Although it looks very much like a dictionary or encyclopedia, each of the book's roughly 5,000 brief biographical sketches is highly subjective; a typical entry may begin with a birthplace and filmography, but concludes with something closer to criticism and memoir, as the author examines his connection to the subject's career both academically and personally. Of
Cary Grant, he writes: "There is a major but very needed difficult realization that needs to be made about Grant—difficult, that is, for many people who like to think they take the art form of film seriously. As well as being a leading box-office draw for some thirty years, the epitome of the man-about-town, as well as being the ex-husband of Virginia Cherell, Barbara Hutton, Betsy Drake, and Dyan Cannon, as well as being the retired actor, still handsome executive of a perfume company—as well as all these things, he was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema." Thomson makes no attempt to hide his preferences; he begins his piece on
Angie Dickinson by writing "The author is torn between his duty to everyone from Throlod Dickinson to Zinneman and the plain fact that Angie is his favorite actress." The book is notable for the attention given to supporting and character actors; in his entry on
John Cazale, Thomson writes that "In heaven, I hope, there will be no stars, just supporting actors. And one of the great strengths of American film is such people." The entries range in length from a few sentences to several pages. They are written in various forms; Thomson's piece on
W. C. Fields begins with an imagined letter from
Charles Dickens to
Wilkie Collins about the death of Fields, as Fields acted in adaptations of Dickens, was something of a Dickensian character, and because he died on Christmas: "Nor could even your own ingenuity for narrative, my dear Collins—and you know what honest admiration I have for it—begin to trace the anxiety with which Fields hid away his money in some several hundred separate bank accounts, nor invent the strange names in which those accounts were lodged." Thomson is notable for his literary style, which often imitates his subjects, and for his humor. His entry on
Hoagy Carmichael imagines how
Howard Hawks asked Carmichael to appear in
To Have and Have Not. Thomson looks at images and themes that feature in a director's films; his entry on
Jean Renoir describes how the image of the river recurs in his work, and closes with
Rumer Godden's narration in Renoir's
The River: "The river runs, the round world spins/ Dawn and lamplight, midnight, noon./ Sun follows day, night stars and moon./ The day ends, the end begins." In the entry on
Michael Powell, Thomson writes:
"Black Narcissus is that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns." ==History==