*Starred Review* The author of the standard reference The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (4th ed., 2004) begins the Guest Star series with fact-packed critical briefs on four American movie icons, managing to give each slim volume its own distinctive tone. Thomson’s account of Bette Davis is the most loving of the four. He is truly impressed with how Davis shaped her career in opposition to the desires of the studios to which she was contracted and to prevailing ideas of how women and starlets were supposed to act on- and offscreen. Chronicling Davis’ life and evolution in Hollywood, Thomson illustrates how changes in her often-disappointing private life (she had a habit of marrying the wrong men) influenced and often deepened her onscreen persona. Reading of how Davis bounced from one bad movie to the next in the early years of her career, it’s hard not to share Thomson’s enthusiasm for her talent, drive, and will. And it is hard not to feel Thomson’s disappointment when Davis’ major, artistic breakthroughs (The Little Foxes, All About Eve) are followed by lapses into forgettable mediocrity (The Man Who Came to Dinner, Payment on Demand). Thomson on Gary Cooper wittily reflects on an actor who seems to have been born into the public’s consciousness full-grown. As he describes Cooper’s meteoric rise from bit player in westerns to a big-name performer, the British critic repeatedly puzzles over the mysteries and contradictions in Cooper’s character, most notably the fact that that this international symbol of a certain kind of stoical, taciturn, adult American manhood was in his private life unambitious, passive, intellectually shallow—a man of neither thought nor action, but an unconscious practitioner of a kind of Zen-like nonaction. Even his entry into the film business and subsequent career seem more a series of happy accidents than any kind of planned progression. Likewise, his prodigious sex life—he seems to have bedded every available woman he ever met—seems more an instinctive tropism, akin to how sea anemones reach out for anything passing by that looks like food, than the result of willful erotic engagement. Thomson also devotes considerable time to highly readable deconstructions of Cooper’s best and most popular films, notably Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Sergeant York, and High Noon, with side trips taken through his other films, noteworthy and not. Thomson focuses on how long it took the well-bred and -educated Bogart to develop his trademark style as the rough-hewn, disillusioned, world-weary, wisecracking, fallen romantic of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.He charts Bogart’s progress from New York stage performer to featured player in 1930s Hollywood, where he was often cast as a certain kind of feral street rat, to star. He shows how Bogart developed his distinctive aura—an evolution that took a considerable amount of time—and acquired the directors and fellow actors who became catalysts for the ongoing transformation of his star character, such as John Huston, Howard Hawks, and Lauren Bacall, whom he married. It’s clear that Thomson loves the luminescent Bergman but doesn’t like her very much. He loves her onscreen persona as the ethereal Ilsa of Casablanca; in the darker, sexually charged atmosphere of Hitchcock’s Notorious; and even radiating the understated but unmistakable erotic heat she brings to the Spencer Tracy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He relishes her Hollywood-like rise, seemingly both unexpected and preordained, from talented Swedish actress to Hollywood goddess. Yet she was so beautiful, so willing to place career before family, so willing and even eager to fall into bed with powerful Hollywood players. How could she not succeed? Which is not to say Thomson accuses her of careerism. He reserves his harshest criticism not for her increasingly chaotic private life but for how, after her brilliance in the 1940s—Casablanca, Gaslight, and the Hitchcock masterpieces Spellbound and Notorious, and more—she settled into a kind of unsatisfying mediocrity in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomson speculates that her fortunes faded with her legendary beauty. But as he makes that observation, it’s hard not to hear behind it a stern, half-stated moral and aesthetic judgment. --Jack Helbig
