Let Us Now Trash Famous Men

James Agee

The era of the greatest discussion and debate about film was in the 1960s, which was also the period of the greatest creativity in international film, when filmmakers like Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and Truffaut produced their best work. Since the work of every one of these filmmakers, and many others, went into sharp decline shortly thereafter, there were no winners in the debates. In the US, critics weren’t aligned with one another, but it was fairly easy to separate them into opposing camps. One one side were critics who applied judgements cultivated in other branches of criticism, in literature and/or theater, and on the other side were critics who approached film as an exceptional art (despite its impurities). 

Since the 60s, however, the level of the discourse inspired by film criticism has declined considerably, as has, of course, the quality of individual films. There doesn’t seem to be anything like the received knowledge one finds in literary criticism – despite efforts at creating a film canon of sorts – about what constitutes good writing. All of the film festivals and the Hollywood Academy awards are as hopelessly commercialized as ever. Prestige means money means prestige is the vicious cycle of an industry encumbered by a publicity machine of monstrous proportions. 

What there are in the place of critical consensus are schools of criticism that operate by their own exclusive standards and apply them consistently, if unconvincingly. Recently, in an Aussie-based ezine called Film Alert 101, critic David Hare (not the English playwright) wrote a review of a Criterion restoration of a 20th Century Fox product called Nightmare Alley. After praising the photographic qualities of the restoration (a subject in which he is an unenviable authority), Hare quoted from a review of the film written by James Agee when he saw it on its first release in 1947. 

"In any mature movie context these days these scenes (of pseudo-religion with fake Temples and media personalities fronting the fakery) would be no better than all right, and an intelligently trashy level of all right, at that; but this kind of wit and meanness is so rare in movies today that I had the added special pleasure of thinking, "Oh, no, they won't have the guts to do that." But they do; as long as they have any nerve at all, they have quite a lot. The rest of the show is scarcely better than average. Lee Garmes camera work is lush but vigorous." (The Nation, November 8, 1947) 

For Agee, this was saying a bit more than needed to be said about a run-of-the-mill failure. In fact, it’s high praise coming from Agee. In his Time review of the film, published five days earlier, he went a little further toward giving the film a positive review. But the last two sentences of Agee’s The Nation review bothered Hare intensely: 

With the last two sentences Agee betrays his lost-in-the thirties-nostalgia for a non-existent socialist cinema of deep-and-meaningful social and moral worthiness, and his snide remarks on Garmes betray his pathological loathing of formalism at the expense of the sort of Hemingway-Huston male weepiedom he so yearned for, even within his own screenplays. 

“Snide remarks”? Since when is “vigorous" camera work a bad thing? Or is it Agee's use of the word “lush”? (Agee was a legendary lush.) But Hare went a little further when he posted his review on his Facebook page: “Agee was also VERY nervous about anything remotely ‘queer’. This and artiness seem to be his slip-is-showing bêtes noirs.” To me, this is infallible proof that there hasn’t been a jot of close reading of Agee on Hare’s part - merely Agee finding Nightmare Alley less than the blinding masterpiece Hare wishes it could be. 

Disagree with something a critic tells you. I do it all the time, with some of my favorite critics. I learn something every time. But calling him out as a homophobe or as a secretly suppressed gay man is outrageous. And since when was Agee a Leftist? Because he once wrote – stupendously – about sharecroppers? Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for Fortune for crissakes (who didn’t know what to do with it)! He was a slave in the Luce mill for fourteen years.

Agee’s most famous screenplays were commissions. (There are even unsubstantiated claims that The Night of the Hunter was written by Charles Laughton, who was unmistakably gay.) His only self-motivated screenplay to be filmed (The Blue Hotel was optioned by John Huston but never filmed) was the charming short film The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. (1) So whatever Hare may have read into Agee’s screenwriting is rather pointless. 

James Agee (1909-1955) was the film critic for Time from 1941 to 1948 and The Nation from 1942 to '48. Living in New York City, he had access to imported films, but his subject was Hollywood. He was in a slightly less precarious position than Otis Ferguson had been in, writing film criticism for The New Republic from 1934 to 1942. But Agee was to be pitied – an enthusiast of an art form that was so rarely in evidence that he had to – was employed to – swim through rivers of shit to find one thing that would make him feel clean again. 

Hare might try to remember what it was like for a cinephile long before the word was even coined the next time he loads a disc into his state-of-the-art player. I think the kind of revisionism being practiced by Hare, a digging up of the dead and zombifying them, is regressive in the extreme. (2) It pretends that the judgements of people of the past are not merely outdated but faulty – that if only James Agee were alive today he would be delighted by the Hollywood pablum he once deplored. And that we who have succeeded Agee have not just the advantage of being alive but of being unencumbered by the values he applied to Nightmare Alley. Incidentally, Agee often wrote reviews of the same film for both publications at which he was employed and the reviews were sometimes at odds with one another. If Hare had bothered to read the three paragraphs he submitted to his Time column (instead of only the one in The Nation), he might’ve been less disapproving of Agee’s opinion of Nightmare Alley.

(1) The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.

(2) Earlier this month, Hare wrote the following: "I Walked with a Zombie is Tourneur's very greatest masterpiece in my view and to me now one of the the five greatest films ever made." I'd rather not know what the other four masterpieces are.

[Postscript July 29, 2021. Still not finished in his feeble attempts to smear the reputation of James Agee, David Hare goes at it again in his latest Film 101 review of a new Blu-Ray transfer of a Monograph Studio release called I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948). 

The "Poverty Row" slur on the studio is a deeply flawed view of the outfit which by the end of the war was making near A-level, length, budget and quality movies in the most loathed of genres by highbrow critics of the time like Agee. Their loss. 

This begs two questions: 1) In an intellectual pursuit like film criticism, or indeed in any pursuit, how is being a highbrow a disadvantage? If he was trying to be sarcastic, Hare should’ve put the word between quotation marks, thereby implying that Agee was a so-called or would-be highbrow; 2) Is Hare admitting that the only way to fully appreciate trash like I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes is by being unabashedly lowbrow (no quotation marks)? 

Whatever the answers to these questions, I know whose shoes I would rather be in.]