NONFICTION
Bette Davis
by David Thomson, $14; paperback
David Thomson has written four mini-biographies, published under the rubric “Great Stars,” as follow-ups to his indispensable, compulsively readable “New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (2002). For all its length, that compendium could spare only two or three pages apiece for even such influential figures as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant.
In these new little books, however, Thomson is free to carry on for 100 or more pages about a single star from Hollywood’s Golden Age, the 1930s and ’40s.
And perceptive carrying-on it is. In his volume on Bette Davis, Thomson makes a good case for the young actress as a hottie. This bucks the conventional view of Davis, as captured by a studio executive in one of the most famous put-downs in Hollywood history: “She has about as much sex appeal as (male character actor) Slim Summerville.”
After reviewing the early Davis oeuvre, Thomson gives his verdict: “In 1935-7, I don’t think there’s a more desirable or intriguing woman in pictures than Bette Davis.”
But Thomson’s next sentence harks back to his reservation about Davis in the “Biographical Dictionary”: “And she’s getting ready to say goodbye to it.” By that he means that Davis is about to enter “the prison of the women’s picture,” with its steady diet of “romantic foolishness” — all those dark victories and noble sacrifices that now seem saccharine and campy.
Golden Age screwball comedies and films noir have held up far better than the sudsy stuff Davis loved to make because they don’t try to crown women as domestic drama queens, avid for Big Moments and Big Speeches — what Thomson calls “the tirade as view of life.”
NONFICTION
American Homicide
by Randolph Roth, $45
Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University, has studied murder from colonial times to the present.
He traces the great rise in American murder rates to the middle decades of the 19th century, when “the least homicidal places in the Western world suddenly became the most homicidal. By the end of the Civil War, homicide rates among unrelated adults were substantially higher in the North than in Canada or western Europe, and higher still by one or two orders of magnitude in the South and Southwest.”
What set the United States apart from less-violent countries, Roth suggests, was a series of upheavals that hit the nation at the time: “the crises over slavery and immigration, the decline in self-employment, and the rise of industrialized cities,” he says.
“Disillusioned by the course the nation was taking, people felt increasingly alienated from both their government and their neighbors . . . ” Some of those perceptions, of course, are still widely held today, and Roth sees a correlation between how we are governed and the likelihood that we will kill one another:
“The statistics make it clear that in the twentieth century homicide rates have fallen during the terms of presidents who have inspired the poor or have governed from the center with a popular mandate, and they have risen during the terms of presidents who have presided over political and economic crises, abused their power, or engaged in unpopular wars.
“The most disastrous increase occurred while Richard Nixon was in power. The most substantial decreases occurred under Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Clinton. But it is not always clear whether the decreases were related to specific policies or whether they were due to the appearance of legitimacy that a particular administration achieved in the eyes of the poor.”
