JAMES AGEE was the most intriguing star-gazer in the middle-brow era of Hollywood films, a virtuoso who capped a strange company of stars on people’s lips and set up a hailstorm of ideas for other critics to use. Of all the ham-on-wry critics who wrote for big little magazines, Agee had the prose and ad-libability to handle the business-craft from all sides. He gave any number of unsung creators their only “deep” coverage; certain key images like “gentleman director” (in the case of Howard Hawks) spotlighted a peculiarly mellifluous soft-shoe type.
While his Tol’able Jim classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, disclosed that he was an unorthodox, unsure left-fielder, Agee was able to build skyscrapers in art out of cross-purposes and clay. Even at his worst, in reviews where he was nice, thoughtful, and guilty until he seemed an “intellectual” hatched in Mack Sennett’s brain, Agee was a fine antidote to the paralyzing plot-sociologists who hit the jackpot during the 1940’s. His great contribution was a constant emphasis on the individuals operating in what is wrongly supposed a “mass art” that assembly-lines the personal out of existence.
The writers who flowered in 1939–47 movie columns of liberal middle-class journals had the same kind of reader-employer freedom that encouraged good sportswriters in the 1920’s—i.e., they served an undemanding audience that welcomed style and knew hardly anything about the inside of movies. Agee wrote reasonable exaggerations, beautifully articulated, about dull plodding treacle that stretched from Jean Simmons to Ingrid Bergman. (Olivia de Havilland, he once wrote, “has for a long time been one of the prettiest women in movies; lately she has not only become prettier than ever but has started to act as well. I don’t see evidence of any remarkable talent, but her playing is thoughtful, quiet, detailed, and well sustained, and since it is founded, as some more talented playing is not, in an unusually healthful-seeming and likable temperament, it is an undivided pleasure to see.”)
Thus, Agee built a Jim-dandy fan club almost the equal of Dylan Thomas’s. Given this terrain of Ageephiles (Auden’s rave about Agee in a Nation fan letter included the proud “I do not care for movies and I rarely see them”), it was predictable that Agee’s contradictory, often unlikable genius would be distorted, simplified, and dulled by an ever-growing hero worship.
Even where he modified and showboated until the reader had the Jim-jams, Agee’s style was exciting in its pea-soup density. As in his beloved films (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Olivier’s work), his criticism had an excessive richness that came from a fine writing ear as well as cautious hesitancy, ganglia, guilt. The sentences are swamps that are filled with a suspicious number of right-sounding insights. Actually, Agee’s appreciations stick pretty close to what the middle-brow wants to hear, as when he accused Mel Tormé of being out of a jar, and raptured about the unequaled “poetry” of Huston’s Mexicans (who were closer to a bottle—spirits of hammonia—than Tormé). His three-dimensional use of “I” constructions, which seldom aroused the reader to its essential immodesty, was buttressed by a moralism that hawked the theater looking for the “sellout” in art. The Hollywood technicians were put through a purgatory: a new angle—the artist’s soul—was added to movie criticism, as 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.
As he shellacked the reader with culture, Agee had one infallibly charming tool in his kit: an aristocratic gashouse humor that made use of several art centuries, a fantastic recall of stray coupons—like old song lyrics and the favorite thing people were saying in February, 1917—and a way of playing leapfrog with clichés, making them sparkle like pennies lost in a Bendix. The funniest passage Agee wrote had to do with a fairly deadpan description of a movie discussion in a Time elevator, humor coming from his capacity to capture an elevator’s sociology in the fewest words. But more often he indicated great comic timing, winding up the top-heavy Lost Weekend review with one flashing line: “I undershtand that liquor interesh: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.”
Agee built slow reviews with his pet multiplications: “It is unusually hard, tense, cruel, intelligent, and straightforward. But I see nothing in it that is new, sharply individual, or strongly creative.” The humor, which came strictly in spots, acted as an oasis: “Otherwise, the picture deserves, like four or five other movies, to walk alone, tinkle a little bell, and cry ‘Unclean, unclean.’”
At least half of the growing Agee legend—that he had a great camera eye, writing equipment, and love for moviemakers—is fantasy. Agee’s visual recall, so apparent in tour de force pieces on Sennett’s gang that hit like a cold shower of visual needles, is always wedded to a blindness to chic artiness. His humanity has a curious way of leveling performers with flattery, and over-competing with directors by flooding their works with a consuming sensibility. His journalistic manner in the smaller Time reviews is flawless, but, unfortunately, Agee’s reputation is based on heavier writing which has a sensitively tinctured glibness (as in this pontifical stretch: “In these long close-ups, as in much else that he does, Dreyer goes against most of the ‘rules’ that are laid down, even by good people, for making genuine and good motion pictures. In a sense I have to admit that he is far out at the edge rather than close to the center of all that I think might be most productive and original. But there is only one rule for movies that I finally care about. . . .”)
Agee’s Time stint added up to a sharp, funny encyclopedia on the film industry during the 1940’s. Though he occasionally lapsed into salesmanship through brilliantly subtle swami glamour (Henry V, the Ingrid Bergman cover story), Agee would be wisely remembered for quick biographies and reviews, particularly about such happy garbage as June Haver musicals and an early beatnik satire Salome Where She Danced, where his taste didn’t have to outrun a superabundant writing talent. But this is the writing that has been shrugged out of Agee On Film by too shrewd editing that is conscious of the art-minded and carriage trade. Other evidences of the book shortchanging Agee’s richness: (1) no sign of those extended journeys on Luce limb for a box-office hero, and (2) no evidence of his conflicting reviews on the same picture for the power (Time) and the glory (The Nation).
Suffering from happy-plexis and booming emphasis, Agee’s deep-dish criticism in The Nation was motivated by a need to bridge Hollywood with the highest mounts of art. Like Gilbert Seldes, he had a dozen ways to move films into the museum. For instance, Agee was a master of critics’ patter, the numbers racket, and the false bracket. He used other critics’ enthusiasms (“Winsten and McCarten think it is one of the best ever made. I don’t care quite that much for it, but. . . .”), expanded petty courage into infinity (Wilder’s courage in making The Lost Weekend), and maneuvered in a pinch with the one-eyed emphasis. “June Allyson, who seems incapable of a superficial performance” is a typical Agee periscope of an actress’s one trait, a minor sincerity, at the expense of an immobile, rangeless cuteness.
If Agee had struggled more with the actual material of the popular nonartist, it is inconceivable that he could have missed the vapidity of so much “good” film art. With his incurious response to super-present-tense material in films, he could praise the stuffed-shirt timing in Olivier’s “Crispin’s Day” speech or the academic woodchopper’s emphasis on that leer in Sunset Boulevard. A great segment of fine Hollywood work isn’t interested in Big Art, but in making a contemporaneous “point” that, by the nature of its momentary truth, dies almost the moment the movie is released.
In certain abrupt Nation reviews (Kazan’s anonymous realism in Boomerang, Ford’s smoglike They Were Expendable), there is a mild struggling with the awareness that the movie is talking not about art but of the necessity of placing itself in a likable position with the furthest advances in currency—whether that contemporaneity has to do with nonchalance (Good News), a manner of shorthand phrasing (early parts of The Ox-Bow Incident), or a way of looking at “hip” folk (The Big Sleep). Agee was a brick wall against pretense in small movies, but, on Big Scale work, where the Boulevard is made of National Velvet and the Limelight’s as stunning as the Sierra Madre, Agee’s reviews suggested a busy day at Muscle Beach: flexing words, bulging rumps of talent, pyramidal displays of filming cunning.
Agee is perhaps as bewitching as his bandwagon believes, if his whole complexity of traits is admitted in the record. Seldom has more personality walked through American criticism with such slyly cloaked overpossessive manners. The present Hollywood film, in which a mishmash knowledge of faintly old modern art is presented in show-biz language, owes part of its inauthentic soul to a fine critic, who even felt obliged to place pictures he disliked in a company with “all the good writing of this century, the films of Pudovkin and Pabst, and some of the music of Brahms.”
November 8, 1958