Quotes by David Thomson

“The character of Annie Doultry is plainly a self-portrait of Brando. There are transcripts of conferences he and Cammell had, and Brando did a lot of improvising, playing the Annie Doultry character. Plainly he saw this as a part that he might play in a movie himself.”

“filling in gaps of the story.”

“Theres a funny thing to when youre writing something thats not quite yours. You feel unburdened. Theres a strange liberty to it, although I was still trying to be faithful to them.”

“Brando clearly was imagining himself as that person. There are several aspects of it that fit with Brando very well; that kind of loner, interested in sailing and the South Seas, drawn to Asian women and eating and drinking.”

“Id say where he is now hes in a pretty amused state, and I hope hed look down on it fondly with a smile. Everyone involved has tried to produce the book (Brando and Cammell) would have.”

“Its not profound literature, but its an adventure story and quite a good adventure story, very unexpected coming from Brando. It tells us a lot about him.”

“He made the South Seas a great part of his life. Clearly this story comes out of the books he read and the things he learned about the seas during his time out there. He was also crazy about Asian women.”

“I dont look for anyone to say this is a great novel, although I do think its a fine, fun read. But what I think is most interesting is that the character of Annie is so clearly a portrait of Brando and that so much of him gets into it.”

“Cammells, I suppose, was a failed career, ... but it was a good deal more interesting than the careers of many people who were much more successful. He was quite a remarkable man.”

“Its funny - writing the afterword required a lot of digging and research, and was ultimately harder than editing the actual novel,”

Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town

I suspect that a greater and more insidious influence [than violence in movies] may lie in what they tell us about being in love, and how to conduct ourselves while in that condition.

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, Bette Davis Eyes. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. Its like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the mediums essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in films emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.