Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire

by David Thomson

From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, an original, seductive account of sexuality in the movies and of how actors and actresses on screen have fed our desire.

Film can make us want things we can not have. But, while sometimes rapturous, the interaction of onscreen beauty and private desire speaks to a crisis in American culture, one that pits delusions of male supremacy against feminist awakening and the spirit of gay resistance. Combining criticism, his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, and memoir, David Thomson examines how film has found the fault lines in traditional masculinity and helped to point the way past it toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person desiring others. Ranging from advertising to pornography, Rudolph Valentino to Moonlight, Rock Hudson to Call Me By Your Name, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to Phantom Thread, Thomson shows us the art and the artists we love under a new light. He illuminates the way in which film as art, entertainment, and business has been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. And he makes us see how the way we watch our movies is a kind of training for how we try to live.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History, Sexuality, Cultural, Media Tie In, Art

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2019

About the author

David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Campbell Andrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomson’s always worth reading but this is one hellishly confused book. He’s getting at something but he never grasps it; he doesn’t even settle on a consistent definition of “gay,” (an identity? action? politic?) which gave rise to the volume in the first place.

This is a morally incoherent work, with no guiding thesis but “movies are sexy.” He hints at culpability and buries the lede of his connection to James Toback; he confesses to infidelity but blithely dismisses the dissolution of marriage. He makes passing reference to porn but does not account for its pervasiveness in the digital age. He lays out a history of sex in movies and ignores (or misstates) inconvenient details. Altogether he reveals himself a very conventional thinker, regurgitating the accepted norms of ostensibly liberal, reasonable society.

And then he’ll bust out a revealing production anecdote or a summation to crystalize his theories. To me, those handful of moments are worth wading through the rest.

A swath of cinema history will die with David Thomson. I’m not sure the movies, as he would recognize them, will last much past him.

[Marshall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t intend to make a habit of reviewing on Goodreads but this merits an exception — what a repugnant collection of boomer rantings masquerading as “criticism.” I began with frustration at Thomson’s inability to recognize desire, the supposed topic of his book, as something with a physiological dimension rather than just existing subjectively for him to arbor. Then I grew restless with his attempting to divine a queer angle on countless Hollywood classics from a position that felt determined to forcibly “out” people or assign motives that cannot be substantiated in any credible fashion. By the end, I was utterly appalled by his apologia for the men held to account by the reckoning of the #MeToo movement. An absolutely disgusting book. (Where was an editor on this?) This is an abject failure on virtually every possible level.

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reminds me of a certain kind of university lecturer, the sort who perches on the edge of the desk and chats instead of lectures, rambling all over the place and dipping into all sort of topics, none of them terribly deeply, interspersed with personal anecdotes that may or may not illuminate the topic. That sort of prof can be very entertaining, but at the end of the term you realize you don't have a lot of coherent notes and you're not sure what exactly you've learned, let alone what you're supposed to study for the exam. So I overall mostly enjoyed it, despite shaking my head at some very odd statements at times. As others have pointed out, he doesn't seem to understand queer theory very well, at times seeming to think it amounts to speculating on whether this or that film person might have been gay or had some same-sex sexual experience (there is WAY too much of that, often amounting to little more than idle or scurrilous gossip), at other times trying to be more theoretical about it all in a somewhat incoherent way. So he says odd things like this when talking about drive-in theatres in the American west: "It's as if that screen was queering the idea of solid landscape and live entertainment." He also generally seems to regard movies as being necessarily driven by male desire and the male gaze, to such an extent that moving away from that focus by, say, having more female cinematographers, however just such a change would be, risks destroying the entire film project entirely: "The thrust of movie-looking, or spying, remains male, and I'm not sure that cinema (the engine called desire) can survive the wise reform that imbalance cries out for. The revelations of 2017, the litany of sexual harassment, never quite got to a key question: what are movies without male lust? Could the whole show lapse, like dinosaurs?" And he has some pretty gross and stupid things to say about the role that sexual harassment and exploitation have played in the professional lives of some filmmakers he admires, like Nicholas Ray: "But Ray was not a cruel man or a natural monster of power. So what was he doing? That question is at the heart of the male empire in filmmaking. He was acting that way because he could, and because that assertion of power assisted his need for creative authority. In the climate of the work pretty women understood a need to be attractive and pliant. Directors take advantage of actresses, but there are actresses who need to give themselves over to the male vision and the wish to do good work. Some sexual affairs are working arrangements. Some marriages have similar strategies."

[Wendy Liu]

Interesting in places but mostly frustrating and incoherent. Definitely needed an editor.

[Ron S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomson is one of the most interesting and occasionally frustrating philosophers writing today -- who almost incidentally, it seems, uses cinema and television as the vehicle for his observations and criticism. This book, given its focus, is sure to provoke strong reaction. Given the cultural climate of #MeToo, it seems fair to call this a courageous work (as an example, not only does Thomson include a chapter on James Toback but refers to him as one of his best friends -- albeit without making any excuses for, or approving of, his behavior.)

Note that publisher Knopf seems to have cold feet about all of this already: the original subtitle of "Male Supremacy, Gay Resistance, and Real Women (at Last) in the Movies" has been changed to "How the Movies Shaped Desire" on the advance reader copy I received.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a frustrating read for many reasons, but I found some of the speculation dubious. For instance, Scotty Bowers claims to have had sex with Spencer Tracy while no other source has suggested Tracy had any homosexual relationships so why would Thomson give it enough credibility to be included here? The book was originally set to deal with gayness in film, but I'm guessing it was too meandering or too speculative to market it that way. What we're left with feels insightful at times and like a bowel moment of the brain at others.

[Michael Flick · Rating 1 out of 5]

A nice mess, to put it in movie speak.

How marketing can destroy a potentially great book. Not sure if the fault is with the publisher or the author—probably some combination of both.

No hint as to what this book is about or why it was written until the end, the last three chapters. Finally on page 271 it comes out: “...my publisher was wondering about a book on how gays in Hollywood had meant so much for our movies and for our culture. I was interested to read that book, and sometimes if you want to read a book you have to write it yourself.” Unfortunately, he didn’t and couldn’t do that: [17] “...When you go to the movies, you take your own history with you. The fantasy is about you.” Gays and movies is not the author’s fantasy. He takes great pains to make that clear. Instead he recycles material, a lot of it from Scotty Bowers “Full Service,” pretty much only adding that a physician acquaintance in San Francisco boasted that Cary Grant had propositioned him in the early 1960s. That tells nothing about Cary Grant but everything you need to know about that boasting physician.

Page 274: “...This is not a book intent on outing people...” but that’s what it does with abandon. About as close as it gets to what it supposedly is about is: [316] .”...just being at a movie and watching was a form of masturbation.” Outing gay actors and periodic mention of desire doesn’t come anywhere close to “...a book aiming to be an account of gayness in movies... [256]”

The author has obviously a broad knowledge of movies, but he aimlessly meanders and weaves, never getting to the point. Incoherent. Wrong author. Wrong book.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I abandoned this book around the halfway point. I've enjoyed books by this author before, but this one is a mess. There is no thesis; a publisher summary says it is "an original, seductive account of sexuality in the movies and of how actors and actresses on screen have fed our desire," but really it's a disconnected collection of essays about sex in movies, with an emphasis on gay filmmakers, actors, and behind-the-scenes artists and technicians. His insights are not new, and in fact, this feels like something that should have published 20 years ago. It's like Thomson just discovered queer theory but doesn't quite know what to do with it. Occasionally interesting, but mostly a disappointment.

[Meg Ulmes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to give this book a four, but I just can't. Some of it was interesting but much of it is way too skim worthy. I glanced over more than half of the book. Way too much philosophizing rather than writing to his topic. Too much psychoanalysis of people, films, and situations. If you're a real cinema lover--go for it. If not, no recommendation here.

[Alex Sarll]

There were big chunks in the middle of this where I thought Thomson had wandered off and got stuck in a corner of his own subject, repeatedly assuring the reader that he wasn't here to out anyone before once again getting into his thoughts on how gay various Hollywood legends were or weren't. Which in fairness, are at least individual; he believes in a straighter Cary Grant and Tony Curtis than I would have thought generally accepted nowadays, but also a gayer John Ford. And yes, it's not without interesting observations; some of what he says verges on truism (the at minimum homosociality of gangs, so deeply fascinating to the most loudly macho makers and fans of cinema), elsewhere he's illuminating on the way that cinema, even before it could openly admit anything of the sort, was so busy making its leads look irresistible that it's no surprise if it ended up queering the audience as a natural by-product. Not that 'queer' is a term Thomson uses much, presumably for generational reasons; we should probably be grateful that he is at least less allergic than some to the B-word, even if he never seems altogether comfortable with it, despite how closely it connects to the core of his thesis. So we will hear how so-and-so, though married, also 'led a gay existence', as if being into more than one gender were necessarily equivalent to being a superhero, or a werewolf.

Now, obviously none of this is irrelevant to the subject. And Thomson is a digressive writer to his bones; I think the only thing I've read from him that's not stuffed with unexpected tangents is Have You Seen?, whose format – a single page each on a thousand films – seems directly calculated to rein him in (and even there he makes a few bold sallies). But I did wonder if we were ever going to get back to the opening chapters, which promised something closer to his subsequent book on screen violence, where he made the argument – tedious and dangerous from a politician, priest or campaigner, intriguing from a lifelong cinema aficionado – that yes, there is a complicity and a risk in all those sins we not only watched in the dark but silently urged on. And then, towards the end, the reason for the lopsided structure finally becomes clear, in a chapter on James Toback. Not a name that rang a bell, if I'm honest, but it turns out he was a director with whom Thomson had been friends for 40-odd years, first hero-worshipping, later increasingly frustrated – and who, after Weinstein, was one of the first names to be repeatedly named in Hollywood's Me Too reckoning. Some of the women saying that he presented them with a previous piece Thomson had written about Toback as evidence of his bona fides. And, upon hearing this, Thomson decided that the book he was writing about homosexuality and cinema needed to become something broader. And you can understand his not wanting to bin what he'd already done, but it doesn't half make for a slightly awkward end result.

Nor is awkwardness the worst of it. If you were so minded, excerpting the quotes from this book to cancel Thomson would be the easiest thing in the world – though also spectacularly pointless, not to mention mean-spirited. The guy was, at time he wrote this, 77; he's built his life around something magical, only to be smacked in the face with the realisation that it came at a terrible cost. A lot of us have experienced something similar over recent years, and we've each reached our own more or less uneasy accommodations or repudiations in light ofthat. But for all that this book can be clumsy, outdated, or in places flat wrong ("Is there porn made for heterosexual women? I don't think so"), it is making an unusually thorough attempt to reckon with the revelations, to resist the easy temptation of blaming a few bad apples, an outgroup, 'the system', and really think about his own complicity, and by extension every viewer's, in cinema's sins – because what's the history of filmgoing if not a century of looking at, lusting after, unwitting characters from the privacy of our own seats in the dark? It's still a mess, but a mess with good intentions, and one where you're never more than a couple of pages from at least a flash of insight.

[Jamie Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful account of the history of movie unions and collaborations, the section on Hepburn and Tracy is particularly brilliant.

However, for a book that claims to not be "intent on outing people", a lot of time is spent stating the sexualities of its subjects.

Ultimately the book feels a bit jumbled and there was not enough transformation from its original intention.

[Rebecca Matthews · Rating 1 out of 5]

Creepy, old fashioned, reactionary rubbish. And I am the idiot who read the whole thing. Do yourself a favour and don't.

[Bettie]

Sleeping With Strangers by David Thomson review – a wrenching reappraisal of the silver screen
The veteran film writer’s timely history of voyeurism in the movies speaks volumes in the age of Weinstein and Trump

[Terry Watkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

A horribly confused and confusing...

look at gayness in film and gays in Hollywood in which the author hops chaotically from personal lives to movies. A mishmash that doesn’t have a thesis or perhaps has two many. A book that doesn’t know what it wants to be or what it is talking about. Skip it.

[Burton · Rating 2 out of 5]

"I began to see how a book originally aiming to be an account of gayness in movies had to lead to something larger and more threatening."

Sound pretty interesting? I thought so, too.

The problem? Check out the summary of the book, if you like. You won't find anything like what the quote describes. I know, because I kept referencing it, looking to console a mounting sense of confusion and bewilderment as I plodded along page after page.

The quote above is not on page one. It's not on page 25 or 105. In fact, it takes two hundred and fifty-seven pages to get to the point. This is an appalling case of burying a book's intent for no discernable reason than bad/lazy/sloppy (take your pick) editing.

“...my publisher was wondering about a book on how gays in Hollywood had meant so much for our movies and for our culture. I was interested to read that book, and sometimes if you want to read a book you have to write it yourself.” That’s page 271. Yeah.

So the intent is clear, now, after 271 pages. However, reflecting back on the previous content the book remains a confused and confusing ramble on...what exactly? How the institution of marriage is a sham, how "gay" is a liberated lifestyle showing our society the way forward and also, somehow, a "style"...or something? How movies may be so thoroughly founded on voyeurism that the form may be forever damned to encourage bad male behavior from the talent to the audience members?

Other ideas are tossed out, little context is ever given, few concrete arguments are made. Memories of Thompson’s youth are mixed at turns with weak philosophical musings, vague assertions about human sexuality and loads of bald-faced gossip. The focus of each chapter veers wildly like a drunk driver going 50 in a 35 while trying to punch his home address into Google maps.

If anything, Thompson unintentionally does damage to the idea of the fully liberated and fulfilled gay person by demonstrating how many otherwise heterosexual people in 1930s-50s Hollywood became rich, bored and so insecure that they indulged in homosexual behavior to try to sate their loneliness. Do their same-sex acts mean they were closeted by a repressive society or that society was opposed to wanton, selfish behavior that damages these people’s communities and family members as thoroughly as unchecked male aggression? Thompson's investigation of Hollywood rumors begs the question but never engages.

Many consider Thompson the premiere film critic in America. Certainly, he manages a few sublime sentences and a chapter here or there that are genuinely thought-provoking. He acutely points out the inherent hypocrisy of the Golden Globes in 2018, where heartfelt speeches about female empowerment are mixed with beauty ads and the trailer for the next Fifty Shades movie.

Is there anything to recommend? "Burning Man," a chapter on the author's checkered relationship with the controversial filmmaker James Toback, is easily the most engaging of the book. "Doing It, Saying It" is a fascinating read on the limits of depicting sex on screen. Another strong essay goes deep on Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo while ruminating on the Harvey Milk assassination. One particularly strong graph lets you know what Thompson is capable of (minor American Gigolo spoiler included):

I’m being a little scathing of a film I’m offering as beautiful. That’s not inconsistent; it’s in the nature of a great deal of film commentary. It’s also a reflection on the uncommon cultural status of the movies as it was emerging by 1980, when Hollywood was as near dead as Judy Rheiman in her final hours—which is to say, luscious, inert, available, and hopeless. Going to the movies has always had to face the question: Are we expected to take this seriously and write about it as if it were Henry James?”

In the first two hundred pages, there are intriguing tidbits of Hollywood lore, including a murder covered up by studio heads, compelling mini-profiles of once famous and forgotten actors and/or hangers-on. There's also a shocking revelation (to those unfamiliar with the history) involving Cary Grant's mother and father.

This was my first David Thompson book, and I really wanted it to be good. Sadly, it gets two stars, nothing more.

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have given this four stars because the writing is great and his ideas are often pretty thought provoking. But I was more than three-fourths through the book before he stated anything close to a unifying thesis. I was reading it and thinking, “Wow, he seems very focused on gay people and gay themes in the movies but the title seems more general than that.” He started with a chapter of memoir about a good friend of his, one instrumental in his life with the movies, who was gay. But then he would go off in a more hetero direction and I’d think that maybe I was wrong and it WAS a more generalized look at how movies portray sex/love/passion and our own responses to that. But then he would veer again. So I was trying to read it by letting each chapter stand as its own essay. It turns out he had started the book with the concept of looking at “gayness” in the movies, mostly as unstated subtext, but then the “#metoo” thing broke with Harvey Weinstein et al, and he felt he had to broaden the book’s scope. In doing that, I don’t feel he integrated the two ideas at all until perhaps the last chapter. I would have wished for a clearly stated idea at the beginning about his original idea and the change in direction. I think it must have been a rushed job in the end. Still worth a read if you love “the movies.”

[Maura McGrath · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading it, I think, but I'm not sure what David Thomson was getting at. In fact, I'm not sure he entirely knew what he was getting at.

Sleeping with Strangers is part film history and part film gossip; part biography and part memoir; part film criticism and part industry insight. It talks about the confirmed and rumored gay (used to reference any person who is not strictly heterosexual) creatives involved in old Hollywood, about the presentation of heterosexual sex on screen, about the presentation of film stars as sex personified to a voyeuristic audience. There is a lot going on, and while it was a fascinating read with much to takeaway, the parts never came together to create a sustained thesis, nor even just a throughline to connect the chapters. It is also clear that Thomson was already in the process of writing this book when the Weinstein news broke; his treatment of the resulting movement feels very much forced into the narrative, as if he felt he needed to address it but did not want to.

There are chapters well worth reading for any film fan, and the book overall is an interesting read. It is only a shame that a book which could have been more fell short of that potential.

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I keep wanting to call this book 'Sex with Strangers,' a title of a Marianne Faithful song (and an artwork by Lutz Bacher). But sleeping leads to dreams, and what is cinema if not filled with them. Dreams are made manifest, projected and seen. It seems odd that David Thomson, now an 82-year old straight, British critic, would write a book that searches for evidence of queerness, gayness, in film, but he does a convincing job of it. Sleeping with Strangers owes some of its foundations to Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, only better researched and not nearly as acidic. Thomson gets down history of the rich contributions of queer people from the beginning of film-- there's much about Valentino and Cary Grant--the infusion of sensibility they brought to the business, to the films that were made. But Thomson also seems aware that the kind of models, fantasies, and objects of lust created by directors, actors, and studios, were constructs that transcended the fallible humans behind them. The metaphors are ripe and there are plenty of them. And the book offers a lens of desire from which to view.

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sleeping With Strangers by David Thomson is a wonderful read. Thomson remains the best living writer about film. Gossip, imagination, criticism, biography and autobiography dart together from the first pages. The chapter on Jean Harlow is classic Thomson: salacious and playfully snide.

It is a book about gay Golden Age Hollywood, audience lust, the author's fascinating with myth. Stories override thesis. It is a funny book, but always in Thomson's wonderfully undercutting register. An almost arrogant disregard for modern film writing pervades the book.

He writes how he has always written, about how people look and how much that matters. Movies through glamour and sex; through business and art.

Gay Hollywood and #MeToo from a writer whose voyeuristic wanderings has always been the essence of his work. It absolutely isn't going to please everyone. If you find yourself regularly offended, then you'll probably find yourself regularly offended reading the book.

[Paul Henry · Rating 2 out of 5]

My take-away from this book is: a wide catalogue of sexual preferences and liaisons of numerous Hollywood individuals through the years, from the 1920s (Travis Blanton, Ruth Taylor, Gentlemen Prefer Blonds) through 2016 (Michael Sheen, Masters of Sex). Plots of various films and TV series are interwoven with the intel on cast and production personnel. There is no particular organizaton to the book that I determined, as it opens in 1967 with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde. I can't call it a history since no source material is listed. Is this all rumor passed down through the years? Material gleaned from scandal sheets and gossip columns? In acknowledgements, the author lists numerous persons who were helpful in putting the book together. So maybe all this is rumor. Well, bottom line, the subject matter really didn't grab me; I don't care what Spencer Tracy's sexual preferences were. I skimmed most of the book, passing over large chunks of verbiage. Not recommended.

[Elisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is very misleading. Had it been called "Gay Hollywood" I might still have read it, but it was just bait and switch for me. Bogart and Bacall, who really shaped my views of desire as a straight woman, get a few sentences. Casablanca is only mentioned because of its ending, with Rick and Louis "together." Nothing about Rhett and Scarlett but tons on how Gable could have "turned tricks" for men in his youth. Tons of speculation about how John Ford (of all people!) could have kissed a man once. "What ifs" galore (what if Brad Pitt was gay?). There is a lot of politics about gay rights that has little to do with movies. Maybe if I were a gay man, Reservoir Dogs would have shaped my desire, but the bulk of this book is about speculation like that. The author says that this was supposed to be a book about gays in Hollywood but he "changed" it when his friend got entangled in the "me-too" movement. I don't see that it was ever rewritten or redone. Not for me.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes this reminded me of a more intellectual Hollywood Babylon with its exposés of secret homosexual lives of classic film stars and creators. That book is a longtime favorite of mine, so I consider this a plus; furthermore Thomson goes beyond lurid details to examine how the long-hidden desires of the creators are reflected in the films. And even beyond that, he shows how the medium of film itself inherently creates desires that can never be fulfilled. A fascinating alternative history of film going back to the silent era. Even if you disagree with Thomson's inferences, he demonstrates how much there is to explore in a film beyond what appears on the surface.

[kp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomson has taken on a difficult subject and approaches it in an emotionally complex way, and I applaud his ambition and his bravery. He is also a readable theorist, blending autobiography, biography, social commentary, and analysis of specific films to remind us of their weight in our lives. Sometimes, however, I felt lost, burdened by repetition, or simply unconvinced or unsatisfied because the book does not quite add up to a coherent exploration. I am all for divergence, but in sections of the book, I watched the author pick up a thread and then simply let it go, leaving the final product a little frayed. Still, certain passages in which Thomson analyzes the interplay between queer sensibilties and the troubled reality of sexual desire and of sexualization of women in film are insightful and morally challenging.

[Brian Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of themed essays that in general cover desire, sexuality, etc from classic movies (e.g., mostly from 1950s and before). I enjoyed learning about some of the general Hollywood stories and gossip, of names that I recognize but are not in my common lexicon; at the same time, it exposed me for how little general film knowledge I have. There are only so many times I can read a mini-review of a movie I've never heard of, featuring actors and directors I barely know ... those more fluent in cinema may enjoy the second layer.

That said, I felt like the essays weren't fully consistent in how they approached matters, and were in some cases heavy handed at treating the author's attitudes towards the actors/characters as universally recognized.

[Sunil · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title suggests an academic text on the erotics of film, but it's really more of an extended prose poem by someone deeply in love with movies; whose life has bridged the theatrical releases of Some Like It Hot and Hereditary; and who now, in less stuffily genteel times, can finally suggest if reality is straight, "is movie gay?"

The book runs out of gas at the very end -a chapter on friendship with James Toback seems tacked 0n as a quick address to the Me Too movement- but you could, I think, pick and choose chapters based on your immediate interest. The ones on earliest, pre-code Hollywood interested me the most, while from the '50s on I started to lose focus.

[Parke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find the book a bit scattershot, but nevertheless brilliant, provocative, and full of beautiful prose. His thesis (he is not the first to say this) that film has altered the way we view relations, same sex or other in convincing. Life imitates art has been well-know but the way women are portrayed by almost exclusively male directors harkens back to the 80's criticism of the male gaze and the intricacies of Lacan. But on particular films it is clear he has spent time loving them in a way that is moving and not just intellectually structured. There is a bit of Zizek in what he says but not as philosophically directed.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting psychosexual analysis of classic movies up until the current day of #metoo. What kind of myth has Hollywood been selling us about love and sex? How did the sexual lives and the myriad repressions, "beards", and macho personalities impact what appeared on the screen. This is an unvarnished look at the directors, actors, actresses, producers and studio executives who met their sexual needs on and off the screen, sometimes openly, more often hidden. A history of movies unlike any other I've read, the raises real questions about the symbiosis of myth making and how we behave.

[(jessica) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomson has penned some important works on film, and while this includes many an interesting take on Old Hollywood scandals and musings on cinema's approach to sexuality, taboo, and the handling of its stars; it's ultimately unclear what the central thesis of this book actually is. Filled with plenty of engaging trivia, but otherwise pretty empty.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not one of David Thomson’s better meditations on film, SLEEPING WITH STRANGERS is still an entertaining - if meandering - treatise on how American cinema has influenced, and been influenced by, sexual desire. Revelations are surprisingly scarce, or at least not a surprise for anyone familiar with Thomson’s other essays.

[Clare Wren · Rating 2 out of 5]

i believe in analyzing and thinking critically about the things you watch, but i also think it is possible to over analyze them. that is exactly what’s happening here. some of the points made here are valid, but it seems like the author is reading into things a little too much.

i also think at times the author is restricted by his own perspective, and his opinion seems to override fact in certain regards. i find the way he writes about women to, at times, be included in this, with some kind of uncomfortable language (in a way that seemed odd even in a book that focuses so much on sex). one tiny thing that i took issue with was the way he wrote about the alleged rape of young actress. the author of this book seemed to draw the actress’ story into question, because she was a teenager rising in her career, and because he could not find the name of man who she accused. this is a story i had heard before in several other books, and i had read several accounts from multiple people detailing the trauma she showed afterward, plus it isn’t very hard to find out who the man was with some searching (sorry for the tangent but i’m a big fan of this actress and this bothered me).

otherwise, the book had some interesting ideas, but that didn’t quite outweigh the negatives for me.