Cheap Shots

Our friend David Wingrove drew our attention to David Thomson’s Guardian obit of Jennifer Jones, which he thought in rather poor taste. I’d read David Edelstein’s rather vile obit of Brittany Murphy so nothing could shock me. But as David says, the striking thing about this piece is that it’s all about how Jones refused to be interviewed by Thomson for his Selznick bio. Jones is judged and condemned on those grounds alone. Consider:

“Well, she’s dead now, at 90. Gore Vidal told me maybe 10 years ago how he’d recently had dinner with Jennifer Jones and complimented her on … her looks? Her cooking? Her jokes? Never mind now. But she did tell him that she was actually three years older than her official age. So was she 93 or 90? What’s the difference if you hardly recognise anyone any longer and if you prefer not to talk to the biographer of the husband who named you Jennifer Jones, who got you your Oscar and turned your life into such a melodrama?”

What does that paragraph boil down to? The last sentence — “What’s the difference” ie “Why should we care about you?” “if you prefer not to talk to etc” ie “if you won’t talk to me?” Pretty incredible. I think it would’ve been nice if Jones had shared her memories with Thomson, and it might have made for a fascinating addition to film history. But I don’t believe she owed those memories to anybody or any such nonsense — they were her own, private, to do with as she pleased.

I think the reason that paragraph reads so snooty and self-important is that Thomson is just not that careful any more what he writes. It pains me to say this, because my contact with Mr T, when I sent him a copy of LA FIN DU JOUR in hopes of changing his mind about Julien Duvivier, was entirely pleasant and I found him gracious and charming. Asked to write something about Thomson’s new book, The Moment of Psycho: How Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, I shied away, because looking at the opening pages on Amazon I found them disturbingly shaky. For a while Thomson has seemed rather middlebrow in his tastes, his skills as a writer exceeding his verve as a thinker, but now his prose itself is starting to slacken. Consider ~

“People liked his films: in the fifties Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by Northwest had all been hits, suspense stories served with the black cream of Hitchcock’s humor.”

That image: black cream. Ugh! And WTF? It won’t do, on a basic level. I’ll pass over with merely a snide snicker the passages in his book on The Aliens Quartet which devolve into an extended sexual fantasy about Sigourney Weaver eating strawberries and cream without a top on — we can put that down to male menopause. What ties together the ugly thought unintentionally revealed in the Jones obit with the casually askew imagery of the Hitchcock piece is a lack of care. Thomson has more or less admitted he doesn’t care so much about movies as he used to* — maybe he should find something he can write about passionately. Something needs to happen.

*His dismissal of Abbas Kiarostami based on a screening of one movie would be enough to confirm this even if he hadn’t come out and said it.