"Agee on Film", James Agee

James Agee (1909-1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. He wrote A Death in the Family (1957), which won him a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. With photographer Walker Evans, he documented the lives of sharecroppers in Alabama during the Great Depression, which later resulted in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). He was also a screenwriter, having contributed to two of the most admired films from the 1950s: The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). He died from a heart attack in a New York taxi at the age of 45, in 1955.

Agee was the most important American film critic in the 40s. He wrote for Time and The Nation, and was a great enthusiast of Charles Chaplin [Agee was possibly the critic who most defended Monsieur Verdoux (1947) in America at a time when it was receiving a poor reception], John Huston, and an admirer of Laurence Olivier’s filmic adaptations of Shakespeare and the horror / fantasy movies produced by Val Lewton. Agee's reviews and screenplays have been collected in the two volumes of Agee on Film. This is the first volume, which collects all his work as a film critic.

Excerpts:

“At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in the movies.”

“[On Odd Man Out] If the world should end tomorrow, as this film rather substantially suggest that it must, and may as well, this film would furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing up of a night city. Movies have always been particularly good at appreciating cities at night: but of a night city this is the best image I have seen.”

“Each of Huston’s pictures has a visual tone and style of its own, dictated to his camera by the story’s essential content and spirit. In Treasure [of Sierra Madre] the camera is generally static and at a middle distance from the action (as Huston says, 'It’s impersonal, it just looks on and lets them stew in their own juice'); the composition is – superficially – informal, the light cruel and clean, like noon sun on quartz and bone. Most of the action in Key Largo takes place inside a small Florida hotel. The problems are to convey heat, suspense, enclosedness, the illusion of some eighteen hours of continuous action in two hours’ playing time, with only one time lapse. The lighting is stickily fungoid. The camera is sneakily 'personal'; working close and in almost continuous motion, it enlarges the ambiguous suspensefulness of almost every human move. In [We Were] Strangers the main pressures are inside a home and beneath it, where conspirators dig a tunnel. Here Huston’s chief keys are lighting contrasts. Underground the players move in and out of shadow like trout; upstairs the light is mainly the luminous pallor of marble without sunlight: a cemetery, a bank interior, a great outdoor staircase.”

Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://mega.nz/#!sXYklSIB!WJDAPCUwpbSxUCEKtMPoLshtoTwb3MOKr_go8YhPycM