By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Schickel’s tough love: Agee's desperate and pathetic work
In his customary berth on page 2 of the Sunday Los Angeles Times Book Review (May 15), Richard Schickel disinters a predecessor at Time magazine as a movie reviewer, James Agee, and has a happy-dance on the remains. Upon the publication of a “desperate and pathetic” draft of a film treatment that Agee had written for Charlie Chaplin, the ever-benevolent Schickel writes with what reads like the yield of years of calculated hatred, “Such greatness as Agee achieved—and reviewing movies is a field that recruits clever souls but never noble ones—derives from the purity of his enthusiasms and distastes and the rather sporty style he devised to convey them. Some of this manner he borrowed from a forgotten but more trustworthy reviewer, Otis Ferguson of the New Republic… As Manny Farber observed in a tormented piece about the man who mentored him, Agee had no film esthetic… He praised movies that agreed with his liberal, humanistic and essentially liberal biases… He was like a music critic who attends operas for their plots… This document is as disheveled as Agee himself was. An alcoholic, an insomniac, with teeth rotting in his head and dress so slovenly and odoriferous he was banned from eating in the… Fox commissary, he evidently wrote this… in the deeper watches of drunken and desperate nights…. Agee was lucky mainly in his early death, which permitted people to mourn the works unwritten.” (The book is “Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay,” by John Wranovics, Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95.) [The link is subscriber-only.]
