Agee on Film : Criticism and Comment on the Movies

Rating:
Summary: Informative and entertaining for movie lovers
Review: Agee on Film, part of Martin Scorsese's wonderful new series of great film books from the past, is a really enjoyable read. It contains a lot of interesting reviews of classic Hollywood films by an articulate, witty writer, who himself wrote the screenplays to some great films, like Night of the Hunter. I love the way that the essays in this book are both thoughtful and direct. He has important things to say about what some films suggest about human nature and society, but at other times he's quick and to the point. Agee writes at the beginning that he thinks everyone is an "amateur" when it comes to films, because what matters the most is not what you know but how a movie affects you; I like that quality in him. He isn't so pretentious that he can't admit when a movie just doesn't move him. He writes in a really down-to-earth way, but his reviews aren't simplistic or rushed, like many of the reviews I read today. Some of my favorite parts of this book are the essays where he quickly gives his take on a bunch of films, writing funny though sometimes harsh one-line quips (for example: "several tons of dynamite were set off in this movie, none of it under the right people"). This book is especially informative and entertaining for movie fans, but also would be useful as instruction on writing about art. Really, though, it should be fun to read for just about anyone.

Rating:
Summary: James Agee, an inspiring critic
Review: Ever wonder what causes a movie reviewer to *become* a movie reviewer? When I was a ten-year-old kid just getting into classic movie comedies, I went to the library and checked out the book AGEE ON FILM solely because it had references to Charlie Chaplin and W.C. Fields. Thus was my introduction to high-quality film criticism.

James Agee made his reputation writing sterling movie reviews for Time and The Nation magazines in the 1940's. Among other glories, he wrote a much-heralded essay titled "Comedy's Greatest Era" that helped to bring silent-comedy icons (most notably Harry Langdon) out of mothballs and caused them to be re-viewed and discussed seriously among film historians. He later went on to work on the screenplays of a couple of gems titled The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.

Unfortunately, many people who regard the critics Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann have either forgotten Agee's work entirely or have assigned his own work to mothballs. But among the faithful are film director Martin Scorsese, who serves as editor of the "Modern Library: The Movies" series of film books. The series has recently reissued the AGEE ON FILM book, and re-reading Agee's work (or reading it for the first time, if you're lucky enough) proves that film criticism can make for reading material as compelling as any fictional novel.

Agee passes the acid test for any film critic: Even if you don't agree with him, his writing is so lively that you can't help enjoying it. His work ranges from three separate columns (three weeks' worth, in print terms) to Chaplin's much-maligned (at the time) MONSIEUR VERDOUX, to the most concise, funniest review ever: Reviewing a musical potboiler titled YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME, Agee replied in four simple words, "That's what *you* think."

If you want to see what high-caliber movie criticism meant in the pre-Siskel & Ebert days, engross yourself in this sprawling book. It'll make you appreciate the decades before every newspaper, newsletter, and Internet site had its own minor-league deconstructionist of Hollywood blockbusters.

Rating:
Summary: The Critic as Artist
Review: James Agee is both critic and artist. His essays on cinema are poetic and moving, hued with a deep love of cinema that infects the reader.

Rating:
Summary: One Of The Great Books By An American Writer!
Review: James Agee was our greatest film critic. And I am so grateful that Martin Scorsese--who has come to be an excellent spokesperson for the art of film as well as a central figure among American directors of the past few decades--chose to reprint his truly classic book Agee On Film as Series Editor of the newly inaugurated Modern Library: The Movies series. I have a battered copy of the earlier edition (title: Agee On Film, Volume I; Volume II was comprised of his original film scripts, such as The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter); it is one of my favorite books. I'm glad to put the new one next to the old one on my shelf. It isn't necessary to replace it. The core of the book is Agee's reviews as a film critic for Time and The Nation (best of all) during the years 1941-1948 (Agee died in 1955). It's magnificent work. And his writing doesn't seem dated at all. Not just on account of his considerable powers and charm. But also because it was Agee not Pauline Kael who first introduced the notion of the movie critic as a person with discerning, contradictory, and sometimes even blatantly opinionated, viewpoints. And who really managed to reach the audience because he seemed to be talking to (rather than down to) them. Some highlights: On Lauren Bacall in her screen debut, To Have and Have Not: "Whether or not you like the movie will depend I believe almost entirely on whether you like Miss Bacall. I am no judge. I can hardly look at her, much less listen to her--she has a voice like a chorus by Kid Ory--without getting caught in a dilemma between a low whistle and a bellylaugh." And Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls "seems never to have dreamed that a young girl who has seen death and suffered gang rape cannot in all reason bounce into her role looking like a Palmolive ad. But in many moments of the early love stuff--in flashes of shy candor and in the pleasures of playing femme esclave--she does very pretty things, and later on she does some very powerful ones." It's fun (and rather stupefying) that Agee was rightfully in a position to say, in 1947:"In Ivan the Terrible, Part I, Eisenstein has deprived himself even of the speed, flow, and shape which helped give Nevsky grace, and most of his peculiar energy has become cold, muscle-bound, and somber. Yet Ivan is a bolder, more adventurous, more interesting film; for a while I felt even more admiration for it than grief over it." And later in the same review, he famously remarks, "it may not be accidental that(Eisenstein) makes (Cherkassov) up with a chin and cranium which becomes ever more pointed, like John Barrymore as Mr. Hyde." Agee worshipped the Old Masters. His appreciation of the great Russian film poet Alexander Dovzhenko ("combining something of the bard and the seer") surpasses my own. And he is peerlessly eloquent on the subject of D.W. Griffith. In his September 4, 1948 essay for The Nation: "The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in The Birth of a Nation. I have heard it praised for its realism, and that is deserved; but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a perfect realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans might remember it fifty years later, or as children, fifty years later, might imagine it." Unfortunately, he does not satisfactorily answer charges about the film's appalling racist message; although he does remark, "(Griffith) understood (African Americans) as a good type of Southerner does. I don't entirely agree with him...," which is more than Kael has ever conceded on the subject. He adds, "He was remarkably good, as a rule, in the whole middle range of feeling, but he was at his best just short of excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge"--that comment could be used to describe this kind of brilliant criticism as well. Perhaps the most memorable of Agee's weekly reviews, to my mind, are those of the Frenchman Jean Vigo's short and long masterpieces, Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante. Watching butchered versions of the movies in 1947, Agee nevertheless instantly recognized the implicit beauty and greatness of Vigo's vision: "On a foggy day, indeed, or with a prejudiced eye, it would be possible to confuse his work with the general sad run of avant-garde movie work, as several reviewers, including some I ordinarily respect, have done. But Vigo was no more a conventional avant-gardist than he was a Hollywood pimp; he was one of the few real originals who have ever worked on film." Watching Olivier's Hamlet in 1948, made Agee take a stab at the mulitmedia circus of the future, with "Olivier's films set up an equilateral triangle between the screen, the stage and literature." There are other pleasures in this book. First of all, "Comedy's Greatest Era," an article published in Life Magazine, September 3, 1949, which practically singlehandedly revived interest in the silent comedies nationwide. It contains the best writing on Buster Keaton that I've ever seen. Take, for example, "He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood." And: "When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue." Agee muses, "Perhaps because "dry" comedy is so much more rare and odd than "dry" wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly." This new volume contains--and it's a wise choice--something not included in the previous one, W.H. Auden's letter to the editors of The Nation praising Agee. Auden quickly establishes himself: "I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them," but he DOES highly admire the critic. Unfortunately (due to financial considerations?) the photographs have been omitted from the text...and it's a real shame because many people my age (I'm 30) have no idea what Harold Lloyd and Dovzhenko looked like. I have mixed feeling about the Introduction by David Denby. It's skillful; but I don't think he quite addresses himself to either the wide range of Agee's sympathies, or to members of a younger audience. But that's a minor flaw; especially when you can flip through and find the author saying about John Huston and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: "Does he think Treasure is his best work to date? The question is virtually meaningless to him. He says, dryly and without self-consciousness: "It is as a picture-maker would have it.""

Rating:
Summary: Resurrected Film Study
Review: James Agee was short for this world, having died in his mid 40s. In that span of time he wrote a famous book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and a couple of classic screenplays, AFRICAN QUEEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. This collection of magazine film reviews and essays is in many ways the leftover part of his work, and yet it feels like enough to make a reputation on. His reviews span just one decade, the 1940s. Many of them tackle foreign films that may be unavailable for all I know.

Interesting to me is that he spends three weeks discussing Chaplin's MONSIEUR VERDOUX, which is a most unusual movie and mostly forgotten today. This might be because he saw it as his only chance to write a poignant piece on the greatest living film artist, or it may be because he identified with the plight of mankind theme that Chaplin was reaching for. You can pick another reason, yourself, but it was a bold decision, because most critics panned the film (according to him) and most readers probably couldn't even see the movie in their small towns. It was as if he knew he would be writing for posterity. Like all critics, he cultivated his darlings. He saw much in the work of John Huston and was very skillful in his sizing up of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. I was impressed that he predicted the all-time classic nature of the film, but also understood the studio system gimmicks that took away from the genius.

You don't have to be literary minded like W. H. Auden to enjoy this book. You'll like it, if you like movies.

Rating:
Summary: Resurrected Film Study
Review: James Agee was short for this world, having died in his mid 40s. In that span of time he wrote a famous book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and a couple of classic screenplays, AFRICAN QUEEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. This collection of magazine film reviews and essays is in many ways the leftover part of his work, and yet it feels like enough to make a reputation on. His reviews span just one decade, the 1940s. Many of them tackle foreign films that may be unavailable for all I know.

Interesting to me is that he spends three weeks discussing Chaplin's MONSIEUR VERDOUX, which is a most unusual movie and mostly forgotten today. This might be because he saw it as his only chance to write a poignant piece on the greatest living film artist, or it may be because he identified with the plight of mankind theme that Chaplin was reaching for. You can pick another reason, yourself, but it was a bold decision, because most critics panned the film (according to him) and most readers probably couldn't even see the movie in their small towns. It was as if he knew he would be writing for posterity. Like all critics, he cultivated his darlings. He saw much in the work of John Huston and was very skillful in his sizing up of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. I was impressed that he predicted the all-time classic nature of the film, but also understood the studio system gimmicks that took away from the genius.

You don't have to be literary minded like W. H. Auden to enjoy this book. You'll like it, if you like movies.

Rating:
Summary: More than we ever deserved . . .
Review: James Agee wrote film criticism in America at a time when the American film industry hardly deserved his attention. His celebrations of silent film comedy, of Preston Sturges, of John Huston [for whom he later wrote the script for The African Queen], and of the handful of worthy foreign films that he managed to see are what make this volume worth reading. Besides Agee's beautiful prose and above all his compassion. Interestingly, Agee was a fan of Frank Capra's comedies (It Happened One Night) and bemoaned the director's decent into serious social films (Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe). His negative review of It's a Wonderful Life, which has never been in print since it appeared in 1946, reveals the extent to which Agee was perhaps too far ahead of his time, and even of ours.

Rating:
Summary: More than we ever deserved . . .
Review: James Agee wrote film criticism in America at a time when the American film industry hardly deserved his attention. His celebrations of silent film comedy, of Preston Sturges, of John Huston [for whom he later wrote the script for The African Queen], and of the handful of worthy foreign films that he managed to see are what make this volume worth reading. Besides Agee's beautiful prose and above all his compassion. Interestingly, Agee was a fan of Frank Capra's comedies (It Happened One Night) and bemoaned the director's decent into serious social films (Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe). His negative review of It's a Wonderful Life, which has never been in print since it appeared in 1946, reveals the extent to which Agee was perhaps too far ahead of his time, and even of ours.