The Many Sides of James Agee

Charlie Chaplin was always in James Agee’s pantheon of movie directors and actors. In “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” a 1949 Life magazine essay, Agee wrote that the final scene in City Lights “is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.” His admiration for Chaplin was also made clear when in his 1942 end-of-the-year column for the Nation, he named the rerelease of The Gold Rush “the best picture I saw this year.”

Yet during Agee’s tenure as a movie reviewer at Time and the Nation between 1942 and 1948, only one new Chaplin feature appeared: the dark satire Monsieur Verdoux. When it was first released in New York in April 1947, the film received mixed-to-negative reviews, in part because of bad publicity surrounding a press conference at the Gotham Hotel on April 14. Chaplin was pummeled with hostile questions about his alleged leftist political views and his failure to become an American citizen, and Agee was famously the only person to defend him, questioning how his detractors could “congratulate themselves upon this country as the finest on earth and as a ‘free country’” while they simultaneously “pry into what a man’s citizenship is, try to tell him his business from hour to hour, . . . and exert a public moral blackmail against him for not becoming an American citizen, for his political views.” Although Agee’s own leftist views had shifted to the center and become more pessimistic after the atomic bomb had been dropped and details about the Nazi concentration camps had become clearer after the end of World War II, he retained his support for original filmmakers who—like von Stroheim, Eisenstein, and Chaplin—often conflicted with the film industries in which they worked.

Agee subsequently came to Chaplin’s (and the film’s) defense in his reviews. Readers may find it interesting to consider his May 5 Time review, in which he wrote—partly hamstrung by Time’s conservative political bent—“Monsieur Verdoux has serious shortcomings, both as popular entertainment and as a work of art. But whatever its shortcomings, it is one of the most notable films in years. It is not the finest picture Chaplin ever made, but it is certainly the most fascinating.”

Contrast that to his detailed defense of the film in the Nation, a journal more receptive to critiques of Western democracies, including the U.S., than Time. Agee’s editor at the Nation, Peggy Marshall, was less likely than Time editor T. S. Matthews to interfere with his copy or try to shape his perspective. For the first and only time during his entire tenure there, Agee devoted three entire columns to a single film. By the time the third had appeared, the film had been pulled from release by United Artists to develop a new ad campaign, which would launch in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the Hollywood Ten’s HUAC hearings.

Agee’s first review was a point-by-point rebuttal of the criticisms that had been lodged against the film in the press. This was an unusual move for Agee: on rare occasions he might refer to another critic he agreed with, but he almost never spent extended space defending a film against its critics. After rebutting the critiques in that first review, he focused on why he thought Monsieur Verdoux was important: “Chaplin’s theme, the greatest and most appropriate to its time that he has yet undertaken, is the bare problem of surviving at all in such a world as this.” Clearly the experience of living through the Depression, the Second World War, the explosion of the atomic bomb, and the emerging Cold War weighed heavily on Agee, and it was in that dark context that he understood Chaplin’s story of a bank clerk who is fired after thirty years and turns to murder to support his invalid wife and son.

Agee had written the Time cover story on the dropping of the atomic bomb, and it affected him deeply. One of the reasons for his intense engagement with Monsieur Verdoux was that he saw the film as a metaphor for the postwar human condition. Peering deeply into the movie, Agee describes how Chaplin develops his theme of survival in the cruel world “chiefly as a metaphor for business. But the film is also powerful as a metaphor for war: the Verdoux home as an embattled nation, the wife and child as the home front, Verdoux as expeditionary force, hero in the holiest of causes, and war criminal.”

It was a courageous defense of a film that was such a departure for Chaplin that many viewers found it easy to dislike. Chaplin so appreciated Agee’s voice in the wilderness that he wrote him a letter of thanks after reading the reviews. In turn, the two men became friends while Agee was spending more time in California working on screenplays, and the night before Chaplin and his wife, Oona, left the U.S. in 1952 for the premiere of Limelight,  they dined with the Agees in New York. Chaplin recalls in his autobiography that Agee came down to see the Chaplins off the next morning, and although Chaplin saw Agee from his porthole and waved his fedora to him, Agee never saw him. “That was the last I ever saw of Jim, standing alone as though apart from the world, peering and searching.” It’s a fitting image, for in his movie reviews, as in much of his other work, Agee spent his career peering and searching for creative achievement.

James Agee’s love of movies is nowhere more evident than in how scrupulously he takes note of whatever moves him, however slightly, in even the most trivial pictures: the way he acknowledges, in The Lash of the Penitentes, “some genuine and interesting shots, suspended in an aspic of terrifying pitiful and funny ineptitudes,” or salvages, from Show Business, “a few bits of archaic vaudeville which give off a moderately pleasant smell of peanuts and cigar smoke.” Correspondingly rare, however, is all-out praise even for films he professed to admire greatly. There are not more than a handful of unqualified raves in his critical corpus, and of these his two-part 1947 review of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite and L’Atalante occupies a special place. It is as if in Vigo, and most especially in the first of these two films (“one of the most visually eloquent and adventurous movies I have seen”), he has for once found someone making the very film he himself might have dreamt of making.

His review of Zéro opens with a proem in which he stakes out a position distinguishing himself both from “foreign film” fans in search of easygoing bawdy French fare and from knee-jerk avant-gardists contemptuous of popular taste, and conjuring an ideal viewer whose “eye is already sufficiently open so that you don’t fiercely resent an artist who tries to open it somewhat wider”—even while emphasizing, almost as a disclaimer, that even such a viewer is unlikely to share the “specialized” and “subjective” reasons for Agee’s enthusiasm. It’s as if the film has permitted Agee to offer a candid self-portrait as someone who shares “Vigo’s peculiar kind of obsession for liberty and against authority,” and is drawn irresistibly to “the enormous liberating force of its quasi-nihilism, its humor, directness, kindliness, criminality, and guile.”

But this too is only prelude to further meditation on the workings of Zéro and of a director “not worried about transitions between objective, subjective, fantastic, and subconscious reality,” who “mixes as many styles and camera tricks, as abruptly, as he sees fit.” Agee vents his frustration at the cautiousness of most filmmakers who restrict themselves to “fragments of the movie alphabet which were mostly shaped and frozen by around 1925.” Vigo in this light is not a marginal experimenter but someone who for once has ventured onto “the full ground on which further work can be done.” More clearly than elsewhere Agee articulates his sense of a future cinema—even if embodied in a film already fourteen years old—of which most of what he has seen in his reviewing years has offered only fragmentary premonitions.

That imagined future has to do with liberation, and very much with pleasure: Vigo’s devices are means “by which enjoyment could be enlarged.” To reinforce the point about pleasure, he brings in Chaplin and Groucho Marx as analogues for some of Vigo’s characters; and as for liberation, he gives the film about the highest praise one could give anything in 1947, calling the schoolboys’ final insurrection “an image of millennial, triumphal joy [that] has only been equaled on film, so far as I know, by newsreel shots of the liberation of Paris.”

Agee always writes as a poet—as a maker, not a consumer of images. He appreciates craft but gives it a very subordinate value, since he is always looking for signs of irreconcilable life, no matter how anarchically expressed. Fiercely judgmental, he is never snobbish in his condemnations. He can despise the corrupt and manipulative aspects of Hollywood filmmaking while cherishing the poetry that may surge up at the most unlikely moments. If his writing on film continues to inspire, it is because far from merely describing, however brilliantly, the movie he is watching, he is always feeling his way toward the movie behind it or within it, the not quite visible film that he creates by imagining it. His strongly favorable review of Georges Rouquier’s documentary Farrebique, for instance, culminates in the detailed description of two shots that do not occur in the film but that Agee’s viewing of it has inspired him to conceive.

Liberation  is indeed the key word that he returns to again and again, as when he writes of John Huston: “His pictures are not acts of seduction or of benign enslavement but of liberation, and they require, of anyone who enjoys them, the responsibilities of liberty.” Since a poet for Agee is a fully engaged actor in the world, bent on the work of transformation, his notion is as much political as aesthetic, even as Agee resists being corralled by the tenets of any easily identifiable ideology. Vigo makes a perfect symbolic figure for him, as the son of a revolutionary who “learned to walk in the prison in which, as Vigo put it, his father was suicided.” To direct a movie is to participate directly in the making or unmaking of the world, and the choices directors make have existential consequences beyond the screening room. When his deepest enthusiasms are stirred, whether by Chaplin or Vigo or Rossellini, it is because he senses world-changing possibilities opening up in the relationship between filmmaker and spectator, an explosion of the reigning passivity. He looks ahead toward the movies of the future, which we may take to be realizations of the movies that were already playing in his head:  “works of pure fiction, played against, and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.”