Agee On Film Volume 1

Agee on Film #1

by James Agee

Perigee trade paperback, 1983, 1st printing, for this price and single shipping cost includes vol 1 and vol 2, matched set, unread but has been opened for review, no marks, no writing, close to new condition but for slight foxing on top edge and very slight toning to inside covers, a beautiful 2 volume set

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Noted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published his novel A Death in the Family (1957).

This author, journalist, poet, screenwriter in the 1940s most influenced films in the United States. His autobiographical work won a Pulitzer Prize.

Life
Born at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six years of age in 1915, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee, a hard drinker and chain-smoker, suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York.

Career
After graduation, he wrote for Fortune and Time magazines, although he is better known for his later film criticism in The Nation. In 1934, he published his only volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage.

In the summer of 1936, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans living among sharecroppers in Alabama. Agee turned the material into a book entitled, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). It sold only 600 copies before being remaindered.

In 1942, Agee became the film critic for Time and, at one point, reviewed up to six films per week. Together, he and friend Whittaker Chambers ran "the back of the book" for Time. He left to become film critic for The Nation. In 1948, however, he quit both magazines to become a freelance writer. One of his assignments was a well-received article for Life Magazine about the great silent movie comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, which has been credited for reviving Keaton's career. As a freelance in the 1950s, he continued to write magazine articles while working on movie scripts, often with photographer Helen Levitt.

Agee was an ardent champion of Charlie Chaplin's then extremely unpopular film Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which has since become a film classic. He was also a great admirer of Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet, especially Henry V, for which he actually published three separate reviews, all of which have been printed in the collection Agee on Film.

Legacy
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ignored on its original publication in 1941, has been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th Century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.

Reviews

[Victor Morosoff]

Parfois trop personnel, voire subjectif pour ce que j’entends d’un critique. Souvent, c’est carrément frustrant de voir comme Agee change de tonalité et ses louanges se transforment à l’improviste en descentes aux enfers. Mais j’avoue qu’il a de l’intuition. Et particulièrement ses textes visionnaires sur les films européens prêtent à l’enthousiasme. 3,7/5

[Steven]

This is some of the finest film criticism one could ever hope to read by an American writer (although Pauline Kael's collected reviews hold a special place of affection in my memories). Agee's 1940s reviews for the magazines "The Nation," "Time," and "The Partisan Review" are included in this volume, and, not surprisingly, they are witty, acerbic, and extremely well informed. The earliest reviews have an edge of nastiness that I find unattractive, but the critiques from the end of World War II to 1950 exhibit an extraordinary humanity, generosity, and perception. I was particularly taken with his three-part dissection of Charles Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947) which Agee considered a masterpiece (and which I have never been able to catch), and with his kind assessments of films I hold dear, such as "The Song of Bernadette" (1943), "Since You Went Away" (1944), and "Sunset Boulevard" (1950). For a variety of reasons, he cared less for other films which I hold in high regard, such as "Double Indemnity" (1944), "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944), and "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946). But his judgment is sound, and I can understand the reasons for his objections.

What is most distressing about this book is to take in how many films have been lost or have simply disappeared into the vaults forever. I don't think I recognized about one third of the titles that Agee reviews (although I am more a student of 1930s films than those of the 1940s). And there are many, many foreign films he cites as influential that are probably gone forever. We are not very good at preserving our film heritage, alas. However, so much artistic work of other types is lost forever, too. For example, the critically important composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote ten operas between 1604 and 1643, and only three have survived. Sigh. So many treasures gone. But I digress from Agee!

The one structural flaw I find in the book is that Agee frequently reviewed the same films for "The Nation" that he did for "Time," so sometimes we see two reviews of the same movies. This occasionally enlarges our understanding of those works, but at other times it is simply annoying. And I must admit that it is very difficult for me to read acres and acres of film reviews back-to-back and nonstop. I should have dipped into this every so often and interspersed it with forays into other things...like Simenon novels.

[Art]

Although dated (with 1940s attitudes occasionally showing through), Agee proves himself to be a perceptive critic, able to cut through to the strengths and weaknesses of the most cherished classics and studio fodder we've long since forgotten. He doesn't stand for phoniness or much artifice. Often he hits the nail right on the head, although viewers and critics of the time may not have seen it the same way. When there are pages and pages about unknown films, the volume can sometimes be a bit of a slog (it took a year to read) but as a classic film aficionado, I found more than enough to chew on and enjoy. It is a shame that he died so young, just as his own Hollywood screenwriting career was getting started.

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[Marie-pierre Stien]

I bought this book (used) hoping to learn about older movies and watch them on Netflix. Unfortunately, most of the movies Agee writes about have long disappeared from the screens (any type of screen). Unless you are a student with access to a film library of some sort, the only thing left is to ponder on the ephemeral nature of stories and Agee's crisp prose.

[Patrick]

Why would you read this book? I'm obviously a fan of Agee's prose so the answer is simple for me. But there is a more generalized value to this book. Agee has very particular views about film, and does a good job developing it throughout his criticism. No surprise here, his aesthetics are based on life as actually lived and his rules for a good film include using amateur actors or people with no acting background at all, but who have a good understanding of human interactions, a focus on a story that actually occurred in the real world, and shoots which occur on location (no studios). He was on the lookout for particularized stories and characters, insights into people and places in your life, and a moral ambiguity or subtlety that makes the viewer do the work. Agee was also a film score skeptic, convinced that it was relied on too much to elicit what the plot and the characters should be communicating, or to buttress and conceal a weak performance.

The book is also a great excuse to watch some early movies that I would not otherwise see (also you got to put the criticism to the test). Treasure of the Sierra Madre was decent, but doesn’t stand up as much as Agee’s words about it. The Marx Brothers movies are laugh out loud funny and full of so many great moments. But the movies themselves aren’t very good, and get worse as they go along. That clan was a vaudeville act; their strength was in a series of discreet, witty scenes, a couple musical interludes, and some slapstick humor, all hung loosely around a plot. The early movies play to this formula, but their more movie-like movies flattened their anarchic humor and talent. Duck Soup, for instance, I thought was wildly overrated. It's a real loss that the Marx Brothers vaudeville acts existed before the technology to record arrived. Monsieur Verdoux is as good as Agee says. There is a scene in that movie where Chaplin takes a woman in off the street to test a poison he just made. After talking with the woman, Chaplin decides to let her go without killing her. I saw this as a depiction of humanity that Chaplin’s character still had, but Agee has an entirely different take on this scene. It’s pretty persuasive and opened up another way into this film that hadn’t occurred to me. I guess that’s to say, you should read this book because it is genuinely insightful as well.