Agee on Film, by James Agee
Review by Jeffrey M. Anderson
Buy Agee on Film, by James Agee.
Agee was the father of American film criticism. Although he was a contemporary
of Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber, he was perhaps the most influential --
so much so that his review of John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre; (1948) got him hired to write the screenplay
Huston's 1952 The African Queen. Agee on Film collects Agee's criticism from 1942 to 1948,
from both The Nation and Time. It's fascinating to see Agee's week-by-week prose, burying deeper
into movies with a very small amount of space than most critics ever get in their lifetimes. He could
take a beautiful movie like Jean Renoir's The Southerner, praise it for its virtues,
but drive a nail into exactly what did not work about the film. His most breathless essay
is his three-part exaltation of Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, which is just about worth
the price of the book all by itself. Another of his greatest reviews, praising the great Curse of the Cat People (1944),
is here as well. This recently re-issued book
also contains lengthy essays on Sunset Boulevard and D.W. Griffith and an appreciation of silent
comedy. I re-read this book in 2005 and now consider it the most valuable film book written in
English.
The out-of-print Agee on Film Vol. 2 collects Agee's screenplays, including The
African Queen and the brilliant The Night of the Hunter.
(1955).
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