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American Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and writer James Agee

In praise of film writer James Agee

J ames Rufus Agee, born 100 years ago last week, may be best known now for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the pioneering 1941 study of three sharecropper families. But in his lifetime it was film writing he lived by, and was best known for. WH Auden was so moved by the "astonishing excellence" of his reviews in the Nation that in 1944 he wrote to the magazine's editors, telling them he "looked forward all week to reading him again". He called the column, "the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today".

It was his recognition of cinema as the American artform of the 20th century that made Agee a pioneer – he stood opposed to many in the literary world who reviled or patronised the medium, or – like Auden – thought it "rather unimportant". In fact, Auden admired Agee's writing on film precisely to the degree that it "transcends its ostensible … subject".

Agee's reviews were morally demanding of both film and its audience ("Huston's pictures are not acts of …benign enslavement but of liberation, and they require, of anyone who enjoys them, the responsibilities of liberty"), but also conveyed intensity of reaction ("Every minute [of Ivan the Terrible] is exciting, but springing as it does against the tensions of near standstill, it is exciting as if a corpse moved").

It was Agee's style that particularly impressed Auden, for combining profundity with "extraordinary wit and felicity". When Agee On Film was reissued in 2000, as part of Martin Scorsese's Modern Library series on film criticism, David Denby, writing in the introduction, made roughly the same point: no amount of dry theory could produce, for instance, the marvel of Agee's description of Orson Welles playing Rochester in Jane Eyre, "his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side-orders of jelly". Such a phrase was "unprecedented and inimitable", Denby thought, "worth more … than 10 academic essays about 'the male gaze'".

The collection also includes one of film history's most important essays: Comedy's Greatest Era, from 1949, in which Agee lovingly rescues the idols of his youth from the oblivion into which the talkies had carelessly consigned them – not only Chaplin, but also Harold Lloyd, Henry Langdon and Buster Keaton, whose face was so motionless that "when he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue". Long before Roland Barthes eulogised the iconography of Greta Garbo, Agee saw that cinema's romance with the face was something novel. Garbo shared with Keaton ("The Great Stone Face") a white-paste, mask-like distinction. "[Keaton] was by his whole style and nature," Agee wrote, "so much the most deeply 'silent' of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell."

A year earlier, Agee had written an obituary of DW Griffith, another work of restoration, containing a line that could stand as self-assessment: "He was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge."

Agee was prodigious as well as diffident – talking and writing copiously, marrying frequently, drinking excessively ("A little bit of too much is just enough for me"). But in this self-description there was also a provocation, an insistence on the appetite and curiosity that made him compelling and explained his many-handedness, while at the same time intimating the cause of his failure. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men missed its moment. By the time the book was published in 1941, war was looming and the Depression seemed like yesterday's problem. Nor did Agee live to see his unfinished, autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, published and win the Pulitzer prize. He ran out of time, dying from a heart attack in a New York taxi cab at the age of 45, in 1955, thinking he had never produced the one irrefutable work that would confirm his heady talent.

Readings: James Agee’s Complete Film Criticism: Reviews, Essays, and Manuscripts

By Jonathan Rosenbaum on October 16, 2017

My late father was never a cinephile, not even remotely, but he managed and programmed a small chain of movie theaters in northwestern Alabama for about a quarter of a century, from the mid-’30s to 1960. And during most or all of that period, he read Time magazine every week, from cover to cover. This means that from September 1942, half a year before I was born, until early November 1948, and not counting all the press books that passed through his office and the various trade journals he subscribed to, just about everything he read and knew about movies came from the so-called Cinema pages of Time , and most of these were written by James Agee.

But he probably had little or no idea who Agee was during this period, even though their stints at Harvard had overlapped, because none of Agee’s writing for Time was signed and my father usually didn’t read The Nation while Agee was concurrently writing his film column there. It’s unlikely that he saw Abraham Lincoln—the Early Years on Omnibus in 1952 because we didn’t have a TV set then, and more probable that he saw The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky the following year at one of his theaters. (Agee wrote and appeared briefly in both of these.) I know that he saw The Quiet One (1948), which Agee wrote, because I remember a 16mm screening of that film at an interracial meeting held in our living room, most likely during the same period. But I suspect he only became fully aware of Agee when the critic entered the American mainstream in 1957, with the posthumous publication of A Death in the Family .

I’ve gone into all this detail because I’m trying to chart what effect Agee’s writing about film in Time might have had on American film taste, and insofar as my father is a pretty good test subject, I’m inclined to conclude that it was minuscule and fairly insignificant. The only enthusiasms for directors that my father fully shared with Agee, as nearly as I can recall, were regarding Laurence Olivier, David Lean, and Carol Reed. Neither The Rules of the Game nor Citizen Kane meant much to him when he saw them, although I recall he did get a rise out of 8 ½ .

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

Over the 539 pages of Time movie coverage gathered in Charles Maland’s costly ($99) 1,037-page collection—Volume 5 of The Works of James Agee published by The University of Tennessee Press—the only time Citizen Kane gets mentioned is a passing allusion to “the Citizen Kane fracas” in Agee’s sometimes gushy extended story about Hollywood gossip columnist “Lolly” (Louella) Parsons. This is because the coverage is (and undoubtedly was) far more valuable as journalism—or what we would now, more precisely and more accurately, call “infotainment,” a rather shameless blend of striking “facts” and jazzy promo for the studios—than as criticism.

It’s certainly welcome to have all or almost all of Agee’s prose about movies for Time in one place—the principal value of this compendium, which also prints or reprints all the Nation reviews and other published film pieces as well as 60-odd pages of “unpublished manuscripts”—but it’s also hard not to regard this as a mixed blessing. The Time writing is frequently arch and/or inflated, far beyond the occasional excesses of Agee’s Nation columns, and even though we find him bending Time speak here and there to suit his own special gifts—referring to Cab Calloway as a “haberdasher,” or claiming that Charles Bickford in Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach “looks rather like a Beethoven left out in the rain”—he’s far more often punching the clock and grinding out his dutiful hack reports of whatever happens to be around that week. And at times, given the usual requirements of Time ’s slangy patter, he can be just as flamboyantly alliterative as Andrew Sarris. (From one of his most entertaining cover stories: “This eminence Columnist [Hedda] Hopper shares (reluctantly) with her rival in revelation, Hearstian Columnist Louella (‘Lollipop’) Parsons, fat, fiftyish, and fatuous, whose syndicated column reaches some 30,000,000 readers.”)

Infotainment is of course far from a worthless activity, and Agee practiced it with uncommon skill, but apart from some periodic overlaps, it shouldn’t be confused with criticism per se. And indeed, it’s partially the overlaps that makes all this Time material a mixed blessing. The fact that the magazine’s prose was anonymous by design also has to be factored into its ambiguous essence (shared today by The Economist , which is far less mannerist in style).

The Woman on the Beach

Given the usually overheated writing about forgettable and forgotten subjects, one can agree with Maland—an English professor and Chaplin specialist at the University of Tennessee—that it’s hard to imagine Agee using some of the Time -ese phrases on his own initiative: “To mention just the ones that begin with ‘cine,’ you can find the following in Agee’s Time reviews: cinemactor, cinemactress, cinemacting, cinemaddict, cinemaudiences, cinemantrap, cinemama (actress playing a mother), cinemusicals, cinemoguls and cinemagnates (both for studio heads), cinemug (a face on screen), cinemakeup, cinemadaptations and cinemalteration (both for film adaptation), cinemoans (films that elicit groans), and even cinegenic (photogenic on screen).” It’s small wonder, then, that due to uncertain indexing and attributions, Maland has discovered through more careful research that no less than 13 of the Time pieces ascribed to Agee and included in both Agee on Film (the venerable 1958 edition) and Library of America’s 2005 anthology Film Writing and Selected Journalism , including a couple on quintessentially Ageean subjects ( The Gold Rush and D.W. Griffith) are not by Agee at all—and these, appropriately, are omitted from Maland’s collection. (It’s worth adding that Maland admits that some of his own attributions remain less than 100 percent certain, and a few of the pieces are listed as co-authored.)

It’s even smaller wonder that so much of Agee’s independent writing is radically rebellious and unreasonable, in reaction to this form of corporate slavery—from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to the original draft of his untitled final novel that was edited into A Death in the Family (available as Volume 1 in The Works of James Agee , and substantially different from the mainstream “classic” that was carved out of it), and including such cantankerous essays as “Pseudo-Folk” (included in Agee on Film , but not in Maland’s collection) and “I’d Rotha Be Right” (which Maland publishes for the first time). In “Pseudo-Folk,” which Partisan Review published in 1944, Agee’s attacks on the Paul Robeson production of Othello and the stage productions of Carmen Jones and Oklahoma is followed by the parenthetical admission that he hasn’t seen them “because I felt sure they would be bad.” His earlier review of Iris Barry’s editing and translation of Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach’s History of Motion Pictures , quite sensibly rejected by the same journal in 1938, begins with the admission, “I have not read much of the book; nor do I intend to; nor do I think it necessary to in order to indicate that it is not worth the attention of an intelligent reader, that it can only further confuse the confused reader, that it is therefore a thoroughly reprehensible piece of work, and that the translator is ill qualified to hold the important and responsible position she does hold in the Museum of Modern Art Film Library.” His longstanding detestation of Iris Barry— “whom Agee loathed beyond all reason,” according to his biographer Laurence Bergreen—was such that he wrote to Dwight Macdonald, while taking a break from work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to draft this hysterical review, about seizing the “beautiful chance to rape Iris Barry, who . . . badly needs it.” (Bergreen, who quotes from this letter, errs in supposing that the Bardèche-Brasillach book was actually written by Barry, but it seems that Agee’s attitude toward her as expressed in this sentence and review makes the mistake understandable. Moreover, one should add that the fact that Brasillach was an anti-Semite who would seven years later be executed for his collaboration with Nazis plays no part in Agee’s indictment, which he wrote far too early to be aware of this.)

All these examples are intemperate refusals of mainstream etiquette and, in most cases, corporate sponsorship, the very thing that supported Agee for most of his life. (This is a form of counterreaction that I’ve lived through myself in portions of my own career as a freelancer—probably most starkly in 1979, when I was writing mainstream articles for American Film to subsidize the concurrent writing of my rebellious, experimental, and literary first book, Moving Places , with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men serving as one of my conscious models.) But sometimes this strategy of abrasive opposition can backfire. In his rejected anti-Barry screed, Agee’s assumption of certain givens in film taste are so shockingly dated and ill-considered that they make him sound like a jerk. To Agee, calling Scarface “the masterpiece of gangster films [without] a trace of sentimentality” (as Bardèche and Brasillach do), Charles Laughton a “memorable actor,” and The Docks of New York “von Sternberg at his best” are so clearly signs of idiocy and mental corruption that his own counter-judgments about these matters don’t even need to be spelled out, much less argued. For the record, there are several passing references to Laughton’s acting in Agee’s subsequent Time and Nation reviews, most of them favorable, and his objections to the praise for The Docks of New York are tied to the authors comparing it to Ford’s The Informer , which Agee seems to detest even more—and mitigated somewhat by his concession that Barry “does point out the speciousness of The Docks of New York ,” without clarifying what this speciousness consists of, for her or for him. As for Scarface , which is never mentioned again in Agee’s collected works, his principal ire seems to have been provoked by the French authors’ praise for Paul Muni and their mentioning James Cagney only in passing. (“I venture that The Public Enemy , though it is easy to overrate it, is about eight times as good as Scarface and that Cagney’s performance [if there must be ‘performances’ in movies] is not at all easily overrated.”) And he’s only slightly more forthcoming about his detestation of Barry’s passing defense of one of Frank Capra’s most cherished features: “…I would have to add that It Happened One Night , an unusually expert and pleasant and almost perfectly valueless show, is overrated past nausea by that sort of highbrow who has belatedly discovered that it sounds intelligent to say that a pure commercial picture can be good (some of our best friends are commercials)…”

Out of the Past

Frankly, the whole piece is an embarrassment, and I can only surmise that Maland opted to include the Barry pan because he thought Agee’s opinions in this case had some legitimacy. On the other hand, Maland clearly omitted “Pseudo-Folk” because that piece has little to do with film directly, but I’m glad that he decided to reprint Agee’s 1946 introduction to A Way of Seeing: Photographs of Helen Levitt (1965), which also has nothing to do with film but happens to be one of Agee’s finest essays, and it was sadly omitted—along with his extraordinary 1943 “America, Look to Your Shame!”—in the Library of America’s 2005 Selected Journalism . Even though the essay refers to the Levitt photographs (which aren’t reproduced here) for much of its meaning—which is one of the reasons why I’ve clung to my copy of the wonderful Levitt book for over half a century—it’s still great to have its prose back in print.

When Manny Farber arranged for his own “complete” film criticism to be published posthumously, he requested that all of his own Time reviews (from mid–August 1949 to mid–January 1950—a gig arranged for by his pal Agee when he left the magazine) be omitted because of how much they were rewritten. Agee, of course, never had such a choice regarding the reprints of his own work, and considering how much his reputation is based on posthumous biographical and romantic legends about him, the sheer weight of his extended careers at Fortune and Time for most of the 1930s and 1940s is usually skimped. So a comprehensive strategy of inclusion gives a logic to much of Maland’s work, yet I must confess that whereas the Library of America’s Farber on Film enhances and expands Farber’s importance as a critic, Maland’s volume, perhaps unwittingly, diminishes the critical importance of Agee. Maland strains to argue otherwise, such as when he writes, “Agee’s pantheon is significant because in this dimension of his work he was celebrating the work of individual directors and in doing so could be considered an early auteurist, anticipating by nearly a decade the auteur approach that would flower in France in the 1950s and in the United States in the 1960s.” This special pleading is misplaced because the hallmark of what he calls “the auteur approach” on both sides of the Atlantic was the discovery of style as personal expression in studio films, something Agee was blind to when it came to, say, Jacques Tourneur in Out of the Past (or, apparently, in Tourneur’s three remarkable pictures for Val Lewton, none of which Agee reviewed), John Berry in From This Way Forward , Frank Borzage in The Other Love , or Robert Siodmak in The Killers , all of whose names go unmentioned, even if Agee does mention Delmer Daves in his Time reviews of The Red House and Dark Passage (and Berry in his Time review of the far less personal Casbah ) and ridicules Michael Curtiz’s liking for camera movement in his Nation review of Casablanca . For all his evocative descriptions of silent slapstick, Jean Vigo, Notorious , and Monsieur Verdoux , Agee’s writing is mostly literary in its language and much of its critical methodology, and far more tuned to gesture, mood, and visual texture than to the stylistic expressiveness examined by critics in the 1950s Cahiers du Cinéma or Sarris in the ’60s. Perhaps for the same reason, he tended to show hostility towards expressionism in most of its forms ( Kane , much of Fritz Lang, Jammin’ the Blues , and The Three Caballeros , though not Odd Man Out —and one wonders how he might have responded to Laughton’s direction of his own Night of the Hunter script), generally preferring his film fiction in a style closer to that of documentary. Indeed, one of the more intriguing aspects of his first published piece of criticism—a rave notice accorded to Murnau’s The Last Laugh in 1926, when he was a sophomore at Phillips Exeter Academy—is that it shows more enthusiasm for expressionism and subjective camera (“we see distorted faces of fiends glaring at us, laughing hideously”) than we generally find in his adult writing, and this winds up being the only Murnau film that’s ever mentioned in this hefty volume. (Lang fares only slightly better.)

Given how many forgettable ’40s films Agee bothered to write about, it’s remarkable how many stylistically memorable films of that era he missed or at least never reviewed, such as Laura , Beauty and the Beast , Duel in the Sun , The Lady from Shanghai , and Letter from an Unknown Woman , or else conspicuously undervalued—another honor roll, stretching from Maya Deren to Good Sam . (Maland alludes to Agee’s “review” of Duel in the Sun , but in fact it’s only a brief, opinionated news story about Selznick’s censorship battles.) And of course the greatest difference between Agee and Farber in terms of contemporary significance is the fact that Agee, unlike Farber, didn’t live long enough to confront any Asian or African or Middle Eastern films or anything by Akerman, Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Fellini, Godard, Resnais, Tati, Truffaut, or Varda. Perhaps the closest Agee ever got to 1960s film culture was reviewing Alf Sjöberg’s Torment , which boasts an early Bergman script. So he clearly belongs to a separate era of film culture that more or less ended with the early years of Italian Neorealism, prior to The Bicycle Thief , Umberto D , and the Rossellini-Bergman films. This alone sadly places him closer generationally to Bosley Crowther (born four years earlier) than to Farber (born eight years later).

Apart from the lamentable “I’d Rotha Be Right,” the other “Unpublished Manuscripts” selected by Maland range from the mildly interesting to the mildly uninteresting while continuing to show Agee as being handicapped by living in what might be called the prehistory of film history. The section “Movie Digest” includes over two dozen capsule reviews of films from the mid-1930s, stylistically similar (though mostly inferior) to reviews of this kind that he would write for the Nation in the 1940s, with few surprises (apart from the assigning of letter grades to many of the reviews), generally suggesting some early trial runs at movie reviewing. “Unpublished Column on René Clair,” probably written in 1944, is also unsurprising and unexceptional apart from some characteristically Ageean hair-splitting. A letter of suggested film titles for the Library of Congress with comments to Archibald MacLeish, never intended for publication, is both repetitious in its own right and redundant in (mostly) restating the critical positions of his published work, and the same could be said for “Notes on Movies and Reviewing to Jean Kintner for a Museum of Modern Art Roundtable,” “Notes for Article on American Movies for Special Issue of Horizon on American Art,” and two proposals for pieces about Eisenstein that he never wrote, one for Time and the other for the Nation .

But the historical innocence of Agee revealed in the Eisenstein proposals is worth noting. Though it’s fully understandable that he would view the first part of Ivan the Terrible as unambiguous Stalinist propaganda, the more recent and exceptional scholarship of Yuri Tsivian and Joan Neuberger have shown both parts to be courageous acts of bravado and even in some respects defiance. I assume it’s merely an oversight that led him to state in his proposal (circa 1947) for a Time cover story on Eisenstein that in contrast to the latter’s troubled career after Que Viva Mexico , “another Russian [sic] director of very great ability, Alexander Dovzhenko, has not, thus far, gotten into any trouble.” (Strangely enough, Maland in a footnote also identifies Dovzhenko as Russian.) That this writer could have been so shockingly ignorant about one of his most cherished filmmakers—an anti-Russian Ukrainian partisan who spent virtually his entire life under Russian surveillance, and whose conflicts with the Russian government were already substantial at least as far back as the 1930s—only goes to show what a historical divide separates us now from Agee on matters of film history. To assume that his considerable literary talent can make up the difference may, alas, be only wishful thinking.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has been publishing film criticism for 40 years. A significant amount can be found at JonathanRosenbaum.net .

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Let Us Now Praise James Agee

The journalist who pioneered serious film criticism showed a cinematic touch in all of his writing..

Sepia-colored photo portrait of James Agee leaning in at an angle.

James Agee cut a dramatic figure in his short life.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts / Billy Rose Theater Division

When Library of America published a collection of Pauline Kael’s film writing last year, many of Kael’s admirers fondly recalled her as the first writer to elevate film criticism to literature. But that distinction actually belongs to an earlier LOA author, James Agee.

Sepia-colored photo portrait of a sharecropper woman against the wood siding of a house.

Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper photographed by Walker Evans to accompany an article by James Agee in Fortune magazine. After the piece was spiked, the essay and photos were published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men .

Library of Congress

Photo of a woman hanging from a pole with tall grass in the background. She is hammering at an object on the pole while a man walks underneath her.

Katharine Hepburn in African Queen, 1951, based on a novel by C.S. Forester, adapted for the screen by Agee and John Huston.

INTERFOTO/Alamy

In 1942, a generation before Kael gained fame for her New Yorker reviews, Agee (pronounced Ay-jee) signed on as a movie critic for both Time and the Nation , penning reviews often more memorable than the movies that inspired them. The Agee style—intensely literary and endlessly alert to the textual nuances of an emerging medium—was a striking departure from the prevailing movie coverage, which often seemed little more than a willing arm of the studio publicity mill. When Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five, fans of his film work immediately began clamoring for a book that would preserve his best reviews within covers, and Agee on Film appeared in 1958. The book’s publication affirmed the stature of film criticism as its own art form, creating a standard that subsequent generations of reviewers have tried to match.

Decades after Agee’s passing, the idea of film reviewing as something intellectually valuable seems thoroughly mainstream. But when Agee was making his way as a journalist in the 1930s and 1940s, few editors were interested in devoting “think pieces” to something so seemingly transient as a Hollywood flick. In fighting for film’s place in the pantheon of modern culture, Agee was defying convention, even at the risk of stalling his career.

In his other writing projects as well, Agee was reliably rebellious. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , his almost maddeningly obscure account of life among Depression-era Alabama sharecroppers, was a commercial flop when it was released in 1941, although the book now stands as a landmark piece of social documentary. Far more accessible, but no less visionary, is Agee’s most popular book, the posthumously published and largely autobiographical novel A Death in the Family . The current vogue in memoirs about loss, such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story , extends a tradition greatly popularized by Agee’s 1957 roman à clef, which uses beautifully poetic prose to recall how the sudden death of Agee’s father radically altered his family’s future.

In addition to reviewing films, Agee was also a groundbreaking screenwriter, adapting Davis Grubb’s novel The Night of the Hunter into the vividly creepy 1955 movie of the same name, and also helping to adapt C. S. Forester’s novel The African Queen into the 1951 film classic.

The Library of America’s collection of Agee’s work spans two volumes: Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism and Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, and Shorter Fiction .

As a critic of films—and an occasional writer on movie projects—Agee favored productions that seemed to indulge intuition and surprise rather than careful calculation. “Movies are made for respectable people now,” he lamented in 1950. “(They) were better when made for lowbrows and made with instinct and delight.”

If Agee liked to think of the world cinematically, it’s possibly because his life, so touched by deep tragedy, soaring success, and wretched excess, often seemed like a movie in itself.

James Rufus Agee was born on November 27, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a working-class father and a mother with a more socially connected background. The contrast informed Agee’s view of the world throughout his life. Later, despite a résumé that included a Harvard degree and positions at the top of national journalism, Agee retained a populist sympathy for the have-nots, embracing an aggressive brand of liberalism that sometimes compromised his professional aspirations.

When Agee was only six years old, his father died in a car accident, leaving an absence that would intensely haunt him the rest of his life. Not long after the loss, Agee was sent to an Episcopal boarding school in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he developed an enduring friendship with Father James Harold Flye, a sensitive and intellectual cleric who became Agee’s surrogate father. When he was sixteen, Agee was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, an elite boarding school that proved a culture clash for the unconventional teen.

“He was a Southern boy of a complex background, already in his own way a populist, an earthy, crunchy, idiosyncratic, rebellious—very rebellious—young man,” writes Robert Coles, a prominent social thinker and Agee admirer. “He arrived at the staid New England private school at a time when it was much stiffer and more exclusionary, almost exclusively populated by wealthy East Coast scions of privilege.”

Shortly after his arrival at Exeter, Agee began an affair with a forty-year-old librarian, the early chapter of a libertine sex life that would, by the time of his death, include three marriages and several extramarital relationships. By his high school years, Agee was also a heavy drinker and smoker, two habits that further complicated his personal life and almost certainly shortened it.

Along with his darker tendencies, Agee’s gifts as a writer were emerging, too, as he led the school’s magazine and literary society and churned out a steady stream of stories, criticism, and poetry. The movies had also captured young Agee’s attention, a passion he confessed to Exeter alumnus and Yale undergraduate Dwight Macdonald. “To me, the great thing about movies,” Agee told Macdonald in 1927, “is that it’s a brand new field. I don’t see how much more can be done with writing or the stage. In fact, every kind of recognized ‘art’ has been worked pretty nearly to the limit. Of course, great things will be done in all of them, but, possibly excepting music, I don’t see how they can avoid being at least in part imitations. As for the movies, however, their possibilities are infinite.”

Although he was an indifferent student, Agee’s writing talent secured him strong recommendations for admission to Harvard, where he continued to refine his literary technique. Ever the experimentalist, Agee told Flye that he aspired “to combine what Chekhov did with what Shakespeare did—that is, to move from the dim, rather eventless beauty of (Chekhov) to huge, geometric plots such as Lear . . . I’ve thought of inventing a sort of amphibious style—prose that would run into poetry when the occasion demanded poetic expression.”

In a more casual mood, Agee penned a parody of Time magazine that would be followed, ironically enough, by a postgraduation job working for Time publisher Henry Luce, who hired Agee to work on a sister publication, Fortune . Bohemian and left of center, Agee seemed an odd fit for the staff of a business publication created by Luce, the conservative publisher. But over the years, Luce would bring a number of liberal writers into his stable, including Macdonald, Archibald MacLeish, and Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Despite the political divide within the office, Luce benefited from the talent he had assembled, and his writers, in turn, enjoyed well-paying positions. In 1932, when Agee started at Fortune , the economic downturn had made such jobs an especially coveted prize.

Staff writers also stood to benefit from Luce’s deft editorial pen, Galbraith would recall many years later in a fond remembrance of his days at Fortune . “No one who worked for him ever again escaped the feeling that he was there looking over one’s shoulder,” Galbraith remembered. “In his hand was a pencil; down on each page one could expect, any moment, a long swishing wiggle accompanied by the comment: ‘This can go.’ Invariably it could. It was written to please the author and not the reader.”

Agee, though, was more resistant to editorial direction—and, it seemed, direction of any kind. Macdonald would later recall Agee’s tense sessions with Luce, in which Luce attempted, often in vain, to temper Agee’s prolix narratives. At one point, an exasperated Agee fantasized about shooting Luce.

Beyond issues of editorial judgment, Agee proved, in countless other ways, to be a decidedly unconventional Luce employee. “As Luce and his magazine were moving into the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan,” Coles writes, “the legend of James Agee was becoming known to the literary community of Manhattan: the enormously talented writer who drank a lot, slept around, and who would write while listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so loudly and so often that people worried whether the Chrysler Building would withstand the orchestral blasts.”

But the odd-couple relationship between Agee and his publisher, whatever its limitations, coincided with what was perhaps Agee’s most fruitful period as a writer. For Fortune , Agee wrote pieces on everything from orchids to the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the bargain between Agee’s poetic largesse and the more practical sensibility of Luce’s house style, one can find magazine journalism that, like the newspaper reportage of Charles Dickens, crackles with the wry intensity of literary ambition.

Here’s how Agee opens his 1934 Fortune piece on cockfighting:

You are a gentleman. You have a taste for sport (most likely horses), leisure to indulge it, and an estate. One quiet morning you walk down to your stables. As you come around the side of the barn, you hear a soft but violent fluttering of wings, an agitated hissing, a passionate exclaiming of low voices. You look down, and there are your Negroes (if you happen to be a southern gentleman) crouched in a wide circle on the ground, leaning on bent knuckles, peering into the center of the ring. They are watching two birds, large and brightly colored, that cling together beak to beak with arched necks, dancing up and down, while their wings whir and they slash at each other viciously, rapidly, with their spurs. The birds are gamecocks, most ferocious of all domestic creatures, and their dance is fatal—it can end only in death.

Notice how, even within the compass of a magazine article, Agee is already polishing his skills as a screenwriter. The opening sounds like stage direction, followed by a plot synopsis, as if Agee is writing a pitch for a movie project.

To read Agee is to be reminded that he thought in pictures, which is why, one gathers, he was such a perceptive movie critic. His review of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek , from 1944, promises to be around longer than the movie itself. “ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek ,” he begins,

is a little like taking a nun on a roller coaster. Its ordinary enough subject—the difficulties of a small-town girl, pregnant, without a husband—is treated with the catnip giddiness to be expected from Writer-Director Preston Sturges. . . . The chief failures are his, too. Some of the fun is painfully unfunny, because it is like a joker who outroars his audience’s reaction. Some of the pity is not pitiful because it is smashed before it has a chance to crystallize. Most of the finest human and comic potentialities of the story are lost because Sturges is so much less interested in his characters than in using them as hobbyhorses for his own wit.

Agee was an early enthusiast of Alfred Hitchcock, praising Hitchcock’s 1944 movie, Lifeboat , as “one of the most ambitious films in years,” and comparing it to the poetry of E. E. Cummings. He was also a friend and champion of Charlie Chaplin, lionizing Chaplin and other silent-era comics in a lengthy retrospective for Life in 1949. Agee persuasively affirmed the value of Chaplin and his contemporary comic screen actors, even as the talkies were nudging their legacies into the background.

As Agee progressed in film reviewing, influential readers took notice. Among his admirers was the poet W. H. Auden, who wrote a glowing fan letter to the Nation in 1944. “In my opinion, his column is the most remarkable event in American journalism today,” Auden said of Agee. “What he says is of such profound interest, expressed with such extraordinary wit and felicity, and so transcends its ostensible—to me, rather unimportant—subject, that his articles belong in that very select class—the music critiques of Berlioz and Shaw are the only other members I know—of newspaper work which has permanent literary value.”

In literature as in film, Agee consistently favored artists who took risks, even if it made them less accessible to the public at large. In the book reviews he filed for Time , Agee’s heart quickened when he read writers who embraced experiment: Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf.

Agee’s most audacious attempt at avant-garde expression involved his assignment by Fortune in 1936 to write a story about the struggles of sharecroppers. Agee traveled to Alabama with photographer Walker Evans, whose achingly beautiful pictures of poor farming families are profoundly moving precisely because of their striking simplicity. In Evans’s haunting, black-and-white images, as in the best documentary photography, there’s no obvious sense of mediation between the subject and the viewer. The gaunt but resilient faces of Evans’s sharecroppers confront us directly, with inch-close immediacy. Evans tends to dissolve into the background of this meeting between those who are seen and those who see them, as sublimely quiet as a stage hand parting a curtain. Evans’s presence in this equation is discernible, but subtle. In some of his most memorable images, Evans’s sharecroppers stand or sit for him as if posing for a formal studio photograph. Their posture, which mimics the rituals of refined family portraits, only serves to underscore their ragged clothing, worn faces, and wearying poverty. What Evans seems to be saying, without quite saying so, is that these sharecroppers are worthy of dignity, too, in spite of their estrangement from economic promise.

But if Evans’s pictures are a study in sublimation, Agee’s accompanying text about the sharecroppers seems as much about Agee as the rural folk he’s supposed to be chronicling. With the title of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , which comes from a passage in the apocrypha, an ancient group of texts excluded from the Bible, Agee sounds the keynote of a narrative dense with literary allusion, riddles, and cosmic speculation. To get a flavor of the book, consider Agee’s disclaimer, in which he says that although his nominal subject is Alabama sharecroppers, his real goal “is to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense. More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”

Not surprisingly, Agee’s Fortune editors balked at his approach, and the story never made it into the magazine’s pages. Agee and Walker eventually expanded the project and got it published as a book, but the volume sold only six hundred copies after its 1941 release and was quickly remaindered. For the most part, readers either embrace Agee’s prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , or they simply endure it.

Among the fans is Coles, who celebrates Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in Handing One Another Along , a 2010 book in which he reflects on literature that’s deeply shaped his moral sensibility. When reading Agee’s narrative, says Coles, “I think of Agee as singing in an opera—a sustained, passionate oratorio. I think of the long discourses of the poets of Greece and Rome. . . .”

But even some admirers of Agee’s Alabama odyssey concede that his travelogue is an acquired taste. Novelist David Madden, whose enthusiasm for Agee has slowly grown into “sustained admiration” over the years, admits that, at first, passages in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men struck him as “precious, mannered, pompous, the tone as condescending.”

A much greater critical consensus has gathered around A Death in the Family , the novel Agee was finishing at the time of his own death, and which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. In a story that can often read like a documentary account of Agee’s own childhood, he seems to reconcile his literary expansiveness with the more linear patterns of traditional fiction, creating lovely sentences that quickly invite comparisons to Proust.

“Knoxville: Summer 1915,” a straight autobiographical essay that was written and published years before A Death in the Family and later employed for the novel’s opening, is perhaps the most beautiful evocation ever written of summer as seen through the eyes of a child. Here, Agee describes the evening routine:

Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out.

The prose of Agee’s boyhood remembrance proved so lyrical that Samuel Barber set a section of “Knoxville: Summer 1915” to music. It was a notable nod to the genius of Agee, who wouldn’t live to see the enduring critical reception he obviously craved.

On May 16, 1955, while putting the last touches on his novel about a family prematurely robbed of its father, Agee died of a heart attack in a New York City taxicab, leaving a wife and children behind. He was a few months shy of his forty-sixth birthday.

If Agee’s life were, indeed, a movie script, then Agee the critic would no doubt have dismissed it as overwritten.

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

In 1979, the Library of America received a $1.2 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to begin publishing titles of classic American literature and keep them in print.

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Movies, tv & music • independent film criticism • soundtrack guides • forming the future • est. 2014, why criticism: james agee – from critic to filmmaker.

When James Agee began making films, he stopped writing about them. His short film In the Street was made in 1948, the same year he quit his two jobs writing criticism to work as a freelancer. Agee’s short encapsulates many of his passions and preferences: it’s a documentary, it’s a silent film and it depicts things as they are with no imposition of a narrative. Set on the streets of New York in Spanish Harlem, In the Street explores what seems to be a day in the life of the people of the neighborhood. A portrait of a time and a place (filled with poetic energy and a well-worn weariness), the film feels exceptional in many ways. Agee and co-director Helen Levitt refuse to detach themselves from the action they are invested in, specifically a blissful moment as children come rushing towards the camera, smiling and laughing, breaking the fourth wall.

Agee’s greatest legacy in filmmaking, however, was his writing. Assembled in Agee on Film: Five Film Scripts are his screenplays, three of which went unproduced, two of which are considered amongst the greatest American films ever made. The scripts and subsequent adaptations show a sensitivity toward silence and attention towards detail. Agee’s scripts have a poetic edge, humour and emotion that reveal more about the interior experience of the world than the outer one .

Among Agee’s most interesting unproduced screenplays was Noa Noa , a film about Paul Gauguin’s life and work, with a focus on his relationship with Vincent van Gogh. The script runs high on emotions and certainly seems to draw quite a bit from Irving Stone’s novel about the life van Gogh, Lust for Life (1934). Rooting the story in the more grounded Gauguin feels on par with Agee’s own aspirations for ideal filmmaking, focusing on a realist vision of the world, moving away from escapism or fleeting fancies.

Agee’s prose brings familiar moments alive , like this passage describing the moment that van Gogh cuts off his ear:

“We hear him get up suddenly; then a frantic scrabbling of metal and hard objects. Then dead silence . We stop dollying. Silence. Then a queer, shrill little animal cry, of amazement as much as pain . Silence. Another little cry. Silence. Then a much more dreadful cry. Silence. Rattling of paper. Silence. Quick footsteps and fast unbolting of the door and Vincent opens the door, close to us. He holds a towel tightly around his head, scarf-like, with one hand. Between the towel and the right side of his head a rag is caught; even so, the towel is somewhat bloody . His breath shakes almost as if his teeth were chattering. He leans for a moment against the door frame. In his trembling left hand, he carries an envelope which he now brings to his mouth. He licks the flap and presses the somewhat bulky envelope against the door frame to seal it. Then for an instant he seems to catch sight of us, staring at us. He looks quickly away — or even raises the envelope to conceal his face from us — as he hurries from the shot.”

Agee builds up toward the moment as well, drawing on the environmental tension of rain pouring down, foreshadowed earlier in the script by a woman who teases van Gogh for trying to comfort her: “O yes, fine, (she grabs his ears). But all you really are is a goose, with no ears at all.” Agee builds the moment around silence rather than images, and given his hatred of musical scores, this was how he likely intended it to play out. Conversely, the same incident in Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956) falters largely because of an intrusive and almost deafening score.

During his lifetime, Agee’s most successful film project, The African Queen (1951), was an adaptation of a novel by C.S. Forester and earned him an Academy Award nomination. Agee, who idolized John Huston as the greatest living American filmmaker, collaborated with him on the screenplay. Built around competing soundscapes, the opening scene of the screenplay sets the tone: the mad peddling Rose , singing and playing her organ, and the billowing sound of the African Queen, helmed by the barefooted Allnut. The film beautifully captures a fierce rivalry that has the potential for aching harmony, and it establishes the centrality of the title ship: a character as fierce and stubborn as either Rose or Allnut.

The only other of Agee’s screenplays to land onscreen was his adaptation of Davis Grubb’s novel The Night of the Hunter (1955). Agee, who would die at the age of 45 in a taxi cab, never lived to see the film.

In Simon Callow’s BFI Classics book on The Night of the Hunter , he explores the backstory of Agee’s work and collaboration. Agee’s previous success on The African Queen (and his experience writing about childhood in the South ) made him a natural choice for the story set in the American South, told from the perspective of two young children . Agee, though, was already knee deep in the alcoholism that would kill him . For years, the haunting disease was used to discredit his involvement in the film, with producer Paul Gregory’s version of events dominating the discussion.

According to Gregory, Agee spent most of the writing period sprawled on the floor in a drunken stupor, though he still managed to produce a behemoth 350-page script (still unpublished), painstakingly recreating the novel with inserted ideas of extended montages built from newsreel footage. Gregory insists the whole thing was a disaster, and the only reason they kept him on was so that director Charles Laughton could have at least a script to shape into something coherent. However, Callow suggests this interpretation of events does not match supported facts that Laughton maintained a steady and cordial relationship through letters and memos, including one where Agee suggests the director be credited as a co-writer. Gregory, who later claimed that Agee was a wreck, responded:

“We do not feel, in any sense, that a change in the credit should be made where you are concerned. We feel that you made a great contribution to The Night of the Hunter . I tell you very honestly if we thought the picture were bad, in order to protect you, we would be more than happy to remove your name, but since we think it is great, we feel that you will be happy and proud that you had something to do with it — and neither Charles nor I feel that under any circumstances you should be embarrassed over the credit.”

One of the biggest points of departure between Agee and Laughton’s vision for the film was the battle between naturalism and fantasy. As clearly established, Agee always preferred a more realist approach. Laughton, however, saw the novel and his film as a disturbed fairy tale. The two were cordial, and Agee apparently spent a lot of time on the set at both Laughton’s and Robert Mitchum’s request. The pair similarly spent time revisiting the works of D.W. Griffith screening at the MoMa before the film went into production, drawing on his style to help build the film’s look and feel. Agee, a great admirer of Griffith, seemed to be swayed towards Laughton’s more expressionistic vision for the film.

In Callow’s opinion, Agee and Laughton were close collaborators on the film and the shooting script used was the product of their collaboration, which is likely why Agee asked for a co-writing credit in the end. He also offers some interesting insight as to the moments in which the film departs from the novel, such as the dialogue:

“Almost all the dialogue in the screenplay is a variant on something in the novel; very often it is verbatim, or slightly tempered to mollify the censor (Lillian Gish is not accused of being the Whore of Babylon) . There are two very striking lines, however, that have no origin in the book. Partly because oí the performance of Lillian Gish, and partly because of their place in the film, they have a powerful resonance. “I’ve been bad’, Ruby confesses, tearfully. You was looking for love, child, the only foolish way you knowed how’ Rachel tells Ruby . ‘We all need love..’ Whether it was Laughton or Agee who wrote these lines, we shall never know; but it was a happy day for the film when they did.”

Both Laughton and Huston seemed to have enjoyed working with Agee, with the latter calling him a friend and even writing the introduction to James Agee on Film: Five Scripts . Agee was finding greater success at the point of his death, but most of his reputation was built posthumously. Death in the Family , his autobiographical novel about growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. And The African Queen , a huge success at the time of its release, is still considered among John Huston’s greatest works. The Night of the Hunter , which had a rough reception at the time of its release, has been reconsidered as one of the best films of the decade, if not of all time.

It’s hard to say how much of James Agee’s critical work went into forming his voice as a writer and whether or not he would continue to develop that voice. There are certain strings that follow from his critical writing on American cinema to his involvement with industry productions, as his preference for silence and naturalism comes through. His voice also emerges through certain avatars, like van Gogh or Allnut, while The Night of the Hunter feels like a nightmare spiritual companion to his posthumously awarded Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family. Agee, as both a critic and scriptwriter, changed the face of American cinema.

Justine Smith ( @redroomrantings ) lives and writes in Montreal, Quebec. She has a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies and a passionate hunger for all kinds of cinema. Along with writing for Vague Visages, she has written for Vice Canada, Cleo: A Feminist Journal and Little White Lies Magazine.

Categories: 2016 Film Essays , Featured , Film Essays , Why Criticism by Vague Visages Writers

Tagged as: C.S. Forester , Column , Death in the Family , Film Critic , Film Criticism , In the Street , John Huston , Noa Noa , Paul Gauguin , The African Queen , The Night of the Hunter , Vague Visages , Vincent van Gogh , Why Criticism

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A Famous Man

By David Denby

In July of 1936, James Agee, a writer for Fortune and an avid Greenwich Village partygoer, drinker, and talker, found himself in the house of a taciturn Alabama family he called the Gudgers. Henry Luce’s business magazine was then in its early, socially concerned phase, and Agee, along with the photographer Walker Evans, had been sent to the South to investigate the situation of tenant cotton farmers—the sort of subject that was common for Fortune during the Depression. As Agee reconstructed the moment afterward, in the report that became not a magazine article but a daunting four-hundred-page prose epic, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (with Evans’s extraordinary photographs preceding the text), he was writing late on a summer night, by the light of a coal-oil lamp, in a front bedroom vacated for his use, while the seven members of the Gudger family were asleep in the next room. He was feeling calm—confident of his ability, aided by the “dry, silent, and famished” little flame, to take stock of the life around him. He hadn’t always felt that way. From the beginning, he had denigrated the reporting project as a fraud and a betrayal. In the book’s first pages, a furious self-inquiry builds up. Agee was not wealthy, but he was privileged, an emissary from a powerful organization and therefore authorized to “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” For what purpose did he pry? For money? For glory? In the name of “honest journalism”? After all, he wasn’t going to do the tenant farmers any good. A literary man in love with Joyce, Faulkner, and Céline, he had no intention of writing the kind of responsible report, with statistics and graphs, that might have spurred legislative action. Nor was he a Marxist, hoping to inflame protest meetings and rallies. The moral quandary of liberal journalism has never been stated with greater clarity or anguish.

Agee and Evans settled on two more families, whom Agee called the Rickettses and the Woodses, and worked and stayed with them for three weeks. The families owned virtually nothing—at best, a couple of mules and a few farming implements—and they were required to give their landlords half of their crops and a quarter or more of the earnings from their own half. They lived without electricity or running water. Having worked since they were children, they were hardened and shrewd, perhaps, but unlettered and inarticulate. For Agee, however, the point was not that these families suffered from atrocious social conditions. The point was that they existed. In an age concerned largely with the “masses,” Agee was impressed by the notion that other human beings idiosyncratically are what they are, in every ornery fibre. Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness—in almost every way, the farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and as capable of pleasure and misery as he. A young couple sitting on a porch and staring at Agee had in their eyes “so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude.” Agee, born an Episcopalian, and deeply religious as a child, was no longer an orthodox believer. But he had a consciousness of the sacred in people and in ordinary objects that believers associate with God’s immanence. He loved, and took literally, Blake’s proclamation “Everything that lives is holy.”

It’s an idea that, as a practical mat-ter, most of us would find hard to sustain. But it imposed devastating, almost comically savage responsibilities on this inordinately ambitious young man (he was twenty-six at the time). Agee wanted to make a connection with the families, and to be liked by them in return, but he didn’t want to swamp the farmers with sympathy—their pride wouldn’t endure it. Try as he might, he could not resolve the disparity between the sullenness of his subjects and his own ravenous and unending sensibility. All that he could do was record. In the room where the Gudgers slept, there was:

George’s red body, already a little squat with the burden of thirty years, knotted like oakwood, in its clean white cotton summer union suit that it sleeps in; and his wife’s beside him, Annie Mae’s, slender, and sharpened through with bone that ten years past must have had such beauty, and is now veined at the breast, and the skin of the breast translucent, delicately shriveled, and blue . . . and the tough little body of Junior, hardskinned and gritty, the feet crusted with sores; and the milky and strengthless littler body of Burt whose veins are so bright in his temples.

Of the Gudger house itself, he noted that, in daylight, “each texture in the wood, like those of bone, is distinct in the eye as a razor: each nail-head is distinct: each seam and split; and each slight warping; each random knot and knothole.” He went on:

The house is rudimentary as a child’s drawing, and of a bareness, cleanness, and sobriety which only Doric architecture, so far as I know, can hope to approach: this exact symmetry is sprung silently and subtly, here and there, one corner of the house a little off vertical, a course of weather-boarding failing the horizontal between parallels, a window frame not quite square, by lack of skill and by weight and weakness of timber and time; and these slight failures, their tensions sprung against centers and opposals of such rigid and earnest exactitude, set up intensities of relationship far more powerful than full symmetry, or studied dissymmetry, or use of relief or ornament, can ever be.

Then, burrowing under the house, he finds, among many other things, “the white tin eyelet of a summer shoe; and thinly scattered, the desiccated and the still soft excrement of hens.”

The families were certainly seen—the re-creation of their furniture, their clothes, food, work, and speech, their smells, their scraps and broken belongings, their momentary joy when they start picking the cotton (until the pain sets in), their outlying woods and springs goes on for pages. In this prose, with its tangled and then flowing lyricism, its indefatigable enumerations and Biblical amplifications, one can hear the influence of Whitman’s exultant catalogues and Joyce’s vibrant harmonies of daily life. In journalism, however, there is no earlier version of it that I’m aware of, and no later equivalent, either—not until you get to Mailer’s polyphonic re-creation of the hippie-activist battalions in the 1967 “Armies of the Night.” In the Library of America’s recent two-volume selection of Agee’s writing ($35 and $40), edited by Michael Sragow, the film critic of the Baltimore Sun , “Famous Men” stands out as Agee’s major achievement, towering over the justly beloved film criticism and the fine, posthumously published novel “A Death in the Family.” Yet “Famous Men” is no easier to read now than it was sixty-five years ago. (It was finally published in 1941, and sold six hundred copies.) At first glance, certainly, it smacks of such period artifacts as documentary hymns to rural electrification and W.P.A. canvases of hammer-swinging workers—the oatmeal-bland left sentimentality that has now fallen into the category of historical kitsch. Confusingly organized, ill-mannered, at times grandiloquent and stargazingly wide-eyed, it’s one of those books which many people read parts of when they were in school but never got around to finishing. Its burdened ethical tone makes readers feel vaguely guilty, a terrible fate for any piece of writing. Yet “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is a book of wonders—an untamable American classic in the same line as “Leaves of Grass” and “Moby-Dick,” a book whose failures of measure and common sense are necessary to its peculiar kind of success.

“Agee is a genius—our only genius.” So spoke “a woman writer of decided opinions,” F. W. Dupee, the Columbia English professor and critic, recalled in an appreciation of Agee written in 1957, two years after the writer’s death. The opinionated lady was almost certainly Mary McCarthy, no easy dispenser of laurels. But tributes to Agee’s talents had been commonplace since he was a boy. Born into a middle-class family in Knoxville in 1909, he was an erratic student but a much appreciated poet and fiction writer at St. Andrew’s school, near Sewanee, at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then at Harvard, where he edited the literary magazine, T__he Advocate . Agee’s stepfather paid his tuition and sent him a check now and then, but at Harvard, then still a place for the wealthy and the wellborn, he was one of the poorer boys. Agee was grateful when his friend Dwight Macdonald, a writer at Fortune , got him a job there, in 1932, and he quickly joined the literary-journalistic life of New York, living modestly in walkup apartments in the Village and in Brooklyn, and in small houses in New Jersey, for most of the rest of his life. At Time Inc., he became famous for his writing, his drinking, his good and bad temper, and for such bits of heroic foolishness as listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in his office at peak volume, with his ear pressed against the phonograph’s speaker. He became a book reviewer at Time in 1939, and then, in late 1941, moved over to the movie section; the following year, he took the film critic’s job at The Nation as well. He wrote for both magazines until 1948, and then worked as a screenwriter—for John Huston on “The African Queen” (1951) and for Charles Laughton on “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), although Laughton heavily revised that screenplay. He composed the narration for documentary films and wrote for CBS’s “Omnibus,” the class-act TV show of the early fifties. He was working on many projects, literary and cinematic, when he died, in 1955, of a heart attack, in a New York City taxi. He was forty-five years old.

In the decades after his death, appreciations like Dupee’s became a flourishing literary genre. Macdonald wrote a harshly loving portrait in this magazine, in 1957; the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, a colleague and friend of Agee’s at Time , wrote a complex but entirely loving one in 1969. Walker Evans, in an edition of “Famous Men” issued in 1960, and, much later, Alfred Kazin, in his memoir “New York Jew,” composed emotionally resonant sketches, and there were many others. All these portraits might be called elegies for a fallen Adonis. They speak of physical beauty and lavish gifts—of Agee’s large hands shaping the air as he talked, of his ardor and generosity, of the inexhaustible vivacity of his mind. And they mourn the waste of those gifts, the books conceived of and then dissipated in bouts of drinking and conversation that lasted until dawn. Macdonald complains of “the worst set of work habits in the Village,” a judgment that was corroborated by Laurence Bergreen in his biography of Agee, which came out in 1984. Macdonald sums up: “I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it.” A later sympathetic critic—Clive James, writing in 1972—lamented “the absence of that sequence of novels which might have recollected his life—a sequence for the writing of which he had qualifications rivalling Proust’s.”

Looking for the cause of Agee’s alleged failure, James seizes on his long years at Time Inc., and Macdonald, shaking his head, records that Agee believed Time ’ s founder, Henry Luce, when he repeatedly promised Agee that he could write seriously for the magazines. “What a waste, what pathetic docility, what illusions!” Macdonald concludes. But in 1949 Agee, working for Life this time, composed a celebration of silent comedy, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” which is one of the best pieces about movies ever written in this country. From the vantage point of 2006, the repeated laments for Agee’s squandered promise no longer look persuasive. Cradling his bottle as he talked to strangers through the night on Perry Street, Agee obviously wasted time. But since he was always castigating himself for his bad habits, isn’t it possible that his disappointed friends and later critics, without intending any malice, took his frequently expressed anguish as license to patronize what he actually achieved? This mode of dealing with the writer was recently extended into sheer hostility by John Leonard. Writing in the Times , Leonard used the occasion of Agee’s appearance in the Library of America as an opportunity not to write an estimate of his virtues and vices as an author but to rehearse the familiar spectacle of his disorderly personal life and the negligent state of his clothes and hygiene.

In both the loving and the hostile portraits, Agee has all too easily been amalgamated into the fable of the Young Man Who Had It All and Threw It Away. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is Thomas Wolfe, there is, concurrently with Agee, the carousing and fornicating Welshman Dylan Thomas—men who drank too much and died too young. But who knows if these writers could have accomplished any more than what they did accomplish? Or if their bad habits didn’t, in some way, ease their torments and make the early good work possible? Why not concentrate on what the writer did rather than on what he failed to do? Reading Bergreen, with his account of Agee’s alternating states of euphoria and despair, one can see the outlines of what a later age would call a manic-depressive temperament, medicated in a way then considered appropriate for a man of Agee’s background—with cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. Since Agee successfully dramatized euphoria and despair in his best work, in the form of idealizing hope and lacerating anger, one could say that his genius was inseparable from his neuroses, and let it go at that.

In any case, the ground of Agee’s supposed martyrdom now looks like the springboard of his originality and accomplishment. He would very likely never have gone to Alabama if Fortune hadn’t sent him there, and what he wrote, in the event, turned into a de-facto rejection of the kind of sober social reporting that the magazine’s writers—Agee among them (Sragow includes a few examples)—were then doing. Time Inc. provided a similar inadvertent lift for the film-review work. As an anonymous movie critic at Time (articles in the magazine were then unsigned), Agee did a terrific job summarizing plots and themes, grade-sheeting performances, highlighting directorial touches. He had an easy way with actors and actresses, and wrote sprightly, fact-filled profiles of Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. He worked with enormous skill, displaying flashes of mischief and eloquence that took the columns out of the ordinary.

What those of us who know Agee’s criticism almost by heart read over and over, however, is the reviews that appeared in The Nation . Some of them are no more than a few sentences or a phrase. (A movie called “You Were Meant for Me” was reviewed with the words “That’s what you think.”) In many other pieces, Agee, having done the basics in Time , would offer just a line or two of plot or setting, and then take off, using his space to evoke the movie physically. (In “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a mother and four daughters, “all in festal, cake-frosting white, stroll across their lawn in spring sunlight, so properly photographed that the dresses all but become halations.”) He would describe a movie as a revelation of the American soul, or comment on some issue of dramatic form, or vex himself over the problem of giving reality its due—his old obsession from “Famous Men,” now transferred, paradoxically, to a photographic medium attracted to illusion. In his six years on the job, he was roused by the moral daring of Chaplin’s “Monsieur Verdoux,” by Jean Vigo’s poetic masterpieces, by Carl Dreyer’s gravity, and by Laurence Olivier’s soaring rhetoric and flights of arrows in “Henry V.” But he saved some of his most detailed concern and praise for such humble realist forms as newsreels and war documentaries (“With the Marines at Tarawa,” John Huston’s “Battle of San Pietro,” and so on). He believed that the mere photographic record of something, skillfully shot, selected, and arranged, could be tantamount to the greatest art. The Nation film criticism was a continuation of the scrupulous and highly moralized attentiveness of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Having acquitted himself with adroit professionalism at Time , Agee was free to unleash his most impassioned eloquence and scorn in the Nation pieces. In Time , reviewing “Bathing Beauty,” one of the ineffable water-tank musicals that Esther Williams made at M-G-M, Agee ends with the mild observation that Williams, “wet and peeled . . . suggests a porpoise amused by its own sex appeal.” In The Nation , however, he concludes his review:

I could not resist the wish that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had topped its aquatic climax—a huge pool full of girls, fountains, and spouts of flame—by suddenly draining the tank and ending the show with the entire company writhing like goldfish on a rug. But M-G-M resisted it.

At The Nation , Agee invented the moral rhetoric of film reviewing. At risk was the “grandest prospect for a major popular art since Shakespeare’s time.” The stage on which this prospect was tested was an industry in which a few “dangerous” individuals with “murderous creative passion” struggled against mediocrity and routine, and often lost. Agee created the myth that almost every critic since his day has drawn on—that the audience, collectively, was pure, and that Hollywood, except for a few people, was timid or corrupt. His friend and rival the critic Manny Farber later complained that Agee, “borrowing words from God, decided whether the latest Hollywood sexpot, in ‘Blanche of the Evergreens,’ was truthful, human, selfless, decent, noble, pure, honorable, really good, or simply deceitful, a cheat, unclean, and without love or dignity,” and Pauline Kael, while acknowledging Agee’s powers as a critic, complained of his “excessive virtue,” which, she said, “may have been his worst critical vice.” But Agee’s virtue was shot through with dissidence, foul temper, and comedy. (He ended a grimly knowing review of Billy Wilder’s alcoholism drama, “The Lost Weekend,” with the following words: “I undershtand that liquor interesh: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.”) Farber and Kael missed something in Agee that was foreign to their own temperaments—the intricate and unending play of piety and blasphemy, the twin needs of an essentially religious man to revere and to let loose. One can only blink in wonder at the profanity that Agee got away with, artfully, as in his review of the excruciating “Carnegie Hall,” in which, he noted, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, “shot from the floor . . . seems to be undergoing for the public benefit an experience, while conducting a portion of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, which men of coarser clay wish exclusively on women, or perhaps on albums of prefabricated trade-union songs.”

The mixture of piety and blasphemy is what makes Agee’s fiction so moving, for here is a Christian author of self-punishing temperament who, at the same time, was awed by creation and could not allow a single aspect of sensuous experience to go unadmired—which meant, necessarily, loving what was raw and degraded as much as what was seemly and fine. In “The Morning Watch,” an autobiographical novella of 1951, a twelve-year-old boarding-school boy, asleep in the early morning of Good Friday, dreams that he is Jesus about to be betrayed by his disciples. He awakes, and hears not Peter and Judas but sleepy boys cursing all around him. He goes to chapel and there, on his knees, relives the previous months of religious crisis, during which he tormented himself over masturbation, only to realize that, at that moment, his back and thighs hurting as he kneels, he is committing the sin of imitating Jesus’ suffering. He leaves chapel with his friends and, as they go skinny-dipping at dawn, steals a look at their genitals; then, at the side of the pond, he kills a snake that may be poisonous and feeds it to the school’s hogs. The mood swings back and forth between guilty devotion to Jesus and excited apprehension of the physical world. As the school enters Easter weekend, and Christ’s resurrection approaches, the boy eases into his sexual future.

In Agee’s autobiographical novel “A Death in the Family,” which he was working on when he died, and which was published in 1957, he goes back further into his youth, to when he was six, in Knoxville, and his young father was killed in a freak automobile accident. The tense alternation of reverence and self-assertion is similar to the rhythm of “The Morning Watch.” The family, which has heard the news of the death, gathers and talks into the night with the strange exhilaration that accompanies catastrophe. A debate forms between the religious, who see the death as having a mysterious purpose that God will not divulge, and the skeptics, who think that it happened by chance, and is without meaning. The boy, Rufus (Agee’s childhood name), is finally told of the accident, and, to our surprise, feels very little except a sense of his own new importance. “My daddy got killed,” he tells strangers and schoolmates on the street. Later, shown the corpse in a funeral parlor, he “looked towards his father’s face and, seeing the blue-dented chin thrust upward, and the way the flesh was sunken behind the bones of the jaw, first recognized in its specific weight the word, dead .” For long stretches, as Agee evokes first the comforts of childhood and then its loneliness and bewilderment, the novel reaches a pitch of tenderness that comes within hailing distance of what Joyce achieved in the early pages of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

Agee’s lyrical gift set him off from other writers of liberal or radical conviction of the day. At almost exactly the same time that he and Walker Evans were in Alabama, George Orwell was exploring living conditions in coal-mining towns in the North of England, and it’s instructive to compare Orwell’s remarkable report, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” with “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Orwell boarded for a while in a little house that took in miners:

The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.

So often in Orwell there is a strong sense of the sordid—the scandal of meanness, decay, filth. And he was appalled by sloth and inanition. When, with much greater sympathy, he describes the miners and their wives in Wigan and other towns he typically catches them not “creeping” but moving vigorously—working, washing, cooking, or searching a slag heap for usable coal. Orwell is a chronicler of man as actor, and the second half of his book is a call for action in the form of socialist reform. But Agee chronicles being. He evokes the farmers and their families not just in sleep but at rest, sitting on a porch, or staring shyly and saying nothing. And he was incapable of physical disgust. For him, there is only an endless variety of shapes, textures, and dispositions, none of them beyond redemption in words.

In “Famous Men,” Agee is not a political writer but a poetic and metaphysical writer, who wanted to honor reality, and also to abolish it. There is a trap built into his kind of intense receptivity. That a person or a thing is itself and nothing else, and is therefore worthy of notice and celebration, may be the beginning of morality, but it’s also the beginning of tragedy. As Agee sits on the porch or alone in a room in one of the houses, he tries to take in, all at once, everything that the family is, everything that exists in the house—for instance, Mrs. Ricketts’s dress, which is shaped “like a straight-sided bell, with a little hole at the top for the head to stick through, the cloth slit from the neck to below the breasts and held together if I remember rightly with a small snarl of shoelace.” He stares at a pair of coarsely sewn and nailed work boots, or at a tattered doll, or at the worn-through oil cloth on an old table, and is amazed at how much life went into the making and use of that table, amazed by how much life is going on in similar households, unnoticed, unrecorded. The mood is one of Wordsworthian awe and submission, though Agee extended his sympathies to objects—even mass-produced, industrial products—as well as to nature. At the same time, however, he is stunned by how limited the families are. Being so vividly and absolutely themselves, they are unable to be so many other things, and some of the angriest, most eloquent pages of the book are devoted to the deformations wrought on the children by early work and poor schooling. They have been cheated out of the most elementary ways of teaching themselves—and therefore cheated out of pleasure. When they grow up, and become similar to that disdainful couple Agee encountered on a porch, the fierceness of their pride will be created as much by ignorance as by anger. The rhapsodist of things as they are is necessarily caught in a position of infinite regret. That is why the book, for all its celebratory tone, never falls into bathos. No one could confuse the tenant farmers’ days with a complete mastering of life.

Agee could do nothing to help the farmers, but at least by making a candid account of his relations with them he could refuse to join their betrayers. After a great many nervous and defiant disclaimers and proclamations, he gets down to business. Copious sections on the farmers’ shelter, work, clothing, and education are interrupted, however, by accounts of his shy attempts to make friends and by speculation on the nature of observation and subjectivity, which anticipates many of the theoretical inquiries of the nineteen-eighties. That wasn’t the only way Agee leaped forward to the future of writing; after about three hundred pages, he breaks into feverish personal narrative. He hits the road in a car, and experiences the terrible heat of a small Southern town in the summer. He wanders around lusting after a whore, almost gets into a fight with some snickering boys at a lunch counter, and, in general, goes from caring about everything to caring about nothing. In these passages, he anticipates the strategies of selfacknowledgment that became commonplace thirty years later in the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Mailer: the writer is not some impersonal conveyor of data but a fallible instrument of experience, including his own. Settling down again at the Gudgers’, he takes off his clothes and attempts to sleep:

The pillow was hard, thin, and noisy, and smelled as of acid and new blood; the pillowcase seemed to crawl at my cheek. I touched it with my lips; it felt a little as if it would thaw like spun candy. There was an odor something like that of old moist stacks of newspaper. I tried to imagine intercourse in this bed; I managed to imagine it fairly well. I began to feel sharp little piercings and crawlings all along the surface of my body. I was not surprised; I had heard that pine is full of them anyhow.

He walks out of the house naked, stares at the sky, goes back in, covers himself hand and foot against the bedbugs, and tries again. He can’t sleep, but knows a rare moment of happiness—the happiness of justification. “My senses were taking in nothing but a deep-night, unmeditatable consciousness of a world which was newly touched and beautiful to me, and I must admit that even in the vermin there was a certain amount of pleasure: and that, exhausted though I now was, it was the eagerness of my senses quite as fully as the bugs and the itching which made it impossible for me to sleep.” And there, in his uneasy bed, the Gudgers, as they rose for another day of backbreaking labor, found him—their recording angel, ready to observe and write again. ♦

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He achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.

These words by James Agee about D. W. Griffith are almost by definition the highest praise any film director has ever received from a great film critic. On the other hand, the equally distinguished critic Andrew Sarris wrote about Griffith's masterpiece: "Classic or not, 'Birth of a Nation' has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can't be ignored...and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word."

Here are two more quotations about the film:

"It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." -- President Woodrow Wilson, allegedly after seeing it at a White House screening. The words are quoted onscreen at the beginning of most prints of the film

"...the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."--Letter from J. M. Tumulty, secretary to President Wilson, to the Boston branch of the NAACP, which protested against the film's blackface villains and heroic Ku Klux Klanners.

Nobody seems to know the source of the Wilson quote, which is cited in every discussion of the film. Not dear Lillian Gish , whose "The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me" is a touchingly affectionate and yet clear-eyed memoir a man she always called "Mister" and clearly loved. And not Richard Schickel, whose "D. W. Griffith: An American Life" is a great biography. Certainly the quote is suspiciously similar to Coleridge's famous comment about the acting of Edmund Kean ("like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”).

My guess is that Wilson said something like it in private, and found it prudent to deny when progressive editorialists attacked the film. Certainly "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet.

Cited until the 1960s as the greatest American film, " Birth " is still praised as influential, ground-breaking and historically important, yes--but is it actually seen? Despite the release of an excellent DVD restoration from Kino, it is all but unwatched. More people may have seen Griffith's "Intolerance" (1916), made in atonement after the protests against "Birth." It says something about my own conflicted state of mind that I included Griffith's " Broken Blossoms " (1919) in the first Great Movies collection, but have only now arrived at "Birth of a Nation." I was avoiding it.

But it is an unavoidable fact of American movie history, and must be dealt with, so allow me to rewind to a different quote from James Agee: "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, but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like..."

I have just looked at the battle charge again, having recently endured the pallid pieties of the pedestrian Civil War epic " Gods and Generals ," and I agree with Agee. Griffith demonstrated to every filmmaker and moviegoer who followed him what a movie was, and what a movie could be. That this achievement was made in a film marred by racism should not be surprising. As a nation once able to reconcile democracy with slavery, America has a stain on its soul; to understand our history we must begin with the contradiction that the Founding Fathers believed all men (except black men) were created equal.

Griffith will probably never lose his place in the pantheon, but there will always be the blot of the later scenes of “Birth of a Nation.” It is a stark history lesson to realize that this film, for many years the most popular ever made, expressed widely-held and generally acceptable white views. Miss Gish reveals more than she realizes when she quotes Griffith's paternalistic reply to accusations that he was anti-Negro: "To say that is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives."

Griffith and "The Birth of a Nation" were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all. That is worth knowing. Blacks already knew that, had known it for a long time, witnessed it painfully again every day, but "The Birth of a Nation" demonstrated it in clear view, and the importance of the film includes the clarity of its demonstration. That it is a mirror of its time is, sadly, one of its values.

To understand "The Birth of a Nation" we must first understand the difference between what we bring to the film, and what the film brings to us. All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. "The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.

But it is possible to separate the content from the craft? Garry Wills observes that Griffith's film "raises the same questions that Leni Riefenstahl's films do, or Ezra Pound's poems. If art should serve beauty and truth, how can great art be in the thrall of hateful ideologies?"

The crucial assumption here is that art should serve beauty and truth. I would like to think it should, but there is art that serves neither, and yet provides an insight into human nature, helping us understand good and evil. In that case, "The Birth of a Nation" is worth considering, if only for the inescapable fact that it did more than any other work of art to dramatize and encourage racist attitudes in America. (The contemporary works that made the most useful statements against racism were “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and "Huckleberry Finn.")

Racism of the sort seen in "The Birth of a Nation" has not been acceptable for decades in American popular culture. Modern films make racism invisible, curable, an attribute of villains, or the occasion for optimistic morality plays. "Birth of a Nation" is unapologetic about its attitudes, which are those of a white Southerner, raised in the 19th century, unable to see African-Americans as fellow beings of worth and rights. It is based on Thomas Dixon's racist play, The Clansman, and the fact that Griffith wanted to adapt it reveals his own prejudices.

Griffith, for example, was criticized for using white actors in blackface to portray his black villains. There are bizarre shots where a blackface character acts in the foreground while real African-Americans labor in the fields behind him. His excuse, as relayed by Miss Gish: "There were scarcely any Negro actors on the Coast" and "Mr. Griffith was accustomed to working with actors he had trained." But of course there were no Negro actors, because blackface whites were always used, and that also explains why he did not need to train any.

Griffith's blindness to the paradox in his own statement is illuminating. His blackface actors tell us more about his attitude toward those characters than black actors ever could have. Consider the fact that the blackface is obvious; the makeup is not as good as it could have been. That makes its own point: Black actors could not have been used in such sexually-charged scenes, even if Griffith had wanted to, because white audiences would not have accepted them. Griffith wanted his audience to notice the blackface.

Some of the film's most objectionable scenes show the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of a white family trapped in a cabin by sexually predatory blacks and their white manipulators. These scenes are credited with the revival of the popularity of the Klan, which was all but extinct when the movie appeared. Watching them today, we are appalled. But audiences in 1915 were witnessing the invention of intercutting in a chase scene. Nothing like it had ever been seen before: Parallel action building to a suspense climax. Do you think they were thinking about blackface? They were thrilled out of their minds.

Today, what they saw for the first time, we cannot see at all. Griffith assembled and perfected the early discoveries of film language, and his cinematic techniques that have influenced the visual strategies of virtually every film made since; they have become so familiar we are not even aware of them. We, on the other hand, are astonished by racist attitudes that were equally invisible to most white audiences in 1915. What are those techniques? They begin at the level of film grammar. Silent films began with crude constructions designed to simply look at a story as it happened before the camera. Griffith, in his short films and features, invented or incorporated anything that seemed to work to expand that vision. He did not create the language of cinema so much as codify and demonstrate it, so that after him it became conventional for directors to tell a scene by cutting between wide (or "establishing") shots and various medium shots, closeups, and inserts of details. The first closeup must have come as an alarming surprise for its audiences; Griffith made them and other kinds of shots indispensable for telling a story.

In his valuable book On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell observes that Griffith "is usually credited with perfecting the enduring artistic resources of the story film." Bordwell has some quarrels with that widely-accepted basic version of film history, but Bordwell lists Griffith's innovations, and observes that the film "is often considered cinema's first masterpiece."

One of Griffith's key contributions was his pioneering use of cross-cutting to follow parallel lines of action. A naive audience might have been baffled by a film that showed first one group of characters, then another, then the first again. From Griffith's success in using this technique comes the chase scene and many other modern narrative approaches. The critic Tim Dirks adds to cross-cutting no less than 16 other ways in which Griffith was an innovator, ranging from his night photography to his use of the iris shot and color tinting.

Certainly "Birth of a Nation" is a film of great visual beauty and narrative power. It tells the story of the Civil War through the experiences of families from both North and South, shows the flowing of their friendship, shows them made enemies as the nation was divided, and in a battlefield scene has the sons of both families dying almost simultaneously. It is unparalleled in its recreations of actual battles on realistic locations; the action in some scenes reaches for miles. For audiences at the time there would have been great interest in Griffith's attempts to reproduce historic incidents, such as the assassination of Lincoln, with exacting accuracy. His recreation of Sherman's march through Georgia is so bloody and merciless that it awakened Southern passions all over again.

The human stories of the leading characters have the sentiment and human detail we would expect of a leading silent filmmaker, and the action scenes are filmed with a fluid ease that seems astonishing compared to other films of the time. Griffith uses elevated shots to provide a high-angle view of the battlefields, and cuts between parallel actions to make the battles comprehensible; they are not simply big tableaux of action.

Yet when it comes to his version of the Reconstruction era, he tells the story of the liberation of the slaves and its aftermath through the eyes of a Southerner who cannot view African-Americans as possible partners in American civilization. In the first half of the film the black characters are mostly ignored in the background. In the second half, Griffith dramatizes material in which white women are seen as the prey of lustful freed slaves, often urged on by evil white Northern carpetbaggers whose goal is to destroy and loot the South. The most exciting and technically accomplished sequence in the second half of the film is also the most disturbing, as a white family is under siege in a log cabin, attacked by blacks and their white exploiters, while the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue.

Meanwhile, Elsie (Lillian Gish), the daughter of the abolitionist Senator Stoneman, fights off a sexual assault by Stoneman's mulatto servant Lynch. Stoneman has earlier told Lynch "you are the equal of any man here." Returning home, he is told by Lynch, "I want to marry a white woman," and pats him approvingly on the shoulder. But when he is told his daughter Elsie is the woman Lynch has in mind, Stoneman turns violent toward him--Griffith's way of showing that the abolitionists and carpetbaggers lied to the freed slaves, to manipulate them for greed and gain.

The long third act of the film is where the most offensive racism resides. There is no denying the effectiveness of the first two acts. The first establishes a bucolic, idealistic view of America before the Civil War, with the implication that the North should have left well enough alone. The second involves unparalleled scenes of the war itself, which seem informed by the photographs of Matthew Brady and have an powerful realism and conviction.

Griffith has a sure hand in the way he cuts from epic shots of enormous scope to small human vignettes. He was the first director to understand instinctively how a movie could mimic the human ability to scan an event quickly, noting details in the midst of the larger picture. Many silent films moved slowly, as if afraid to get ahead of their audiences; Griffith springs forward eagerly, and the impact on his audiences was unprecedented; they were learning for the first time what a movie was capable of.

As slavery is the great sin of America, so "The Birth of a Nation" is Griffith's sin, for which he tried to atone all the rest of his life. So instinctive were the prejudices he was raised with as a 19th century Southerner that the offenses in his film actually had to be explained to him. To his credit, his next film, "Intolerance," was an attempt at apology. He also once edited a version of the film that cut out all of the Klan material, but that is not the answer. If we are to see this film, we must see it all, and deal with it all.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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190 minutes

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When Chaplin Became the Enemy

By J. Hoberman

June 8, 2008

ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world’s most beloved clown became his adopted land’s most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux, a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.

“Monsieur Verdoux,” opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is subtitled “A Comedy of Murders,” and, as the French critic André Bazin observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash. Condemned to death at the movie’s end, he declares his crimes paltry compared with those of Western civilization: “As a mass killer, I’m an amateur by comparison.”

Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one. As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in “The Great Dictator” (1940), he would now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he feared would follow. “Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy,” Chaplin told an interviewer. “Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business.” But “Monsieur Verdoux” was also the logical result of Chaplin’s feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a man.

Although enormously popular, “The Great Dictator” had not been without controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate floor. The stormier reception for “Monsieur Verdoux” reflected both the film’s content and the filmmaker’s character.

Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals in the form of a sensational paternity suit and political sympathies. For some the two were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat, denounced Chaplin as a Communist “notorious for his forcible seduction of white girls.” Even before “Monsieur Verdoux” opened in April 1947 the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: “You give me the material and I’ll blast.”

Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. But “Monsieur Verdoux” which was surely influenced by Brecht’s notions of social satire brought its own disaster.

To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.

At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel’s packed Grand Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime target of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s evolving investigation into Communism in Hollywood.

The next day “Monsieur Verdoux” received the worst notices of Chaplin’s career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and, per The New York Herald-Tribune, an “affront to the intelligence.” But the reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as “basically serious and bitter,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that “those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to weep.” For some, the film became a cause James Agee wrote a three-part defense in The Nation although it wasn’t much help that the most unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker (“a brilliant comedy whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples all over the world”).

“Monsieur Verdoux” lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin was demanding Chaplin’s deportation; expecting to be brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee’s chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. “It is against war and futile slaughter,” he wrote. “I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger.”

Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged a federal investigation into Chaplin’s political activities, the National Board of Review voted “Monsieur Verdoux” best picture of 1947.

For all its intellectual defenders, however, “Monsieur Verdoux” grossed a pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity crowds.

Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce “Dr. Strangelove” and with Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Chaplin’s dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of sick humor: “If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in ‘Monsieur Verdoux,’ today’s crowds may be too eager.”

While never enjoying the canonical status of “The Gold Rush” or “City Lights,” “Monsieur Verdoux” did rise in critical esteem over the course of a long and unpopular war. The movie’s fortunes have since faded, but, learning that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the film’s prescience, citing the government’s “murderous public policy” and the profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.

“Monsieur Verdoux” may once again be timely, but the audacity of its statement derives less from Chaplin’s antiwar polemic than from his antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing in socializing the Little Tramp. “By his very existence,” Bazin noted, Verdoux “renders society guilty.” Approaching eternity, the convicted killer subtly reverts to the Tramp’s distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this? In the movie’s ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, “They’re going to guillotine Charlie!”

J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.

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Comedy’s Greatest Era | by James Agee

November 17, 2019

The appearance of “Comedy’s Greatest Era” in Life maga zine, September 3, 1949, received one of the greatest responses in the magazine’s history. The surprising element was the reaction from people who could have seen few, if any, of the silent comedies, simply because they were too young. The article makes it possible for everyone to be nostalgic for something that perhaps they have never known.

by James Agee

In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the belly-laugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a belly-laugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. Then, after the shortest possible time out for recuperation, he would feel the first wicked tickling of the comedian’s whip once more and start up a new ladder.

The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has had that treatment. The best of comedies these days hand out plenty of titters and once in a while it is possible to achieve a yowl without overstraining. Even those who have never seen anything better must occasionally have the feeling, as they watch the current run or, rather, trickle of screen comedy, that they are having to make a little cause for laughter go an awfully long way. And anyone who has watched screen comedy over the past ten or fifteen years is bound to realize that it has quietly but steadily deteriorated. As for those happy atavists who remember silent comedy in its heyday and the belly-laughs and boffos that went with it, they have something close to an absolute standard by which to measure the deterioration.

When a modern comedian gets hit on the head, for example, the most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license, and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a kind of poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it—look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palms downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor, and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.

Startled by a cop, this same comedian might grab his hat-brim with both hands and yank it down over his ears, jump high in the air, come to earth in a split violent enough to telescope his spine, spring thence into a coattail-flattening sprint and dwindle at rocket speed to the size of a gnat along the grand, forlorn perspective of some lazy back boulevard.

Those are fine clichés from the language of silent comedy in its infancy. The man who could handle them properly combined several of the more difficult accomplishments of the acrobat, the dancer, the clown and the mime. Some very gifted comedians, unforgettably Ben Turpin, had an immense vocabulary of these clichés and were in part so lovable because they were deep conservative classicists and never tried to break away from them. The still more gifted men, of course, simplified and invented, finding out new and much deeper uses for the idiom. They learned to show emotion through it, and comic psychology, more eloquently than most language has ever managed to, and they discovered beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly beyond reach of words.

It is hard to find a theater these days where a comedy is playing; in the days of the silents it was equally hard to find a theater which was not showing one. The laughs today are pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short. They almost never build, as they used to, into something combining the jabbering frequency of a machine gun with the delirious momentum of a roller coaster. Saddest of all, there are few comedians now below middle age and there are none who seem to learn much from picture to picture, or to try anything new.

To put it unkindly, the only thing wrong with screen comedy today is that it takes place on a screen which talks. Because it talks, the only comedians who ever mastered the screen cannot work, for they cannot combine their comic style with talk. Because there is a screen, talking comedians are trapped into a continual exhibition of their inadequacy as screen comedians on a surface as big as the side of a barn.

At the moment, as for many years past, the chances to see silent comedy are rare. There is a smattering of it on television —too often treated as something quaintly archaic, to be laughed at, not with. Some two hundred comedies—long and short—can be rented for home projection. And a lucky minority has access to the comedies in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which is still incomplete but which is probably the best in the world. In the near future, however, something of this lost art will return to regular theaters. A thick straw in the wind is the big business now being done by a series of revivals of W. C. Fields’s memorable movies, a kind of comedy more akin to the old silent variety than anything which is being made today. Mack Sennett now is preparing a sort of pot-pourri variety show called Down Memory Lane made up out of his old movies, featuring people like Fields and Bing Crosby when they were movie beginners, but including also interludes from silents. Harold Lloyd has re-released Movie Crazy , a talkie, and plans to revive four of his best silent comedies ( Grandma’s Boy , Safety Last , Speedy and The Freshman). Buster Keaton hopes to remake at feature length, with a minimum of dialogue, two of the funniest short comedies ever made, one about a porous homemade boat and one about a prefabricated house.

Awaiting these happy events we will discuss here what has gone wrong with screen comedy and what, if anything, can be done about it. But mainly we will try to suggest what it was like in its glory in the years from 1912 to 1930, as practiced by the employees of Mack Sennett, the father of American screen comedy, and by the four most eminent masters: Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the late Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton.

Mack Sennett made two kinds of comedy: parody laced with slapstick, and plain slapstick. The parodies were the unceremonious burial of a century of hamming, including the new hamming in serious movies, and nobody who has missed Ben Turpin in A Small Town Idol , or kidding Erich von Stroheim in Three Foolish Weeks or as The Shriek of Araby, can imagine how rough parody can get and still remain subtle and roaringly funny. The plain slapstick, at its best, was even better: a profusion of hearty young women in disconcerting bathing suits, frisking around with a gaggle of insanely incompetent policemen and of equally certifiable male civilians sporting museum-piece mustaches. All these people zipped and caromed about the pristine world of the screen as jazzily as a convention of water bugs. Words can hardly suggest how energetically they collided and bounced apart, meeting in full gallop around the corner of a house; how hard and how often they fell on their backsides; or with what fantastically adroit clumsiness they got themselves fouled up in folding ladders, garden hoses, tethered animals and each other’s headlong cross-purposes. The gestures were ferociously emphatic; not a line or motion of the body was wasted or inarticulate. The reader may remember how splendidly upright wandlike old Ben Turpin could stand for a Renunciation Scene, with his lampshade mustache twittering and his sparrowy chest stuck out and his head flung back like Paderewski assaulting a climax and the long babyish back hair trying to look lionlike, while his Adam’s apple, an orange in a Christmas stocking, pumped with noble emotion. Or huge Mack Swain, who looked like a hairy mushroom, rolling his eyes in a manner patented by French Romantics and gasping in some dubious ecstasy. Or Louise Fazenda, the perennial farmer’s daughter and the perfect low-comedy housemaid, primping her spit curl; and how her hair tightened a good-looking face into the incarnation of rampant gullibility. Or snouty James Finlayson, gleefully foreclosing a mortgage, with his look of eternally tasting a spoiled pickle. Or Chester Conklin, a myopic and inebriated little walrus stumbling around in outsize pants. Or Fatty Arbuckle, with his cold eye and his loose, serene smile, his silky manipulation of his bulk and his satanic marksmanship with pies (he was ambidextrous and could simultaneously blind two people in opposite directions).

The intimate tastes and secret hopes of these poor ineligible dunces were ruthlessly exposed whenever a hot stove, an electric fan or a bulldog took a dislike to their outer garments: agonizingly elaborate drawers, worked up on some lonely evening out of some Godforsaken lace curtain; or men’s underpants with big round black spots on them. The Sennett sets—delirious wallpaper, megalomaniacally scrolled iron beds, Grand Rapids in extremis —outdid even the underwear. It was their business, after all, to kid the squalid braggadocio which infested the domestic interiors of the period, and that was almost beyond parody. These comedies told their stories to the unaided eye, and by every means possible they screamed to it. That is one reason for the India-ink silhouettes of the cops, and for convicts and prison bars and their shadows in hard sunlight, and for barefooted husbands, in tigerish pajamas, reacting like dervishes to stepped-on tacks.

The early silent comedians never strove for or consciously thought of anything which could be called artistic “form,” but they achieved it. For Sennett’s rival, Hal Roach, Leo McCarey once devoted almost the whole of a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler to pie-throwing. The first pies were thrown thoughtfully, almost philosophically. Then innocent bystanders began to get caught into the vortex. At full pitch it was Armageddon. But everything was calculated so nicely that until late in the picture, when havoc took over, every pie made its special kind of point and piled on its special kind of laugh.

Sennett’s comedies were just a shade faster and fizzier than life. According to legend (and according to Sennett) he discovered the sped tempo proper to screen comedy when a green cameraman, trying to save money, cranked too slow.* Realizing the tremendous drumlike power of mere motion to exhilarate, he gave inanimate objects a mischievous life of their own, broke every law of nature the tricked camera would serve him for and made the screen dance like a witches’ Sabbath. The thing one is surest of all to remember is how toward the end of nearly every Sennett comedy, a chase (usually called the “rally”) built up such a majestic trajectory of pure anarchic motion that bathing girls, cops, comics, dogs, cats, babies, automobiles, locomotives, innocent bystanders, sometimes what seemed like a whole city, an entire civilization, were hauled along head over heels in the wake of that energy like dry leaves following an express train.

“Nice” people, who shunned all movies in the early days, condemned the Sennett comedies as vulgar and naive. But millions of less pretentious people loved their sincerity and sweetness, their wild-animal innocence and glorious vitality. They could not put these feelings into words, but they flocked to the silents. The reader who gets back deep enough into that world will probably even remember the theater: the barefaced honky-tonk and the waltzes by Waldteufel, slammed out on a mechanical piano; the searing redolence of peanuts and demirep perfumery, tobacco and feet and sweat; the laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall.

Sennett wheedled his first financing out of a couple of ex-bookies to whom he was already in debt. He took his comics out of music halls, burlesque, vaudeville, circuses and limbo, and through them he tapped in on that great pipeline of horsing and miming which runs back unbroken through the fairs of the Middle Ages at least to ancient Greece. He added all that he himself had learned about the large and spurious gesture, the late decadence of the Grand Manner, as a stage-struck boy in East Berlin, Connecticut, and as a frustrated opera singer and actor. The only thing he claims to have invented is the pie in the face, and he insists, “Anyone who tells you he has discovered something new is a fool or a liar or both.”

The silent-comedy studio was about the best training school the movies have ever known, and the Sennett studio was about as free and easy and as fecund of talent as they came. All the major comedians we will mention worked there, at least briefly. So did some of the major stars of the twenties and since—notably Gloria Swanson, Phyllis Haver, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler and Carole Lombard. Directors Frank Capra, Leo McCarey and George Stevens also got their start in silent comedy; much that remains most flexible, spontaneous and visually alive in sound movies can be traced, through them and others, to this silent apprenticeship. Everybody did pretty much as he pleased on the Sennett lot, and everybody’s ideas were welcome. Sennett posted no rules, and the only thing he strictly forbade was liquor. A Sennett story conference was a most informal affair. During the early years, at least, only the most important scenario might be jotted on the back of an envelope. Mainly Sennett’s men thrashed out a few primary ideas and carried them in their heads, sure the better stuff would turn up while they were shooting, in the heat of physical action. This put quite a load on the prop man; he had to have the most improbable apparatus on hand—bombs, trick telephones, what not—to implement whatever idea might suddenly turn up. All kinds of things did—and were recklessly used. Once a low-comedy auto got out of control and killed the cameraman, but he was not visible in the shot, which was thrilling and undamaged; the audience never knew the difference.

Sennett used to hire a “wild man” to sit in on his gag conferences, whose whole job was to think up “wildies.” Usually he was an all but brainless, speechless man, scarcely able to communicate his idea; but he had a totally uninhibited imagination. He might say nothing for an hour; then he’d mutter “You take …” and all the relatively rational others would shut up and wait. “You take this cloud . . .’’ he would get out, sketching vague shapes in the air. Often he could get no further; but thanks to some kind of thought-transference, saner men would take this cloud and make something of it. The wild man seems in fact to have functioned as the group’s subconscious mind, the source of all creative energy. His ideas were so weird and amorphous that Sennett can no longer remember a one of them, or even how it turned out after rational processing. But a fair equivalent might be one of the best comic sequences in a Laurel and Hardy picture. It is simple enough—simple and real, in fact, as a nightmare. Laurel and Hardy are trying to move a piano across a narrow suspension bridge. The bridge is slung over a sickening chasm, between a couple of Alps. Midway they meet a gorilla.

Had he done nothing else, Sennett would be remembered for giving a start to three of the four comedians who now began to apply their sharp individual talents to this newborn language. The one whom he did not train (he was on the lot briefly but Sennett barely remembers seeing him around) wore glasses, smiled a great deal and looked like the sort of eager young man who might have quit divinity school to hustle brushes. That was Harold Lloyd. The others were grotesque and poetic in their screen characters in degrees which appear to be impossible when the magic of silence is broken. One, who never smiled, carried a face as still and sad as a daguerreotype through some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying physical comedy ever invented. That was Buster Keaton. One looked like an elderly baby and, at times, a baby dope fiend; he could do more with less than any other comedian. That was Harry Langdon. One looked like Charlie Chaplin, and he was the first man to give the silent language a soul.

When Charlie Chaplin started to work for Sennett he had chiefly to reckon with Ford Sterling, the reigning comedian. Their first picture together amounted to a duel before the assembled professionals. Sterling, by no means untalented, was a big man with a florid Teutonic style which, under this special pressure, he turned on full blast. Chaplin defeated him within a few minutes with a wink of the mustache, a hitch of the trousers, a quirk of the little finger.

With Tillie’s Punctured Romance , in 1914, he became a major star. Soon after, he left Sennett when Sennett refused to start a landslide among the other comedians by meeting the raise Chaplin demanded. Sennett is understandably wry about it in retrospect, but he still says, “I was right at the time.” Of Chaplin he says simply, “Oh well, he’s just the greatest artist that ever lived.” None of Chaplin’s former rivals rate him much lower than that; they speak of him no more jealously than they might of God. We will try here only to suggest the essence of his supremacy. Of all comedians he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion. As for pure motion, even if he had never gone on to make his magnificent feature-length comedies, Chaplin would have made his period in movies a great one singlehanded even if he had made nothing except The Cure , or One A.M. In the latter, barring one immobile taxi driver, Chaplin plays alone, as a drunk trying to get upstairs and into bed. It is a sort of inspired elaboration on a soft-shoe dance, involving an angry stuffed wildcat, small rugs on slippery floors, a Lazy Susan table, exquisite footwork on a flight of stairs, a contretemps with a huge, ferocious pendulum and the funniest and most perverse Murphy bed in movie history—and, always made physically lucid, the delicately weird mental processes of a man ethereally sozzled.

Before Chaplin came to pictures people were content with a couple of gags per comedy; he got some kind of laugh every second. The minute he began to work he set standards—and continually forced them higher. Anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook trout in The Gold Rush , or embarrassed by a swallowed whistle in City Lights , has seen perfection. Most of the time, however, Chaplin got his laughter less from the gags, or from milking them in any ordinary sense, than through his genius for what may be called inflection —the perfect, changeful shading of his physical and emotional attitudes toward the gag. Funny as his bout with the Murphy bed is, the glances of awe, expostulation and helpless, almost whimpering desire for vengeance which he darts at this infernal machine are even better.

A painful and frequent error among tyros is breaking the comic line with a too-big laugh, then a letdown; or with a laugh which is out of key or irrelevant. The masters could ornament the main line beautifully; they never addled it. In A Night Out Chaplin, passed out, is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his coat by staggering Ben Turpin. His toes trail; he is as supine as a sled. Turpin himself is so drunk he can hardly drag him. Chaplin comes quietly to, realizes how well he is being served by his struggling pal, and with a royally delicate gesture plucks and savors a flower.

The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplin’s work. He could probably pantomime Bryce’s The American Commonwealth without ever blurring a syllable and make it paralyzingly funny into the bargain. At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.

Harold Lloyd worked only a little while with Sennett. During most of his career he acted for another major comedy producer, Hal Roach. He tried at first to offset Chaplin’s influence and establish his own individuality by playing Chaplin’s exact opposite, a character named Lonesome Luke who wore clothes much too small for him and whose gestures were likewise as unChaplinesque as possible. But he soon realized that an opposite in itself was a kind of slavishness. He discovered his own comic identity when he saw a movie about a fighting parson: a hero who wore glasses. He began to think about those glasses day and night. He decided on horn rims because they were youthful, ultravisible on the screen and on the verge of becoming fashionable (he was to make them so). Around these large lensless horn rims he began to develop a new character, nothing grotesque or eccentric, but a fresh, believable young man who could fit into a wide variety of stories.

Lloyd depended more on story and situation than any of the other major comedians (he kept the best stable of gagmen in Hollywood, at one time hiring six); but unlike most “story” comedians he was also a very funny man from inside. He had, as he has written, “an unusually large comic vocabulary.” More particularly he had an expertly expressive body and even more expressive teeth, and out of his thesaurus of smiles he could at a moment’s notice blend prissiness, breeziness and asininity, and still remain tremendously likable. His movies were more extroverted and closer to ordinary life than any others of the best comedies: the vicissitudes of a New York taxi driver; the unaccepted college boy who, by desperate courage and inspired ineptitude, wins the Big Game. He was especially good at putting a very timid, spoiled or brassy young fellow through devastating embarrassments. He went through one of his most uproarious Gethsemanes as a shy country youth courting the nicest girl in town in Grandma’s Boy. He arrived dressed “strictly up to date for the Spring of 1862,” as a subtitle observed, and found that the ancient colored butler wore a similar flowered waistcoat and moldering cutaway. He got one wandering, nervous forefinger dreadfully stuck in a fancy little vase. The girl began cheerfully to try to identify that queer smell which dilated from him; Grandpa’s best suit was rife with mothballs. A tenacious litter of kittens feasted off die goose grease on his home-shined shoes.

Lloyd was even better at the comedy of thrills. In Safety Last , as a rank amateur, he is forced to substitute for a human fly and to climb a medium-sized skyscraper. Dozens of awful things happen to him. He gets fouled up in a tennis net. Popcorn falls on him from a window above, and die local pigeons treat him like a cross between a lunch wagon and St. Francis of Assisi. A mouse runs up his britches-leg, and the crowd below salutes his desperate dance on the window ledge with wild applause of the daredevil. A good deal of this full-length picture hangs thus by its eyelashes along the face of a building. Each new floor is like a new stanza in a poem; and the higher and more horrifying it gets, the funnier it gets.

In this movie Lloyd demonstrates beautifully his ability to do more than merely milk a gag, but to top it. (In an old, simple example of topping, an incredible number of tall men get, one by one, out of a small closed auto. After as many have clambered out as the joke will bear, one more steps out: a midget. That tops the gag. Then the auto collapses. That tops the topper.) In Safety Last Lloyd is driven out to the dirty end of a flagpole by a furious dog; the pole breaks and he falls, just managing to grab the minute hand of a huge clock. His weight promptly pulls the hand down from IX to VI. That would be more than enough for any ordinary comedian, but there is further logic in the situation. Now, hideously, the whole clockface pulls loose and slants from its trembling springs above the street. Getting out of difficulty with the clock, he makes still further use of the instrument by getting one foot caught in one of these obstinate springs.

A proper delaying of the ultrapredictable can of course be just as funny as a properly timed explosion of the unexpected. As Lloyd approaches the end of his horrible hegira up the side of the building in Safety Last , it becomes clear to the audience, but not to him, that if he raises his head another couple of inches he is going to get murderously conked by one of the four arms of a revolving wind gauge. He delays the evil moment almost interminably, with one distraction and another, and every delay is a suspense-tightening laugh; he also gets his foot nicely entangled in a rope, so that when he does get hit, the payoff of one gag sends him careening head downward through the abyss into another. Lloyd was outstanding even among the master craftsmen at setting up a gag clearly, culminating and getting out of it deftly, and linking it smoothly to the next. Harsh experience also taught him a deep and fundamental rule: never try to get “above” the audience.

Lloyd tried it in The Freshman. He was to wear an unfinished, basted-together tuxedo to a college party, and it would gradually fall apart as he danced. Lloyd decided to skip the pants, a low-comedy cliché, and lose just the coat. His gagmen warned him. A preview proved how right they were. Lloyd had to reshoot the whole expensive sequence, build it around defective pants and climax it with the inevitable. It was one of the funniest things he ever did.

When Lloyd was still a very young man he lost about half his right hand (and nearly lost his sight) when a comedy bomb exploded prematurely. But in spite of his artificially built-out hand he continued to do his own dirty work, like all of the best comedians. The side of the building he climbed in Safety Last did not overhang the street, as it appears to. But the nearest landing place was a roof three floors below him, as he approached the top, and he did everything, of course, the hard way, that is, the comic way, keeping his bottom stuck well out, his shoulders hunched, his hands and feet skidding over perdition.

If great comedy must involve something beyond laughter, Lloyd was not a great comedian. If plain laughter is any criterion—and it is a healthy counterbalance to the other—few people have equaled him, and nobody has ever beaten him.

Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd were all more like each other, in one important way, than Harry Langdon was like any of them. Whatever else the others might be doing, they all used more or less elaborate physical comedy; Langdon showed how little of that one might use and still be a great silent-screen comedian. In his screen character he symbolized something as deeply and centrally human, though by no means as rangily so, as the Tramp. There was, of course, an immense difference in inventiveness and range of virtuosity. It seemed as if Chaplin could do literally anything, on any instrument in the orchestra. Langdon had one queerly toned, unique little reed. But out of it he could get incredible melodies.

Like Chaplin, Langdon wore a coat which buttoned on his wishbone and swung out wide below, but the effect was very different: he seemed like an outsized baby who had begun to outgrow his clothes. The crown of his hat was rounded and the brim was turned up all around, like a little boy’s hat, and he looked as if he wore diapers under his pants. His walk was that of a child which has just gotten sure on its feet, and his body and hands fitted that age. His face was kept pale to show off, with the simplicity of a nursery-school drawing, the bright, ignorant, gentle eyes and the little twirling mouth. He had big moon cheeks, with dimples, and a Napoleonic forelock of mousy hair; the round, docile head seemed large in ratio to the cream-puff body. Twitchings of his face were signals of tiny discomforts too slowly registered by a tinier brain; quick, squirty little smiles showed his almost prehuman pleasures, his incurably premature trustfulness. He was a virtuoso of hesitations and of delicately indecisive motions, and he was particularly fine in a high wind, rounding a corner with a kind of skittering toddle, both hands nursing his hatbrim.

He was as remarkable a master as Chaplin of subtle emotional and mental process and operated much more at leisure. He once got a good three hundred feet of continuously bigger laughs out of rubbing his chest, in a crowded vehicle, with Limburger cheese, under the misapprehension that it was a cold salve. In another long scene, watching a brazen showgirl change her clothes, he sat motionless, back to the camera, and registered the whole lexicon of lost innocence, shock, disapproval and disgust, with the back of his neck. His scenes with women were nearly always something special. Once a lady spy did everything in her power (under the Hays Office) to seduce him. Harry was polite, willing, even flirtatious in his little way. The only trouble was that he couldn’t imagine what in the world she was leering and pawing at him for, and that he was terribly ticklish. The Mata Hari wound up foaming at the mouth.

There was also a sinister flicker of depravity about the Langdon character, all the more disturbing because babies are premoral. He had an instinct for bringing his actual adulthood and figurative babyishness into frictions as crawley as a fingernail on a slate blackboard, and he wandered into areas of strangeness which were beyond the other comedians. In a nightmare in one movie he was forced to fight a large, muscular young man; the girl Harry loved was the prize. The young man was a good boxer; Harry could scarcely lift his gloves. The contest took place in a fiercely lighted prize ring, in a prodigious pitch-dark arena. The only spectator was the girl, and she was rooting against Harry. As the fight went on, her eyes glittered ever more brightly with blood lust and, with glittering teeth, she tore her big straw hat to shreds.

Langdon came to Sennett from a vaudeville act in which he had fought a losing battle with a recalcitrant automobile. The minute Frank Capra saw him he begged Sennett to let him work with him. Langdon was almost as childlike as the character he played. He had only a vague idea of his story or even of each scene as he played it; each time he went before the camera Capra would brief him on the general situation and then, as this finest of intuitive improvisers once tried to explain his work, “I’d go into my routine.” The whole tragedy of the coming of dialogue, as far as these comedians were concerned and one reason for the increasing rigidity of comedy every since—can be epitomized in the mere thought of Harry Langdon confronted with a script.

Langdon’s magic was in his innocence, and Capra took beautiful care not to meddle with it. The key to the proper use of Langdon, Capra always knew, was “the principle of the brick.” “If there was a rule for writing Langdon material,” he explains, “it was this: his only ally was God. Langdon might be saved by the brick falling on the cop, but it was verboten that he in any way motivate the brick’s fall.” Langdon became quickly and fantastically popular with three pictures, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp , The Strong Man and Long Pants ; from then on he went downhill even faster. “The trouble was,” Capra says, “that high-brow critics came around to explain his art to him. Also he developed an interest in dames. It was a pretty high life for such a little fellow.” Langdon made two more pictures with high-brow writers, one of which (Three’s A Crowd) had some wonderful passages in it, including the prize-ring nightmare; then First National canceled his contract. He was reduced to mediocre roles and two-reelers which were more rehashes of his old gags; this time around they no longer seemed funny. “He never did really understand what hit him,” says Capra. “He died broke [in 1944]. And he died of a broken heart. He was the most tragic figure I ever came across in show business.”

Buster Keaton started work at the age of three and one-half with his parents in one of the roughest acts in vaudeville (“The Three Keatons”); Harry Houdini gave the child the name Buster in admiration for a fall he took down a flight of stairs. In his first movies Keaton teamed with Fatty Arbuckle under Sennett. He went on to become one of Metro’s biggest stars and earners; a Keaton feature cost about $200,000 to make and reliably grossed $2,000,000. Very early in his movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

No other comedian could do as much with the dead pan. 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. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue. His short-legged body was all sudden, machinelike angles, governed by a daft aplomb. When he swept a semaphore-like arm to point, you could almost hear the electrical impulse in the signal block. When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jogtrot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint—always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face—were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift.

Keaton was a wonderfully resourceful inventor of mechanistic gags (he still spends much of his time fooling with Erector sets); as he ran afoul of locomotives, steamships, prefabricated and over-electrified houses, he put himself through some of the hardest and cleverest punishment ever designed for laughs. In Sherlock Jr :, boiling along on the handlebars of a motorcycle quite unaware that he has lost his driver, Keaton whips through city traffic, breaks up a tug-of-war, gets a shovelful of dirt in the face from each of a long line of Rockette-timed ditch-diggers, approaches a log at high speed which is hinged open by dynamite precisely soon enough to let him through and, hitting an obstruction, leaves the handlebars like an arrow leaving a bow, whams through the window of a shack in which the heroine is about to be violated, and hits the heavy feet-first, knocking him through the opposite wall. The whole sequence is as clean in motion as the trajectory of a bullet.

Much of the charm and edge of Keaton’s comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as dead-pan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies—the negatives of which have been lost—were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because “dry” comedy is so much more rare and odd than “dry” vat, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

As soon as the screen began to talk, silent comedy was pretty well finished. The hardy and prolific Mack Sennett made the transfer; he was the first man to put Bing Crosby and W. C. Fields on the screen. But he was essentially a silent-picture man, and by the time the Academy awarded him a special Oscar for his “lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen” (in 1938), he was no longer active. As for the comedians we have spoken of in particular, they were as badly off as fine dancers suddenly required to appear in plays.

Harold Lloyd, whose work was most nearly realistic, naturally coped least unhappily with the added realism of speech; he made several talking comedies. But good as the best were, they were not so good as his silent work, and by the late thirties he quit acting. A few years ago he returned to play the lead (and play it beautifully) in Preston Sturges’s The Sin of Harold Diddlebock , but this exceptional picture—which opened, brilliantly, with the closing reel of Lloyd’s The Freshman —has not yet been generally released.

Like Chaplin, Lloyd was careful of his money; he is still rich and active. Last June, in the presence of President Truman, he became Imperial Potentate of the A.A.O.N.M.S. (Shriners). Harry Langdon, as we have said, was a broken man when sound came in.

Up to the middle thirties Buster Keaton made several feature-length pictures (with such players as Jimmy Durante, Wallace Beery and Robert Montgomery); he also made a couple of dozen talking shorts. Now and again he managed to get loose into motion, without having to talk, and for a moment or so the screen would start singing again. But his dark, dead voice, though it was in keeping with the visual character, tore his intensely silent style to bits and destroyed the illusion within which he worked. He gallantly and correctly refuses to regard himself as “retired.” Besides occasional bits, spots and minor roles in Hollywood pictures, he has worked on summer stages, made talking comedies in France and Mexico and clowned in a French circus. This summer he has played the straw hats in Three Men on a Horse. He is planning a television program. He also has a working agreement with Metro. One of his jobs there is to construct comedy sequences for Red Skelton.

The only man who really survived the flood was Chaplin, the only one who was rich, proud and popular enough to afford to stay silent. He brought out two of his greatest nontalking comedies, City Lights and Modern Times , in the middle of an avalanche of talk, spoke gibberish and, in the closing moments, plain English in The Great Dictator , and at last made an all-talking picture, Monsieur Verdoux , creating for that purpose an entirely new character who might properly talk a blue streak. Verdoux is the greatest of talking comedies though so cold and savage that it had to find its public in grimly experienced Europe.

Good comedy, and some that was better than good, outlived silence, but there has been less and less of it. The talkies brought one great comedian, the late, majestically lethargic W. C. Fields, who could not possibly have worked as well in silence; he was the toughest and the most warmly human of all screen comedians, and It’s A Gift and The Bank Dick , fiendishly funny and incisive white-collar comedies, rank high among the best comedies (and best movies) ever made. Laurel and Hardy, the only comedians who managed to preserve much of the large, low style of silence and who began to explore the comedy of sound, have made nothing since 1945. Walt Disney, at his best an inspired comic inventor and teller of fairy stories, lost his stride during the war and has since regained it only at moments. Preston Sturges has made brilliant, satirical comedies, but his pictures are smart, nervous comedy-dramas merely italicized with slapstick. The Marx Brothers were sidesplitters but they made their best comedies years ago. Jimmy Durante is mainly a nightclub genius; Abbott and Costello are semi-skilled laborers, at best; Bob Hope is a good radio comedian with a pleasing presence, but not much more, on the screen.

There is no hope that screen comedy will get much better than it is without new, gifted young comedians who really belong in movies, and without freedom for their experiments. For everyone who may appear we have one last, invidious comparison to otter as a guidepost.

One of the most popular recent comedies is Bob Hope’s The Paleface. We take no pleasure in blackening The Paleface ; we single it out, rather, because it is as good as we’ve got. Anything that is said of it here could be said, with interest, of other comedies of our time. Most of the laughs in The Paleface are verbal. Bob Hope is very adroit with his lines and now and then, when the words don’t get in the way, he makes a good beginning as a visual comedian. But only the beginning, never the middle or the end. He is funny, for instance, reacting to a shot of violent whisky. But he does not know how to get still funnier (i.g., how to build and milk) or how to be funniest last (i.e., how to top or cap his gag). The camera has to fade out on the same old face he started with.

One sequence is promisingly set up for visual comedy. In it, Hope and a lethal local boy stalk each other all over a cow town through streets which have been emptied in fear of their duel. The gag here is that through accident and stupidity they keep just failing to find each other. Some of it is quite funny. But die fun slackens between laughs like a weak clothesline, and by all the logic of humor (which is ruthlessly logical) the biggest laugh should come at the moment, and through the way, they finally spot each other. The sequence is so weakly thought out that at that crucial moment the camera can’t afford to watch them; it switches to Jane Russell.

Now we turn to a masterpiece. In The Navigator Buster Keaton works with practically the same gag as Hope’s duel. Adrift on a ship which he believes is otherwise empty, he drops a lighted cigarette. A girl finds it. She calls out and he hears her; each then tries to find the other. First each walks purposefully down the long, vacant starboard deck, the girl, then Keaton, turning the corner just in time not to see each other. Next time around each of them is trotting briskly, very much in earnest; going at the same pace, they miss each other just the same. Next time around each of them is going like a bat out of hell. Again they miss. Then the camera withdraws to a point of vantage at the stern, leans its chin in its hand and just watches the whole intricate super structure of the ship as the protagonists stroll, steal and scuttle from level to level, up, down and sidewise, always managing to miss each other by hair’s-breadths, in an enchantingly neat and elaborate piece of timing. There are no subsidiary gags to get laughs in this sequence and there is little loud laughter; merely a quiet and steadily increasing kind of delight. When Keaton has got all he can out of this fine modification of the movie chase he invents a fine device to bring the two together: the girl, thoroughly winded, sits down for a breather, indoors, on a plank which workmen have left across sawhorses. Keaton pauses on an upper deck, equally winded and puzzled. What follows happens in a couple of seconds at most: air suction whips his silk topper backward down a ventilator; grabbing frantically for it, he backs against the lip of the ventilator, jacknifes and falls in backward. Instantly the camera cuts back to the girl. A topper falls through the ceiling and lands tidily, right side up, on the plank beside her. Before she can look more than startled, its owner follows, head between his knees, crushes the topper, breaks the plank with the point of his spine and proceeds to the floor. The breaking of the plank smacks Boy and Girl together.

It is only fair to remember that the silent comedians would have as hard a time playing a talking scene as Hope has playing his visual ones, and that writing and directing are as accountable for the failure as Hope himself. But not even the humblest journeymen of the silent years would have let themselves off so easily. Like the masters, they knew, and sweated to obey, the laws of their craft.

* Silent comedy was shot at 12 to 16 frames per second and was speeded up by being shown at 16 frames per second, the usual rate of theater projectors at that time. Theater projectors today run at 24, which makes modern film taken at the same speed seem smooth and natural. But it makes silent movies fast and jerky.

Life magazine , September 3, 1949

More: Buster Keaton , Charlie Chaplin , Harold Lloyd , Harry Langdon , James Agee , Mack Sennett

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6 thoughts on “comedy’s greatest era | by james agee”.

The proofreader of this article was out to lunch.

Sure looks that way (“as the joke wall bear”?).

“Dry” vat is very rare and odd, indeed. Not as rare and odd as “dry” comedy, as Agee so astutely attests, but it is indeed rare. And odd.

Harry Langdon and Harold Lloyd but no Roscoe Arbuckle? Try again.

You’re a little late to make that suggestion: James Agee, author of this article, died in 1955.

Could you please post some more Agee reviews? Thank you.

Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Circus’: A Masterpiece of Melancholy and Mirth

Chaplin’s The Circus was released in 1928 when cinema was rocked by the sound revolution. It follows the stratospheric success of The Gold Rush (1925) but arrived during one of the artist’s toughest periods

Ennio Flaiano: Omaggio a Chaplin

Ho avuto stamane una lettera senza firma. L’anonimo si duole che all’omaggio a Charlie Chaplin, alla Fenice di Venezia, la sera del 3 settembre scorso, non fossero presenti molti registi e autori italiani.

John Huston: Undirectable Director | by James Agee

Of the directors whose work Agee most admired, John Huston was perhaps the one he was most personally drawn to. In the course of working on this article the two met for the first time. Subsequently they worked together on The African Queen.

Monsieur Verdoux | Review by James Agee

I think Monsieur Verdoux is one of the best movies ever made, easily the most exciting and most beautiful since Modern Times. I will add that I think most of the press on the picture, and on Chaplin, is beyond disgrace.

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Revisiting James Agee: Discovering the Original ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’

The discovery of the unpublished Fortune article that turned into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men helps us see the vivid power of this strange classic.

Malcolm Jones

Walker Evans/Library of Congress

If, like me, you were at some point in your life addicted to the work of James Agee, then your pulse must have raced a little when you heard the news recently that the original version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had at long last come to light.

Agee and the photographer Walker Evans traveled to Alabama in 1936 and spent much of that summer with three tenant farming families at the behest of Fortune magazine, where Agee was a staff writer. (Evans was at that time working as a photographer for the federal government and got a leave of absence to travel with Agee, which explains why a lot of the pictures he took on that trip later wound up as part of the Farm Security Administration archive in the Library of Congress.) The Fortune story never ran, but Agee kept working on the project, and in 1941 he and Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , a much enlarged and vastly more ambitious work that has over time become a classic if unclassifiable piece of American literature.

When Agee chose his book’s title from a passage in the Apocrypha, he was being ironic, since his subjects—Alabama tenant farmers—were not only not famous but ignored, neglected, marginalized, and scorned by the rest of the nation. But sometimes irony breeds upon itself, and this is one of those instances. Agee and Evans’s book only sold around 600 copies when it appeared in 1941, but over time it has established itself as a unique and enduring mashup of reporting, confession, and oracular prose that sometimes takes your breath away. In the process, the three families portrayed by Agee and Evans have indeed achieved not fame exactly but certainly a sort of iconic immortality. Along with the Depression victims photographed by Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and the other photographers working for the Farm Security Administration, they are who and what we think of when we call that era to mind.

I’ve worn out three copies, and I doubt my affection for this strange book is all that unique. I have also changed my mind about it as many times as I have read it. As a young man, I was completely under its spell. As the years past and my tastes changed, I came to hold it in a chillier regard, and there were times when I considered it one of the most self-indulgent train wrecks in the history of literature, worth saving only for Evans’s indelible photographs. To be fair, any prose would suffer in close comparison with those images, which look like nothing so much as something handed down by God. Rereading it now, I still find much of it hard to take, rather like a chocolate cake made entirely of icing. But when Agee stops going cosmic on you and gets down to describing the rudiments and fixtures of the lives of the farming families, it becomes an altogether different book—profound, illuminating, and unforgettable. I was shocked, this time around, to discover how many passages I had virtually committed to memory.

There might seem to be little left to learn about this oddball masterpiece. But recently archivists discovered among Agee’s papers the original 30,000-word story that he wrote for Fortune . Much shorter and a lot less ambitious than what would eventually become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , the manuscript, published jointly by The Baffler and Melville House as Cotton Tenants: Three Families , sheds considerable light on the origins of a classic. It may not be the Rosetta Stone, but it gives us at least a Point A from which we may gauge how far Agee traveled to create his finished book.

The early draft is mainly a sketch for the last two-thirds of Agee’s ultimate text, the part devoted to a minute dissection of various aspects of tenant life, including money, shelter, clothing, education, and work. As a magazine feature, it fails by any conventional standard, and failed by Agee’s standards as well, apparently. “The trip was very hard, and certainly one of the best things I’ve ever had happen to me,” he wrote to a friend after he returned to New York in the fall of 1936. “Writing what we found is a different matter. Impossible in any form and length Fortune can use; and I am now so stultified trying to do that, that I’m afraid I’ve lost ability to make it right in my own way.” Maybe a gentler way to say the same thing is that Agee fails almost completely as a conventional magazine writer. But when he relaxes a bit, and stops trying to be conventional and cooking his prose into something biblical—in other words, when he settles for being James Agee, a Southern boy with a poet’s eyes and tongue—he does fine.

Describing the frail nature of the outbuildings on one farm, he writes with economy and dry humor, “These buildings could all but be pushed flat by one man who tried hard.” Of one farmer’s mother in law, he says, “She is the sort of woman the children of nice people shout after in the street.”

But the most fascinating sections are the germinal passages upon which Agee would build and elaborate in the final version. In Cotton Tenants , there is a quick, vivid image of the spring that supplies water for one family: “The spring is not so deeply cowled beneath the hill that the water is cold and nervy: it is about the temper of faucet water, and it tastes sad on the mouth.” The same section in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is not more poetic. But it is rounder, more complete: “The spring is not cowled so deeply under the hill that the water is brilliant and nervy, seeming to break in the mouth like crystals, as spring water can: it is about the temper of faucet water, and tastes slack and faintly sad, as if just short of stale. It is not quite tepid, however, and it does not seem to taste of sweat and sickness, as the water does which the Woods family have to use.” When you read these passages back to back, it’s like watching an artist turn a sketch into a painting. Cotton Tenants may be no masterpiece, but it is an invaluable addition to the Agee shelf.

Agee’s prose is germinal in another way. Artistically speaking, few places in the United States have been more pawed over than Hale County, Alabama, or fired more imaginations. Since the first publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , its inspiration for other artists has been both broad and deep. The book directly inspired Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land . And more recently, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson revisited the subjects of the original book 50 years later in And Their Children After Them . That book, extraordinary in its own way, won a Pulitzer Prize. The practitioners of the New Journalism in the ‘60s and ‘70s all owed Agee a huge debt, and Evans’s photos have by now influenced several generations of documentarians.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men also profoundly shaped the photographer William Christenberry, a Hale County native who grew up near the subjects portrayed by Agee and Evans and whose own family knew some of the people in the book. (Coincidentally, Christenberry was born the same year Agee and Evans made their trip to Alabama.) In the ‘60s, Christenberry met Evans, who became an enduring influence. But long before that, he has said, the book taught him that there was artistic possibility in his own backyard.

For decades, long after he moved away from home, Christenberry returned each summer to photograph the changing landscape of his native soil. Now when I look at his work, which obsessively records the passage of time and its effects on people and places in the landscape, I think of a passage in which Agee describes one of the rickety houses inhabited by a tenant family: “A hollow altar, temple, or poor shrine, a human shelter, which for the space of a number of seasons shall hold this shape of earth denatured: yet in whose history this house shall have passed soft and casually as a snowflake fallen on black spring ground, which thaws in touching.” Agee and Evans recognized that art and memory conjoined are the only true bulwarks against the obliteration of all we hold dear about the past.

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Frank Grillo Joins ‘Peacemaker’ Season 2 as Rick Flag Sr.

By Jordan Moreau

Jordan Moreau

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Team Peacemaker is growing.

Season 2 of James Gunn ‘s DC action series “Peacemaker” has added Frank Grillo , Gunn announced Friday on Threads. Grillo will play Rick Flag Sr., the father of Suicide Squad member Rick Flag Jr. (played by Joel Kinnaman in the previous two movies).

However, Grillo will debut as Rick Flag Sr. in animated form first. He’s part of the voice cast for “Creature Commandos,” an upcoming Max series about a black ops team of monsters working for Amanda Waller after she forms the Suicide Squad. “Creature Commandos” will kick off Gunn’s Phase One of the new DC Universe.

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“Peacemaker” Season 2 brings back John Cena as the titular mercenary, who killed Rick Flag Jr. at the end of Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” movie. The meeting between Peacemaker, whose real name is Christopher Smith, and Rick Flag Sr. will surely be a tense one. Cast members Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, Jennifer Holland and Steve Agee also return for Season 2.

Gunn wrote all eight episodes of “Peacemaker” Season 2 and directed three episodes, including the season premiere. Gunn and his DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran executive producer the series, with Cena as co-executive producer. The series is produced by Gunn’s Troll Court Entertainment and The Safran Company in association with Warner Bros. Television.

Grillo is represented by CAA, Entertainment 360, 42West, and Paul Hastings.

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By Denise Petski

Denise Petski

Senior Managing Editor

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Gunn teased last month that Season 2 had begun production and shared a photo from the set. He also noted that for Peacemaker Season 2, he would “be directing some of the episodes” like in Saturday’s shoot, “But there are three other great directors joining me for the season.”

Gunn wrote all eight episodes of Season 1 of Peacemaker and directed five, including the first. Gunn, Safran and Matt Miller serve as EPs on the series, with Cena as co-EP and Stacy Littlejohn as consulting producer. Based on characters from DC, Peacemaker is produced by Gunn’s Troll Court Entertainment and The Safran Company in association with Warner Bros Television.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by James Gunn (@jamesgunn)

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