DVD Chronicle

In my last Chronicle I followed Graham Greene's lead to films that he reviewed in the 1930s and that still seem worth watching today. Here, I'll do the same with Greene's American counterpart, James Agee, who did his reviewing in the 1940s for The Nation and Time.

Agee the film critic could be tersely dismissive when confronted with out-and-out trash. In a 1948 review for The Nation ("Midwinter Clearance"), he cleared one silly musical away simply by listing its title and adding four words: "You Were Meant for Me. That's what you think." For that matter, he could be terse when dealing with a flawed masterpiece like Odd Man Out (1947). Carol Reed's film could scarcely be better described than in Agee's summations "a series of passive elegiac tableaux," "uses allegory wrong end to." But the essential Agee was expansive, not terse. The Nation indulged him with a lot of column inches; his mind worked in a naturally allusive way ("as nihilistic as Céline," "as deeply humane as Dickens," he wrote of Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek); he was greatly in love with words and their effects. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is for Agee not just gay, but "inviolably, genuinely, and intelligently gay." The twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet is not just beautiful, but "rapturously beautiful" ("if I may resort to conservative statement," he added). Prose pours out of him, on occasion prose as finicking and alliterative as Henry James's (Lewis Allen's 1945 haunted house melodrama The Unseen "generates sporadic wincing qualms of excitement without ordering them into anything constant and cumulative") or, at other moments, as comically inventive as the orotundity of W. C. Fields, one of his onscreen heroes. Listen to Agee on Till the Clouds Roll By, for instance. This 1946 biopic about Jerome Kern

is a little like sitting down to a soda-fountain de luxe atomic special of maple walnut on vanilla on burnt almond on strawberry on butter pecan on coffee on raspberry sherbet on tutti frutti with hot fudge, butterscotch, marshmallow, filberts, pistachios, shredded pineapple, and rainbow sprills on top, go double on the whipped cream. Some of the nuts, it turns out, are a little stale, and wandering throughout the confection is a long bleached-golden hair, probably all right in its place but, here, just a little more than you can swallow.

After this colossal simile the reviewer pulls himself together to find the single word that is unexpected but exactly right for Kern's music in the movie: "nacreous."

Whether playing for laughs or writing in deadly seriousness, and whether an enthusiastic approver of some film or a diehard naysayer, Agee brings to his movie reviews the passionate eloquence which fills the pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his great documentary report (with Walker Evans photographs) on the lives of dirt-poor cotton sharecroppers at the end of the Depression. Bourbon-soaked eloquence, one is sometimes tempted to say about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: language toppling over itself or being heaped into gargantuan lists in the effort to be loving enough to those appallingly damaged families in north Alabama. Agee the film reviewer is more controlled than Agee the documentary artist, more aware of what language can and cannot do, and more conscious of ordinary readers' needs; he was of course a little older when he wrote the reviews. Eloquence in his film criticism is usually unforced, and arises from both attention to detail and an awareness of what the art of the cinema might actually be expected to accomplish. The creative imagination, he commented in one review, is "merely an intensification of good sense to the point...