The DTs

I've been dipping into David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film. With the latest edition almost 1000 pages long, you can't really read it from cover to cover.

His entries are all mini-essays, with the opinions far more useful than the information, which is already on IMDb anyway. (In fact, Thomson, unlike Halliwell or Katz, isn't trying to be encylopedic, and so probably isn't worried about competition from the internet.)

What's fascinating, beyond how outrageous and peremptory so many of his opinions are, is how arbitrary they seem. One opens the book to Ford or Hawks or Fellini or Chaplin or Cagney or Redford never knowing if it'll be a paean or a slam. (To give you a hint, he loves Hawks, not Ford, and that's good enough for me.)