"Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

David Thomson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 14, 2008

In 1975, David Thomson published his Biographical Dictionary of Film, and few film books have enjoyed better press or such steady sales.

Now, thirty-three years later, we have the companion volume, a second book of more than 1,000 pages in one voice—that of our most provocative contemporary film critic and historian.

Juxtaposing the fanciful and the fabulous, the old favorites and the forgotten, this sweeping collection presents the films that Thomson offers in response to the question he gets asked most often—“What should I see?” This new book is a generous history of film and an enticing critical appraisal written with as much humor and passion as historical knowledge. Not content to choose his own top films (though they are here), Thomson has created a list that will surprise and delight you—and send you to your best movie rental service.

But he also probes the question: after one hundred years of film, which ones are the best, and why?

“Have You Seen . . . ?” suggests a true canon of cinema and one that’s almost completely accessible now, thanks to DVDs. This book is a must for anyone who loves the silver screen: the perfect confection to dip into at any point for a taste of controversy, little-known facts, and ideas about what to see. This is a volume you’ll want to return to again and again, like a dear but argumentative friend in the dark at the movies.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, October 2008: Having already written (and twice revised) the greatest bathroom book of all time, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson has refreshed his encyclopedic and idiosyncratic understanding of movie history to confect another giant slab of candy for anyone who loves movies or just likes to watch a great mind at work. "Have You Seen...?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films is no cobbled collection of old reviews: written fresh from start to finish, Thomson's page-long profiles often ignore plot to focus instead on the people behind the film or the slippery, personal question of what the movie is actually like to watch. And writing about a thousand films pushes him beyond his favorites into more interesting territory: flaws and failures are often his best subjects. You'll want to discover movies you've never heard of before, and rediscover others you thought you knew well. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly

Film critic Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film) gives cinephiles and film novices alike a comprehensive yet personal list of 1,000 must-see films. Arranged alphabetically—a chronological index is included—Thomson's tome opens with a slapstick American comedy (1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein) and closes with a social critique from talented Italian director, Antonioni (Zabriskie Point from 1970). For Thomson, films are products of both their time and our own, and the act of watching (and re-watching) reminds us that film is a medium where the past perpetually enhances the present. It can't be a coincidence that the oldest entry (1895's L'Arrosseur Arrossé) and the newest (2007's No Country for Old Men) are both twists on the revenge epic helmed by innovative brothers (the Lumières and the Coens, respectively). As Thomson points out, Story is as long and twisty as a hose. It goes on forever. (Oct. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1024 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307264610
• ISBN-13: 978-0307264619
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 2 x 10.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #663,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 107 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Bloody maddening December 8, 2008

By Thomas Plotkin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This series of thumbnail summaries of many many movies is erudite, funny, well-written and infuriating. Like Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane, Thomson is an intrusive critic; we're usually more aware of his own presence than those of the movies he evokes. And his presence is that of the worst sort of Englishman in Southern California, a virus that has infected theSanta Monica region since English directors, actors and technicians (and decades later, music industry folk) began flocking to these shores in the 1900's. They get rich and fat off our pop culture, love the weather, yet feel free to criticize us from their perspective as insider/outsiders who truly have Yanks' measure as no-one else does. Public school class snobbery drips off of these loyal social democrats more than any fox-hunting hyphenate I've ever met; they spend their entire life, when they're not getting drunk, playing hide-the-ball for the fact that they are involved, one way or another, in making mindless entertainment for midwestern american teenages for the benefit of american banks by heaping scorn on the institutions that fatten them.

Thomson is a gruesome offender here -- no matter how much he likes a movie, he's always somehow better than it. Individually, his reviews are terrific, but his flaw-spotting becomes noticable after a while, because it always comes down to the immaturity and infantalism of American audiences that the even the most gifted film-makers are in thrall to, even Kubrick, Altman, the Coppola of The Godfather. He extends this to most global cinema post-1980, seeing folks like Kieslowski as too Hollywoodized; he also hates religion in all its forms, and thus consigns Tarkovski, Bresson, and John Ford to the ash-heap of history, on the implicit grounds that the religious are stupid gullible people.

This from a man who wrote two book-length mash-notes to Warren Beatty and Nicole Kidman, of all people, books all the worse for being highly intellectualized and cerebral. See what I mean about fattening yourself at the trough while biting the hand that feeds?

His book on Orson Welles was the nadir, he clearly loathed the fact that Welles was a popularizer of high culture, and a smiling bad boy who would back down to no-one (unlike Thomson,who writes commisioned works on behalf of Nicole Kidman), and instead of recognizing Chimes at Midnight as being the greatest, smartest Shakespeare cinema adaptation ever, beats up on Welles for his weight and supposed dilletanteism and inability to complete anything, all myths (except the weight part) biographers like Bogdanovich, Leaming, and Rosenbaum have done much to dispel. It comes down to the lamentable notion that if Thomson had been around Welles in 1942, he could have told him a thing or two about better managing his career and putting together his films. What's weird is that this kinda Marxist critic of the US culture industry winds up sounding little different than the executives at RKO who executed Welles' downfall on the grounds that he was too big for his britches and cocky and didn't care what they thought of him.

All of the capsule reviews in this book start to read like this after a while, know-it-all hectoring of the "those who can't do, teach" variety. The self-hating critic's contempt channelled from his job to the works under review. For all his scholarly talk of Sterne and Nabokov tucked away in his movie reviews, he cannot conceal the fact that books like this, and his most famous, similarly thumb-nail entry-organized book The Biographical Dictionary of American Film, are essentially meant to be read while on the toilet.

On the other hand, his novels about the movies Silver Light and Suspects are Borges-like little wonders, fiction about characters from classic movies and their unlikely interactions that actually show a real understanding and empathy for how America's myths often victimize and trap her. Maybe Thomson is just more humble as a fiction writer, aware of his weaknesses out of respect for the form. Both novels, which like 7 people have read, are worth seeking out, more so than his criticism.

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars For ALL lovers of film October 16, 2008

By Avid Collector

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I just received this book and so have only spent a couple of hours with it. The book is very engaging, and stirs interest in seeing films that you might have never ever watched, much less heard of. He is good about telling why he likes or dislikes the films, and in some cases suggests that you don't even watch the whole film, but certain scenes, or portions that are not to be missed.
Overall a great reference.
He has most of the reviews from films from the 30's to the 50's. This is intentional on his part, but does a very nice job of covering many decades of movies and he even has a couple of films from 2008.
There is a chronological index in the back of the book, but strangely enough, the book has no Table of Contents, or alphabetical listing of the reviews. I think that the inclusion of an alphabetical listing, and maybe an additional listing by director would have made things more interesting, and the book easier to use as a reference.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars ". . . when it was easy to be in love with cinema" October 26, 2008

By Found Highways VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I always used to recommend David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film as the most important book on movies for anyone to have. Now I have to recommend two books--the Biographical Dictionary and this one, "Have You Seen . . . ?" A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.

Like Thomson's Biographical Dictionary, "Have You Seen . . . ?" is as valuable to simply read and learn about movies from as it is as a reference book. I don't know of anyone who knows as much about the art and history of movies as David Thomson. (Another book by Thomson you should read is Suspects but that's for another time.)

These one thousand films certainly aren't all on Thomson's "Best of" list. On The Sound of Music: "[P]roducer-director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman . . . had killed West Side Story a few years earlier, which was a more serious crime than making The Sound of Music, because the latter had always been brain-dead."

Thomson's interest and knowledge is deepest concerning the 1930s through the 1970s. That's an amazing amount of knowledge, but he's spent his whole life studying film in the way lovers of 1960s "film culture" did--by watching good and/or interesting (not always the same thing) films over and over again.

Thomson is American now, but he grew up in England and he has the perspective of the outsider to shape his view of this country and its movies. On The Truman Show as a 1990s phenomenon:

"No other American film was clearer that the greatest threat to our existence was . . . above all our decision to be cheerful, amiable, and pleasant. . . . It was as if someone at last had realized that the most . . . frightening thing about America was not the menace, . . . but the bonhomie, the salesman oil . . ."

I don't know if it's what Thomson intended, but this makes me think of us charging off into the rest of the world, bringing "freedom" and our friendship whether it's welcome or not.

What I like most about Thomson's writing is that, in making me decide whether I agree with him or not, it makes me realize what I think.

Thomson has his strengths (or prejudices): he takes westerns and especially comedies very seriously. He knows all about film noir and the Europeans who invented this "American" style. I don't think he cares for horror movies much. But he does write about the films that transcend the genre--Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, even John Carpenter's Halloween, which echoes Hitchcock by using suspense, not gore.

So it's interesting that Thomson starts "Have You Seen . . . ?" off with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Talk about a trivial story. But the relationship between Bud and Lou isn't trivial. Thomson gets right to the horror that I sensed when I saw the Abbot and Costello movies on TV when I was ten:

". . . Bud Abbott manages to be the most forbidding figure in sight. Deep down, we know that Bud has abused Lou--it is the secret in their films never quite arrived at."

Reading David Thomson helps me see things in the movies I didn't before, and his writing and thinking about film has helped me train myself to see strange things on the screen too.