David Thomson

It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry — even America itself — would never be the same.
In The Moment of Psycho, film critic David...

"She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful ... But it was her edge that made her memorable-her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others." Bette Davis was the commanding figure of the great era of Hollywood stardom, with a drive and energy that put her contemporaries in the shade. She played...

"Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight." On screen, Gary Cooper, was the ultimate all-American hero: lean, laconic, and masculine, a lone sheriff battling his enemies in High Noon, or a tough individualist in The Fountainhead. Off-screen he bedded a host of leading ladies and carefully honed his image, making hundreds of movies and winning two Oscars...

Contents Include: Growing Melons in Dung-beds or Pits; Sowing the Seed, and Management of Young Plants; Training and Stopping; Soil and Planting, etc; Moulding Up - Temperature; Impregnation, Watering, etc; Forms of Houses - Depths of Soil; Preparing the Plants, Planting; Watering; Temperature and Syringing; Ventilation; Impregnation, Training and Stopping; Very Early Forcing; Varieties; Insects and Diseases. This book contains classic material,...

How many acts of murder have each of us followed on a screen? What does that say about us? Do we remain law-abiding citizens who wouldn't hurt a fly? Film historian David Thomson, known for wit and subversiveness, leads us into this very delicate subject. While unpacking classics such as Seven, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Strangers on a Train, The Conformist, The Godfather, and The Shining, he offers a disconcerting sense of how the form of movies...

With the global economic slowdown, business is entering unchartered territory and most business leaders and managers have not been exposed to prolonged recessionary pressures. However, there are models a unique set of companies that have grown in recessionary times for achieving growth in difficult markets, and David G. Thomson, growth expert and consultant, has identified them and their characteristics. What are these companies doing differently,...

Anatole "Annie" Doultry is in his early fifties, with an imposing physical presence and a reputation to match. In 1927, he is serving six months in a hellish Hong Kong prison where, on a whim, he saves the life of a Chinese prisoner.The prisoner's employer happens to be Madame Lai Choi San. Beautiful, ruthless, and shrewd, she is one of the most notorious gangsters in Asia. When Annie gets out of prison, Madame Lai thanks him with an offer of inconceivable...

A critic shares professional insights into how to derive more from a film experience, analyzing a range of iconic films to reveal metaphorical artistry techniques in the acting, filming, dialogue, and music.

In this moral conundrum that ponders how much moviegoers enjoy depictions of violence on a grand scale, an acclaimed film critic turns his attention to war movies, exploring how war and cinema in the 20th century became inextricably linked, transforming civilian experience of war-and history itself-for millions around the globe.

In just a few years, what used to be an immobile piece of living room furniture, which one had to sit in front of at appointed times in order to watch sponsored programming on a finite number of channels, morphed into a glowing cloud of screens with access to a near-endless supply of content available when and how viewers want it. With this phenomenon now a common cultural theme, a writer of David Thomson's stature delivering a critical history, or...