IN the panel (right) are just a few of the observations made by the articulate and shrewdly perceptive critic David Thomson, in which contains critical portraits of over 1,000 international actors and film-makers. One of the longest entries in the book is devoted to Orson Welles and it concludes: "He inhaled legend - and changed our air. It is the greatest career in film, the most tragic, and the one with the most warnings for the rest of us."
Thomson now has written an entire book exploring the life and work of Welles- Rosebud, sub-titled The Story of Orson Welles. Welles's great masterpiece, Citizen Kane, was released in 1941, the year Thomson was born and in his book he recalls the indelible experience of seeing the film for the first time all alone in a cinema in Tooting in south London. "I can see now that my future was taken care of and ruined maybe," he notes, and he describes Kane as no less than "the greatest, movie that ever has been made or ever will be made".
Regularly pausing in conversation and choosing his words carefully, Thomson outlined the evolution of his Welles book as we partook of a few bracing Bloody Marys in his Dublin hotel recently. "I've been getting ready for this for a long time, in that my interest in Welles goes back a very long way," he said. "It built as I became more aware of film. It then became a focus of my work as a teacher of film because twice in the 10 years when I taught, I did a seminar on Welles and pretty well every year I taught Kane."
Thomson's book editor proposed the idea of a Welles book four years ago. "I pointed out that there had been so many books on Welles, especially in the middle 1980s," says Thomson. "And he said, `Well, I know, but none of those books really does it'. We agreed to do it. I can't remember the exact timetable but, suddenly before I'd even put pen to paper I heard what Simon Callow was up to. I didn't know him then, but I'd read his (Charles) Laughton book and I'd heard only good things about him. And I also gathered that Callow was planning a monumental, book on Welles.
"For a while I wondered, if I should do my book. That phase passed and then something liberating clicked in. I never wanted to do what Callow planned - a 1,200-page book over two volumes. I never wanted to be that thorough. It seemed too robotic almost as to be humourless, and I always felt that with Welles you had to have a form that caught the mischief in the man. And I thought if Callow's going to do it his way, I'm freer to be a little more daring.
Playful was the key word, Thomson felt, and the guideline movies was F For Fake (1973), Welles's clever, sly and aptly misleading reflection on forgery and illusionism. Thomson's enthralling Rosebud is shaped like an imagined docudrama, complete with digressive devices such as work-in-progress, discussions between the author and, his publisher.
"I knew some people would be irritated and that some would think the book adolescent, but it's the way I thought of doing it," Thomson says. "It's full of admiration for Welles, but it says: Be careful don't fool yourself, this was one tricky monster, don't let's hero-worship him. He's dead, he's not going to be hurt. Let's look at the work more closely, and at this deviousness which is very much part of the work, and let's see him for what he was a very, very tormented, self-destructive genius who played games all the time."
Thomson explains his fascination with Welles. "He is a man and he is obsessed with men of extraordinary talent and power and with the glory of achievement - and yet he is possessed by, haunted by, a certainty of failure, and it's that contrast that interests me most."
Before tackling his Welles book, David Thomson showed his own deep interest in show business figures of great talent and power in his choice of subjects for his earlier critical biographies - Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes (1987) and the superb Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (1992).
Isn't Beatty losing it now, rather like Welles did? "It's tragic," Thomson says. "On the one hand, I'm told that he's absolutely bowled over by and in love with his two children and it may well be that he's spending so much time with them. But he has ceased to be a figure of interest. He really seems to have lost not just his looks, Which is dangerous enough for an actor like that, but he's also lost his edge."
DAVID Thomson says he lost the best friend he'll ever have when the Irish director, Kieran Hickey, died three years ago. They met in 1960 on the steps of the National Film Theatre in London. They worked together compiling filmographies of directors at a time when such things were not available. Thomson collaborated as a writer on some of Hickey's films - Faithful Departed, Jonathan Swift and A Child's Voice.
Their talks continued down the years, in letters, over the phone and in person, and Thomson says some people are surprised at how much space he has given over to Kieran Hickey in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary. "It's my book and I felt he should be in," Thomson says. "In a way I feel the movies are over now he's gone."
Thomson recalls with great pleasure teaching film in the 1970s and the excitement of feeding students who were hungry to learn about how movies are made and about the history of film. "You go to colleges now and they believe that movies started with Star Wars," he says ruefully. "Despair is a word I would very reluctantly use, but ..."
Four years ago when Howards End and Unforgiven were front-runners for Oscars, Thomson commented, unfairly to my mind, that "when James Ivory and Clint Eastwood vie for a year's best film, it may be that the movies can see their end." Invited to elaborate on that statement, Thomson says: "Neither is the worst film ever made. They both have qualities, and even though I'm not a fan of either film, Ivory and Merchant fulfill a useful purpose of a kind, I think, and sometimes there's some very good acting in their films. I'm not against them. I'm just against the elevation of them into defenders of the culture, which is erroneous. Equally, I like Clint Eastwood, but I don't buy him as a great director or as a great mind, I thought Unforgiven was a promisingly harsh fable that betrayed itself."
We agree to differ. "We have that right," he says. "But I fear that we live in very lean times. I see fewer and fewer directors around who are unmistakably of the first quality. I don't think there's been any moment in the history of movies when we've had fewer great directors alive and functioning.
"And when you look at what the youngsters who are coming along are doing - they seem happy to make more or less what the industry wants them to make. I mean, I think Pulp Fiction had a fantastic energy and there's no question about Tarantino's talent, but it seems to me that he hit a roadblock prematurely. And I don't see the likelihood of him overcoming it easily. I don't think he knows what to do.
"The lack of having a compelling subject to do has a lot to do with the extra emphasis being put on a certain kind of commercial process in film-making today. Films are not about photographed images anymore, they're about electronic images. It's not so much technique as technology. Films are increasingly dealing with things that never happened or could be, and nobody appears to be shocked. Hollywood wants bigger and bigger projects and they are specifically asking writers to find them a way of getting special effects people have never seen before. You can see them discussing In dependence Day and someone saying, `Let's blow up the White House and someone else saying, `Rrriglit'! Great shot! Could we fit a story to make that happen?'
"So you have a film like Independence Day, which isn't the worst. I think there's a way in which its fun, but how many people are killed in the course of it? Zillions and zillions - yet everyone's cheering at the end. It's a very strange world if we judge by our films."