TCM ran a day's worth of Ann Miller movies last week, I myself wrote about one ("Texas Carnival") recently, and so I figure it's a good time to bring this up. David Thomson's "New Biographical Dictionary of Film" is a fun, often provocative work, but it's hardly definitive. I don't think it claims to be, but still...
As my wife and I were watching "Carnival," I was trying to remember another musical we had seen with the lovely Ms. Miller. Sure, we have a thing called the Internet these days, and I'm well aware of it, but unlike our TCM-giving TV, the computer has to warm up first, and I didn''t want to turn it on and shut it back down just for something easily found in one of those older research tools: books. You remember books, right? Those thingies with all the words on paper and stuff?
So I reached for the weighty Thomson tome to find the Ann Miller entry, only to find there was none! There may have been Penelope Ann Miller--I couldn't tell you for sure, as I wanted to get back to "Texas Carnival"--but nothing on the brassy brunette.
Now, I enjoy the book and respect it's deliberate non-comprehensiveness, but this begs the question, what good is a biographical dictionary of film that doesn't have an entry for Ann Miller? Shouldn't it be called something like "A Really Big Book of a Bunch of Movie People"?
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