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’.