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James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism
James Agee
Contains the full text of Agee on Film, a trove of other previously uncollected film reviews; Agee's screenplay for Charles Laughton's gothic masterpiece The Night of the Hunter; and a fascinating selection of Agee's penetrating journalism and book review
Library of America
September 2005
748 pages
ISBN: 1931082820
Hardcover
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Contemporary
James Agee brought to bear all his moral energy, slashing
wit, and boundless curiosity in the criticism and
journalism that established him as one of the commanding
literary voices of America at mid-century. In 1944 W. H.
Auden called Agee's film reviews for The Nation "the most
remarkable regular event in American journalism today."
Those columns, along with much of the movie criticism that
Agee wrote for Time through most of the 1940s, were
collected posthumously in Agee on Film: Reviews and
Comments, undoubtedly the most influential writings on film
by an American. Whether reviewing a Judy Garland musical or a wartime
documentary, assessing the impact of Italian neorealism or
railing against the compromises in a Hollywood adaptation
of Hemingway, Agee always wrote of movies as a pervasive,
profoundly significant part of modern life, a new art whose
classics (Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Vigo) he revered and whose
betrayal in the interests of commerce or propaganda he
often deplored. If his frequent disappointments could be
registered in acid tones, his enthusiasms were expressed
with passionate eloquence. This Library of America volume
supplements the classic pieces from Agee on Film with
previously uncollected writings on Ingrid Bergman, the Marx
Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Vittorio De Sica's
Shoeshine, and a wealth of other cinematic subjects. Agee's own work as a screenwriter is represented by his
script for Charles Laughton's unique and haunting
masterpiece of Southern gothic, The Night of the Hunter,
adapted from the novel by Davis Grubb. This collection also
includes examples of Agee's masterfully probing reporting
for Fortune-on subjects as diverse as the Tennessee Valley
Authority, commercial orchids, and cockfighting-and a
sampling of his literary reviews, among them appreciations
of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, S. J. Perelman, and
William Carlos Williams.
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