DVD Chronicle: The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories, and: Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, and: The General Died at Dawn, and: Pépé le Moko, and: Hands of Orlac, and: Ninotchka (review)

Of that large number of twentieth-century authors who wrote film reviews on the side, whether for a little extra money or for the pleasure of exploring another art form, who were the best, the most perceptive? My vote would go to Graham Greene and James Agee. In England, Greene reviewed films steadily through the 1930s, for the Spectator and for Night and Day, the weekly that tried to be London's counter-part to The New Yorker, had a glittering six-month run, then went out of business—a demise accompanied by the successful lawsuit brought against Greene by the nine-year-old Shirley Temple, who resented his calling her, in the course of a pan of her 1937 film Wee Willie Winkie, "a fancy little piece . . . a complete totsy." In the 1930s Greene also wrote his first screenplays and saw the first screen adaptation of one of his own fictions (Orient Express): it was the start of what would be a nearly career-long involvement with the cinema. In America, Agee did his film reviewing in the 1940s, for The Nation and Time, an experience later to be useful in writing his screenplays for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) and in the meantime catering to his love for the cinema. That love could be backward-looking, nostalgic, as in his famous Life magazine piece "Comedy's Greatest Era," on the lost art of American silent comedy, but Agee had his enthusiasms for films of the moment, too. And his amused disdain: in a 1945 review for The Nation, he sums up the Shirley Temple vehicle Kiss and Tell in terms nearly as contemptuous as Greene's ("the audience, pimpishly helped out by the camera . . . develops an almost pathological interest in the girl's hind quarters"); Agee and The Nation escaped without litigation.

The pleasure of browsing through Greene's and Agee's reviews can be fully indulged in two collections, The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories, edited by David Parkinson, and Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, in Martin Scorsese's new series Modern Library the Movies. For anyone interested in the art of criticism, I recommend a prolonged immersion in Greene's and Agee's prose, and for anyone interested in the art of film, a willingness to follow their leads to what, sixty or seventy years later, is still worth watching. One could do worse than take them as guides to old movies, which is what I propose to do with Greene here (on a later occasion, I will do the same with Agee).

Nowadays, of course, films of the 1930s have to be seen on DVD, rather than in what Greene called "the Pleasure Dome—all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and a bizarre taste which we shall never see again." Often enough we're lucky that there are DVDs to watch: many of Greene's favorites are out of print or otherwise unattainable. We must take on trust his estimation of the Soviet propaganda film We from Kronstadt or Jacques Feyder's English melodrama Knight Without Armour, William Wyler's These Three or Jack Conway's The Trunk Murder ("a comedy of astonishing intelligence and finish"). Even so important a film in its day as Buñuel's documentary Land Without...