Star-Gazing for the Middle brows
FARBER, MANNY
Star-Gazing for the Middlebrows Agee on Film. McDowell, Obolensky. 432 pp. $6.00. JAMES AGEE was the most intriguing star-gazer in the middlebrow era of Hollywood films, a virtuoso who...
...Thus, Agee built a Jim-dandly fan olub almost the equal of Dylain Thomas's...
...Agee wrote reasonable exaggerations, beautifully articulated, about dull plodding treacle that stretched from Jean Simmons to Bergman...
...certain key images like "gentleman director" (in the case of Howard Hawks) spotlighted a peculiarly mellifluous soft-shoe type...
...I don't sede evidence of ^ny remarkable talentit, but her playing is thoughtful, quiet:t, detailed and well sustained, and sinc:e it is founded, as some more talenteid playing is not, in an unusuallly healthful-seeming and likable tem nperament, it is an undivided pleasure reto see...
...If Agee had struggled more with the actual material of the popular non-artist, it is inconceivable that he could have missed the vapidity of so much "good" film ant...
...The humor, which came strictly in spots, acted as a,n oasis: "Otherwise, the picture deserves, like four or five other movies to walk alone, tinkle a little bell and cry 'Unclean, unclean.' " The Neu...
...Agee built slow reviews with his pet multiplications: "It is unusually hard, tense, cruel, intelligent and straight-forward...
...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 closeups, 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...
...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 oo-upons—like old song lyrics and the favorite thing people were saying in February 1917 —and a way of playing leap-frog with cliches, making them sparkle like pennies lost in a Bendix...
...Olivia De HavilReviewed by Manny F?rber Contributor, "Commentary"Nat?m" land, he once wrote, "has for a lonig time been one of the prettiest women aiin movies...
...As in his belove;d films (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, esOlivier's work), his criticism had ain excessive richness that came from a fine writing ear as well as cautiouis hesitancy, ganglia, guilt...
...sen Thentences are swamps that are filled witth a suspicious number ofd right-sounding insights...
...Suffering from happy-plexis and booming emphases, Agee's deep-dish criticism in the Nation was motivated by a need to bridge Hollywood with the highest mounts of art...
...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 1940s...
...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 crosspurposes and clay...
...His great contribution was a constant emphasis on the individuals operating in what is wrongly supposed a "mass art" that assemblylines the personal out of existence...
...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...
...But this is the writing that has been' shrugged out of Agee On Film by too-shrewd editing that is conscious of the artminded and carriage trade...
...Actually, Agee apprecia a tion sticks pretty close to what the iemiddlebrow wants to hear, as when ;nhe accused Mel Torme of being out utof a jar, and raptured about the un nequalled "poetry" of Huston's Mexi :icans (who were closer to a bottle— —spirits of hammonia—than Torme...
...Leader At least half of the growing Agee legend—that he had a great camera eye, writing equipment, and love for moviemakers — is fantasy...
...With his incurious response to super-presenttense material in films, he oould praise the stuffed-shirt timing in Olivier's "Crispin's Day" speech or the academic woodchopper's emphasis on that leer in Sunset Boulevard...
...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 review suggested a busy day at Muscle Beach: flexing words, bulging rumps of talent, pyramidal displays of filming cunning...
...He gave an)' number of unsung creators their only "deep" coverage...
...His three-dimensional use of "I" con nstructions, which seldom aroused the ie reader to its essential immodesty, y, was buttressed by a moralism that at hawked the theater looking for the "sellout" in art...
...JAMES AGEE was the most intriguing star-gazer in the middlebrow 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...
...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 blind ness to chic artiness...
...But more often he indicated great oomdc timing, winding up the top-heavy The Lost Weekend review with one flashing line: "I undershtand that liquor interesh: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film, Thash tough...
...But I see nothing in it that is new, sharply individual, or strongly creative...
...v-Even where he modified and show n boated until the reader had the Jimjams, Agee's style was exciting in itts pea-soup density...
...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...
...Seldom has more personality walked through American criticism with such slyly cloaked over-possessive manners...
...He used other critics' enthusiasm ("Winsten and McCarten think it is one of the best ever made...
...For instance, Agee was a master of critics' patter, the numbers racket, and the false bracket...
...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...
...Given this terrain o:if Agee-philes (Auden's rave abount Agee in a Nation fan letter includeid the proud "I do not care for movie3s and I rarely see them"), it was preedictable that Agee's contradictoryy, often unlikable genius would be disstorted, simplified and dulled by ain ever-gr?wing hero worship...
...lately she has not onlly become prettier than ever but haas started to act, as well...
...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...
...Of all the ham-on-wry critics who wrote for big Little magazines, Agee had the prose and ad-libability to handle the businesscraft from all sides...
...The writers who flowered in 193947 movie columns of liberal middleclass journals had the same kind of reader-employer freedom that encouraged good sportswriters in the 1920s—i.e., they served an undemanding audience that welcomed style and knew hardly anything about the inside of movies...
...But there is onlv 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 1940s...
...Agee is perhaps as bewitching as his bandwagon believes if his whole complexity of traits is admitted in the record...
...His humanity has a curious way of leveling per formers with flattery, and over-com peting with direotors by flooding their works with a consuming sensi bility...
...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...
...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...
...Like Gilbert Seldes, he had a dozen ways to move films into the museum...
...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 soclology in the fewest words...
...Star-Gazing for the Middlebrows Agee on Film...
...In certain abrupt Nation reviews (Hathaway's anonymous realism in Boomerang, Ford's smog-like 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...
...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...
...Though he occasionally lapsed into salesmanship through brilliantly subtle swami glamour (Henry V. the 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, Scdome Where She Danced, where his taste didn't have to outrun a superabundant writing talent...
Vol. 41 • December 1956 • No. 45
