Holden Caulfield described a good book as one that made you want to call the author on the phone; I?d describe a good critic as one whose company you relish. And lord, how I relish Agee?s company. Not for him the movies-are-gussied-up-plays approach of so many 1940s critics. He cared passionately about camerawork, and gave credit, writing of the magnificent opening of The Hard Way that ?James Wong Howe?s first few minutes with the camera, in a Pennsylvania mill town, all but floored me with gratitude. ? In assessing The Best Years of Our Lives, a movie that was ?at its worst...annoying in its patness, its timidity? but that still required two columns to cover adequately, Agee throws quibbles aside for one genius: ?I can?t think of a single shot of [Gregg] Toland?s that doesn?t show the amount of will, creative energy, and taste, and doesn?t add with perfect power and modesty its own special kind of expressiveness.?
In that spirit, let me interject that I watched The Spiritualist the other night (any movie with a pet crow and dialogue such as the immortal line, "Alexis, do you think I'd make a good celestial companion?" has purchase on my affections) and John Alton's cinematography is beautifully witty and inky, from his use of deep focus to make a house interior look like a stadium rink to the milky apparitions floating above the crystal ball.
But back to the Siren, whose pet crow pecks the heads of those who cross her on Twitter, so beware.
[Philip] Lopate writes that present-day regard for Agee is tied up with his ?thanatoptic mystique?--his looks, his recklessness, his alcoholism, his death. In all honesty I can state that this has never been true of me. Once I learned the bare pitiful outline of Agee?s life, I avoided learning more. It is painful enough to read his review of The Lost Weekend, with its bitter joke of a kicker, and wonder that the insight was so piercing, but the will to get better wasn?t there--or, perhaps, never had time to appear:
It becomes, too much of the time, just a virtuoso piece about a handsome, practically unidentified maniac. In one or two scenes you get with some force the terrible humiliation which is one of the drunkard?s experiences; but considering the over-all quality of the film, it is remarkable how much you seem to have been given, and how little you actually get. There is very little appreciation, for instance, of the many and subtle moods possible in drunkenness; almost no registration of the workings of the several minds inside a drinker?s brain; hardly a trace of the narcissism and self-deceit which are so indispensable or of the self-loathing and self-pity which are so invariable; hardly a hint, except through abrupt action, of the desperation of thirst; no hint at all of the many colorings possible in the desperation.
Yes, Agee understood alcohol psycho-metabolically, and Wilfrid Sheed in his meditation on Agee in The Morning After argues that there was another area in which he was painfully, intimately expert.
In Agee's famous Guggenheim application for 1937--Sheed: "surely the strangest application ever complied by a sane man. It lists no fewer than forty seven projects, several of them multiple, covering practically the whole of human experience from sex to politics. The good judges must have thought he was mad. This kind of scatterbrained fertility is usually associated with the cracked men in the patent office"--one of the projects proposed to explore the pathology of laziness.
"A story," he explains, "of cumulative horror." One doesn't write such stories from the outside. Laziness in a busy writer suggests that some call is going unheeded, that writing is being used as an evasion, like non-stop talking.
Agee's best, funniest, most dartingly precise talking can be found in his Nation film reviews, where the tight column space made brevity a necessity; his worst writing with a capital W is found in his expansive arias in which he takes on great subjects in packed sentences and paragraphs that stretch the horizon like Thomas Wolfe railcars. Reviewing Hollywood entertainments constrained him from releasing the prose poetry roiling in the boozy night, and his criticism was the better for it, which is why it's lasted.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/the-siren-of-infinite-delight.html
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