A movie must begin with words: a book, a script, an acknowledgment from a producer that a concept is not a bankable text. David Thomson, a London-born critic based in San Francisco, reverses the procedure with a work of fiction drawn entirely from old films. His sources are such moody classics as Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Laura, Casablanca and dozens of other favorites from the Late Show of the American psyche.
While most fans are content to watch Captain Louis Renault and Rick Blaine (Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca) walk off into the fog together, Thomson asks more. Where did the cynical French policeman and the hard-boiled American come from? What will they do after the final fade-out? And what of Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker (Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb in Laura), Guy Haines and Bruno Anthony (Farley Granger and Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train) and Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis (Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard)?
In all, Thomson imagines fuller lives for 85 characters. Rick Blaine, for example, was born in Omaha in 1900. Before Casablanca and the Cafe Americain, he played football at the University of Nebraska, organized farm workers in California, fought against fascism in Spain and played the black market in Paris. There he met Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), a language teacher and daughter of a bankrupt Swedish count, who will survive the war to subtitle Ingmar Bergman films, model for Edward Hopper and become Dag Hammarskjold’s assistant. She died with the Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1961 when their plane crashed in Africa. Blaine, a probable alcoholic and possible homosexual, died in 1949. He had lived in Marrakech with Louis Renault. Meanwhile, at The Maltese Falcon, Casper Gutman and Joel Cairo (Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre) wind up as a professional bridge team, too mistrustful to allow each other out of sight.
Thomson’s romance with the dark side of American cinema leads to complicated relationships. Laura Hunt’s older sister is Mary Frances Bailey (Donna Reed), wife of George Bailey (James Stewart) of It’s a Wonderful Life. Those who must believe the worst about even the nicest people will be pleased to learn that George and Sister-in-Law Laura enjoyed a pre-Christmas tryst at New York City’s Pierre Hotel. Julian Kay (Richard Gere in American Gigolo) was born in an asylum, son of the mad Norma Desmond and Screenwriter Joe Gillis, whom she shot in the last reel of Sunset Boulevard. Julian is raised by Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), Norma’s former husband and butler. After two dismal marriages, Judy Rogers (Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause) joins a Haight-Ashbury commune.
Reading Suspects is like compulsively picking chewing gum off the underside of a theater seat. Thomson piles unsavoriness upon unsavoriness: murders, betrayals, secrets and low-budget aphorisms like “People in movies have a sensational now about them and a mysterious past.”
No one’s history is more cryptic than that of Noah Cross (John Huston in Chinatown), ruthless Los Angeles pioneer, father to his own granddaughter and possible sire of Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai). He is the omnipotent wizard in Thomson’s sinister Oz, an America whose center is located in Bedford Falls, Neb. It is a mythical place of lost innocence and the home of George Bailey, who watches SAC bombers over the cornfields of his youth and concludes that “America is just a story of its men and women going from happiness to stoicism.”
More likely, happiness is going from movie to movie or, better yet, staying home to slip those little dream sandwiches into the VCR. Thomson plays to this explosion in film culture in much the way that Jorge Luis Borges ingratiates bibliophiles by writing fantasies about books. One good unreality deserves another.
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