London-born David Thomson graduated from Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. He has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, is on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, Film Comment, Los Angeles, and The New Republic. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Welles is certainly enjoying a boom; soon after the first volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles (Forecasts, Nov. 20, 1995) comes this study by the author of The Life of David O. Selznick and A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson does not pretend to have done vast scholarship or delved extensively into original sources. As a boy in England, he says, he fell under Welles's spell, and his book is a sort of vast, almost novelistic examination of the showman's rich and ultimately deeply frustrating life; it is an attempt to come to terms with the fascination Welles continues to exert, although it is generally agreed that his last 40 years were an anticlimax. Determined to be compulsively readable, Thomson indulges in highly tendentious asides, interrupts himself with questions he imagines his publisher asking and works in chunks of scenes from Welles's movies and snippets from the interviews the star tirelessly gave all his life. The result is a vivid patchwork, a swift, impressionistic take on Welles that is also an often moving tribute to his oblique mix of genius and charlatanism. Not by any means the only book on Welles to read, but a stimulating and diverting one, with some unusual judgments: that his Macbeth, for instance, is better than his Othello, and that the late F for Fake is a neglected masterwork. Illustrated. 50,000 first printing. (June)
Thomson, author of the terrific Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (LJ 11/1/92) and many other film books, weighs in here with his own take on another legendary film figure. It must inevitably be compared with Simon Callow's ambitious Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (LJ 11/15/95), which, as the first of two volumes, covers only through the 1941 release of Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, Thomson's single volume on an entire life seems rushed by comparison‘only 50 pages are devoted to the last 27 years. Little new ground is broken here; even Thomson's usually bright insights seem secondhand and pedestrian. Unless your patrons are begging for more Wellesiana, this is an optional purchase.‘Thomas J. Wiener, editor, "Satellite DIRECT"
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