Agee on Film (review)

m S ' eviewsVL 1 1W ? Agée on Film by James Agée Modem Library, 2000, 465 pp., $14.95 James Agée is generaUy remembered for two works: a novel, A Death in the Family, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a sprawling, epic masterwork of nonfiction, illustrated with photographs by Walker Evans. But what Agee may have been best at was the more modest endeavor of writing about the movies. This coUection of film reviews and essays is a reissue of the book, which had long been out of print. No film is too smaU for Agee's critical attention. Though he deUghts in the work of John Huston and CharUe Chaplin, B-grade pictures such as Isle of the Dead and Mademoiselle Fifi get a good going- over as weU—as does much of the HoUywood schlock born of the gUtzy, cinematic age of the '40s and '50s. With this volume—part of the Martin Scorsese series of film Uterature —we get an introduction by New Yorker film critic David Denby. There's alsoa reprintofthe letter W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation, the journal that many of these reviews come from, half bemoaning, half celebrating the day "when Agee on Film wiU be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis." (No doubt it already has been.) The reviews are of a uniformly high quaUty, but the best writing in the book comes from the two longer essays that serve as bookends. The first, on the comedy ofAgee's beloved sUent film era, captures Buster Keaton as well as anyone ever has: "In a way his pictures are Uke a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is thejuggler's effortless, uninterested face." The emphasis on the visual is crucial in these writings, as it was to Agee's fiction and poetry. "Film must do its work through the eyes," he wrote, and it would seem that Agee thought the same of his prose. The other long essay is onJohn Huston, Agee's favorite director, for whom he wrote the screenplay for The African Queen. Huston, too, was preoccupied with Uterature, adapting several classics. His clean, linear work might appear to be at odds with Agee's lyricism, but the two men shared a sense of structure. When Gloria Swanson hissed her famous line in Sunset Boulevard that it 194 · The Missouri Review was the pictures that were getting smaUer, she might easUy have been talking about them in regard to JamesAgee. Writing about film, Agee, the prose stylist, often overshadowed his subjects. I should think that film criticism has never come closer to attaining the mantle of true art than it does here. (CF) The Green Suit by Dwight Allen Algonquin, 2000, 288 pp., $22.95 Dwight Allen's first novel, The Green Suit, is a deUghtful read. The protagonist, PeterSackrider, is a comic antihero whose vices we can too readUy recognize in ourselves—that is, if we were haU so honest. The novel comprises eleven individual stories: the first five and the last story are narrated by Peter; the rest are narrated by a variety of voices, primarily female. "Deferment," the first story, sets a pattern for Peter's personaUty that wUl repeat itself throughout the novel. He is cowardly. For example, he resorts to handwritten notes to break up with his girlfriend and later to send condolences for her brother, who dies in Vietnam. He is drawn to inteUigent, ambitious women such as Lizzie Burford, who is a straight-A student, but his lust leads him to lesser women such as Cheryl, who would "screw pretty much anything with two legs." He is also drawn to a male mentor, a sawmiU hand named Red, who possesses aU the verve that Peter lacks. Other colorfuUy drawn male mentors appear throughout the novel— Elvin, the buUding superintendent in "The Green Suit"; Hal Hazelett, a newspaper reporter in "The Hazeletts' Dog"; Larry Hale, a down-and-out, alcohoUc, divorced father in "Succor"; and Harvey Blum, a former college professor in "A Bed of Ice." Each of these men...