Customer Reviews

Suspects

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You may have read Thomson's excellent movie reviews or his wonderful book on Orson Welles. If so, you know this guy is both a film scholar and a die-hard fan of the medium.

"Suspects" is a must-read for any film buff. Thomson goes back into movie history and writes short biographies of various film characters, starting early in their life and usually ending with their deaths. These extrapolated bios are fascinating alternative histories of the sort of movie characters whom you want to continue to get to know even outside the scope of the pictures they appear in.

So the book is vastly entertaining if you're the sort of person who wonders what "Chinatown"'s Jake Gittes' childhood was like, or whatever happened to George Bailey after "It's a Wonderful Life" ended.

But there's more going on in this book than the fantastical and fully imagined bios. Soon various characters from different movies begin appearing in other characters' bios, and the real-life bios of producers and actors and directors start to seamlessly creep into the text.

At some point you realize that the narrator is not Thomson but rather a famous movie character (I won't reveal who it is here). This narrator's presence ties the seemingly disconnected vignettes together, and gives the book a darker feel as it progresses.

In the end, you realize this is not just a whimsical book about the love of movie characters. It's ultimately an examination on how movies affect the way we think and how film not only shapes our perceptions and our memories but in some ways comes to stand in for them, both for the good and for the bad.

And that's why I love this book -- you can read it as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives, or you can read it simply as a fascinating take on movie fandom. Either way, it's fabulous.

This has got to be one of the hardest books to describe I've come across. You could fairly label it any (or all) of the following: meditation on film noir, meditation on the American psyche, film buff fanfic, partial encyclopedia of film characters, or experimental fiction. Thomson is an eminent film critic and biographer, and back in the early '80s, he was approached to put together a dictionary of film characters. As he thought about the project, the more problematic it seemed to him. So he reconceived it by focusing on the characters from a core of classic noir films and planning out how they might have interacted.

The book unfolds as brief biographies of almost 100 characters from around 40-50 films, mostly from the 1940s-1970s era. The characters are reimagined as they interect with the "real" world as well as the "reel" world of others in the book. So, for example, the characters Noah Cross (Chinatown) and Nora Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) are shown to have been lovers in the 1920s, while Ilsa (Casablanca) dies in the 1963 plane crash that killed U.N. General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld . Meanwhile, some characters are revealed to be relatives of others and so forth. As readers of Thompson's Biographical Dictionary of Film know, he is a gifted and incisive biographer, and his fictional work here is equally skilled. All of which makes for interesting (and sometimes amusing) metafare, but there's something deeper at work.

It's not at all clear who the first-person writer of these mini-bios is (it's clearly not Thomson), nor how he or she is related to them, or what the purpose of all the succession of bios is. However -- there is a big clue in the form of a map at the very beginning. That said, the clue didn't register with me, and about 1/3 of the way into the book, I was confused enough to start skipping around a bit. At the back, I found a family tree that unlocked the riddle and sent me back into the book, flipping back and forth to connect the dots (one of the book's juicier pleasures arrives once the reader works out the identity of Travis Bickle's (Taxi Driver) father.) As befits a book of such odd construction and narrative, one can interpret it many different ways -- as a statement on identity, a statement on American values, a statement on aging, a statement on the function of film, or even just an odd entertainment.

Whatever one's reaction, it's definitely worth checking out by those interested in experimental approaches to fiction, as well as those with a penchant for film noir. It would certainly be to the reader's advantage to be familiar with at least half the films referenced by the book, otherwise the character sketches are going to be hardest to contextualize in the mind. I was familair with about 3/4 of the characters in the book, and found the unfamiliarity with the other 1/4 to detract from the grip of the book.

I didn't go into this demanding much - just a series of intriguing fictional biographies that interconnected with each other over the course of the novel. And to be fair, most of the biographies are well-written, and many are interesting. A few are even touching. But there are two major flaws that kept me from really enjoying this book:

1) To really appreciate this as a whole, you need to be familiar with all of the characters' source films. This is especially noticeable with some of the less famous films.

2) A significant number of the characters have unpleasant histories, with elements that only seemed to be added for shock value. This reaches its offensive peak with the last few bios, including that of the narrator.

If those two issues aren't likely to be a problem for you, then you might get something out of this. Otherwise, I'd probably pass.

If you are an avid movie buff & have seen a wide variety of movies in the "noir" genre then you may get more out of this book than I did. As a collection of stand-alone mini-biographies of some of the characters in the aforementioned movies this book does a fine job of filling in their backgrounds very well. In some cases, the "whatever happened to?" aspect of these characters is expanded upon very nicely.
It is in the weaving of these vignettes that I feel the author has gone awry. Or maybe I, as the reader, did not have enough background to follow the authors intent. Admittedly, I have not seen over half of the movies listed in the book. Perhaps this added to my confusion, but is it not the writer's job to eventually explain all?
Of the movies I have seen, I noticed the author took some liberties to bend the story his way (which is called "poetic license")and that makes me curious about the others.
For instance, the state in which Bedford Falls exists is never mentioned in the film, "It's A Wonderful Life". Having seen this movie more times than I can count, I've always felt that Bedford Falls was in upstate New York. The characters who leave Bedford Falls all have connections to New York City; Sam Wainwright, Harry Bailey & Violet. Had Bedford Falls been located in Nebraska (as the author contends), wouldn't someone had an itch to go to Chicago?
And one character that was left out of the book; Mr. Potter is only mentioned briefly, but no background and no what-happened-to?
Enjoy the book for the clever mini-bios but don't try to find the plot... it's not there.