primarily on his extraordinary good looks — Bogart spent a decade at Warner Bros. playing far-from-memorable villains before John Huston figured out a way to make the actor a new sort of star in “The Maltese Falcon.”
Davis also served a fairly long apprenticeship at Warner Bros. before she hit her stride in the late 1930s and then spent the subsequent decade as queen of lot. Bergman was an import, brought to Hollywood from Sweden by producer David O.Selznick and packaged as a new “natural” star who could be beautiful and sexy in a very accessible, down-to-earth manner.
The books show how aging stalled Davis’s career after her “All About Eve” triumph — she was only 42! — while Cooper and Bogart would remain at the top of their profession despite the ravages of time.
Thomson explores the difference between the confidence of a star’s screen image and the insecurities that can lead to bad choices of roles.
After his early fame as a glamorous, rather remote leading man, Cooper decided to tone down his good looks and play Everyman roles that Thomson believes neutered the star’s potent sexuality.
“In many Hollywood careers there comes an awkward moment when a man or woman decides to be more likeable — and time and again it betrays the shallowness and insecurity of their thinking,” Thomson writes of Cooper after his success as the Vermont yokel in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.”
