A film reference that’s too rough

THE early “Rough Guides” were perfect products of their time and place -- the 1980s and Britain. As the first of them (a guide to Greece) appeared in 1982, British airfares were suddenly becoming affordable for students and a certain class of university graduates too well educated to actually work. Britons no longer packed off to their local seaside resorts for the summer holidays; they went to the Mediterranean, Iberia and the Americas instead.

As the ‘80s progressed, London became a hotbed of travel writers cobbling together blurbs about adventures experienced and borrowed. “Rough Guides” followed for just about every place with youth hostels. By the end of 1996, the guides were also covering world music, and Penguin had acquired 51% of the company. By the end of 2002, the sun never set on the “Rough Guide” empire, by now owned outright by Penguin.

Today, “Rough Guides” are the Anglicized answer to the American “ . . . for Dummies” franchise. Their hundreds of titles are an index of baby-boomer preoccupations; there are now “Rough Guides” to the Internet, iPods, pregnancy, “ethical living” and “unexplained phenomena.” The guides serve not only the intrepid traveler but also a vast audience of passive adventurers -- movie buffs -- with editions on gangster films, chick flicks, westerns and horror movies. Art, sugar or schlock, there’s a “Rough Guide” for it. But the spectacle of what is still a seat-of-the-pants travel-guide company barging into the world of chroniclers of movie history and criticism almost doesn’t bear watching. Moreover, the “Rough Guides” have barged into a world with a presiding master.

There have long been British anthologies aimed at helping moviegoers schedule their trips to the cinema and/or their hours in front of the telly. The best known are the late Leslie Halliwell’s film and television companions. Then there is that taxonomic wonder, David Thomson’s ever-evolving “Biographical Dictionary of Film.” Thomson may one day be judged the finest film critic ever to write in English. He is certainly one of the most idiosyncratic of systematists. The rule for inclusion in his dictionaries is simple: An actor, composer, cameraman or producer must interest him. The editions of his dictionary then hang together as audits of his enthusiasms.

The new “Rough Guide” mimics Thomson in that it creates a dictionary from criticism, but it is systematized differently -- that is, the focus is on directors, more than 800 of them. Nor is there one essayist chipping away at a masterwork but four (listed) critics, who are up to what feels more like a recycling exercise of old reviews from the “Time Out” series of city guides.

The best of the four named writers is CNN.com film critic Tom Charity. If an entry is deft or insightful -- such as the essays on Curtis Hanson, David Lean or Howard Hawks -- chances are that there will be a tiny “TC” at the end of it. Charity’s entry for Hanson is typically nimble: “To get his membership of the Directors Guild of America in the mid-1980s, Curtis Hanson needed the endorsement of three members. He went to John Cassavetes (‘the maverick independent’), Don Siegel (‘the consummate studio director’) and Sam Fuller (‘who worked in both worlds’). The anecdote reveals the extent to which Hanson was already a Hollywood insider. . . .”

The other named authors are Richard Armstrong, “affiliated to” the British Film Institute; Lloyd Hughes, author of “The Rough Guide to Gangster Movies”; and Jessica Winter, author of “The Rough Guide to American Independent Film.” The introduction thanks “many” other contributors, who go unnamed. The anonymity may be a blessing -- for them. But for the reader, it is problematic.

If Charity had written the entire guide, this would be a different review, and a far more complimentary one. But much of the book amounts to artless pedantry. Whose eyes wouldn’t glaze over after this introduction to French director Louis Malle? “Although he was a contemporary of the nouvelle vague directors, Louis Malle’s filmmaking was always more rooted in classical prototypes and he was never interested in innovation for innovation’s sake.”

As a critical exercise, “The Rough Guide to Film” feels less like the capable work of Halliwell, or what appears to be a life’s work for Thomson, and more like British publishing taking a cue from the United Kingdom’s meat industry. It reads like a collection of scraps from film critics, whizzed together into a director pie.

Undisclosed sources for contents are rarely a good sign in a British meat product. This book suggests that much the same rule pertains to collections of criticism.

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Emily Green is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.