Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee

Agee and the Filipino Epic Genghis Khan: A Personal Journey

agee and the fIlIPIno ePIC GeNGhis KhaN: a Personal Journey John wranoVICs Not the least pleasure of attempting deep research on the film career of a writer like James Agee is the hunt for those little known marginal movies, the arcane work long out of print and distribution, that live in the low shoulders of familiar peaks like The African Queen and Night of the Hunter. Even in this wired world there are some films that have fallen so deeply down the cracks of time, memory, and esteem that it almost takes a miracle to bring them to light. An example of one such neglected film is the Filipino director Manuel Conde’s action/biography Genghis Khan (1950), for which Agee wrote an English-language commentary. The search for this film I took on as a sort of perverse personal challenge. On and off, for about six years, I poked around the Internet, made cold calls to Hollywood, Paris, and Manila, and searched film archive libraries and rental catalogs fishing for any hint of an extant print of the version of the film with Agee’s overdubbed narration. Nobody seemed to have one. Even United Artists, which had acquired the distribution rights to the film after its successful showing at the August 1952 Venice Film Festival, had no copy. I did find lobby cards and posters. And I narrowly missed out on snagging an especially rare publicity pressbook for the film on eBay. I also came across publicity photographs from the film housed in the archived collection of David Bradley, who coincidently worked with Agee on the unproduced film of Agee’s Paul Gauguin screenplay Noa Noa. Along the way, I made the acquaintance of a film scholar in the Philippines who generously shared with me a bootleg VHS tape of a much-duped John wranovics ~ 254 ~ original Tagalog version of the film, which, although of great interest, lacked Agee’s English-language commentary. A couple of years ago, after one more prolonged bout of Google diving, I finally found and tracked down the company in Ohio that owned the theatrical rights to the film. But the company could find no print of Genghis Khan in its vault. They did, though, help me locate a film rental outfit located in New York City, which owned the television broadcast rights and, happily, actually had a copy of the film. After some negotiation , and the financial support of the University of Tennessee, the Ohio company agreed to license a theatrical showing of the film and the New York company agreed to ship the reels. The upshot was that in November 2009, at the Centennial Celebration of Agee in Knoxville, Genghis Khan was projected on screen to a live audience in the United States for likely the first time in over fifty years. My goal all along had been simply to locate the film, to prove to myself that it could be done, and get it shown, regardless of its reception . So it was all the more rewarding that the movie is truly charming, an action-packed sword-and-shield adventure romp that, while admittedly unpolished, sometimes technically bordering on the primitive, is full of imagination, original situations, and boundless energy. Agee’s commentary doesn’t transform the film into a great film, but the joy he took in telling the tale is obvious, with frequent flights into the mid-range of his lyrical talents. The Knoxville audience was captivated. But what really topped off the experience for me was the look on the face and the emotion and delight in the voice of the Filipino woman who approached me after the lights came back on. She had driven over an hour to see the movie, and not because of Agee. She came for Manuel Conde, the movie’s producer, director, star, and unstoppable promoter, now a revered historical figure in Filipino film culture. Agee too had fallen under Conde’s spell. It was for the chance of working again with his friend, in the Philippines, to write and share the direction of two ultimately unrealized projects, Twilight of the Pagans and Sarangani, that Agee fatefully passed on writing the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick, a job that instead went to Ray Bradbury. agee anD the filiPino ePic GeNGhis KhaN: a Personal JoUrney ~ 255 ~ According to his biographer, Nicanor G. Tiongson, Manuel Conde was “a maverick, rebel, an iconoclast...