AGEE ON FILM, volume 1, Essays and Reviews by James Agee
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B0027WZJZU
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
27 Movies from the Dark Side (Ebert's Essentials)
Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film
25 Great French Films (Ebert's Essentials)
scenario-is a shade or two more perceptive, though again it gets along, proudly and well, with plain sense 34 / Agee on Film and sensitiveness instead of brilliance. It is distinguished from most cutting simply in being the work of men who have thought, felt, and cared a great deal about the power and honesty of given film images, in themselves simply, in juxtaposition and careful series, in rhythm, and in a rhythmic and spatial whole. The results of this sort of thought and feeling, carved out
with a rock. It looks as if Cherkassov in The Calling of Dan Matthews were only a question of a very short time. Old Acquaintance is a typical woman's duet on the standard musical saws favored by any housewives' magazine (the tune is "Love Is the Sweetest Thing but We Have No Bananas Today"). What perplexes me is that I could sit through it with some interest. The two chief characters seem to represent, between them, all that a suburban housewife at her worst likes to think she is and thanks God
painted or the music composed-you may or may not be surprised to find that they stand up rather well. I can think of very few contemporary books that are worth the jackets they are wrapped in; I can think of very few movies, contemporary or otherwise, which fail to show that somebody who has worked on them, in front of the camera or in any one of many places behind it, has real life or energy or intensity or intelligence or talent. But you have only to compare the best of last year's films with
which could have been accounted for in about three extra shots. The tenement sets and city streets of the movie are as lovingly and exhaustively detailed and as solid-looking as any I can remember. Most of the players, like those in the same studio's Ox-Bow Incident, clearly .believed they had special duties, opportunities, and privileges. I was especially moved and impressed by James Dunn as the father and by the ways, visible and sometimes stammering though they were, in which Peggy Ann Garner
visually and in its use of dialogue and sound; and, again like many, it makes even the best American work look childish so far as reverence for and skill with character and background and atmosphere are concerned. At times the picture goes so wild that it suggests Gogo! or Erskine Caldwell-or, simply, that rural life is at once the most localized and the most universal, and that its pine-knot paroxysms of grotesqueness are among the most endearing, even noblest, of its characteristics. But as a