David Thomson on ‘The Big Screen’

It’s Friday, when we talk about movies on the Takeaway. And today, rather than focus on a specific new release, we’re looking at the big picture. From silent films to youtube videos, from international cinema to Hollywood’s golden age, we’re going to try to cram in as much as we can.
It’s all in honor of David Thomson and his new book, “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies,” which is both a history of, and valentine to, film.  
“It’s really a story about screens.” Thomson says. “Everybody spends so much time looking at screens, and they think they’re looking at reality and dealing with it. But maybe they’re not.””The movies were always capable of showing us something that we felt had been forbidden, and we love the forbidden,” Thomson says. And though sex and violence are perhaps the most obviously taboo, it is the ineffable “coolness” of the movies that is most out of our reach. “Kids today, and for decades, have thought being cool is the indefinable essential to life – it comes from the movies.”
The movies also glamorize America’s darker side: Through gangster films and monster movies, we learned to embrace murderers and bank robbers. “Monsters become sentimental characters,” Thomson says. Bonnie and Clyde killed people, and robbed banks, and were “two of the most glamorous and attractive people from the sixties.”
Movies discussed include The Big Sleep, Last Tango in Paris, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Godfather.