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James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism

Agee on Film | uncollected film writing | The Night of the Hunter | journalism and film reviews More

Edited by Michael Sragow

“The most American of American movie critics … James Agee enters The Library of America as a twofer—and, in what seems like an LOA first, one volume is devoted to his ‘film writing.’” — The Village Voice

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Sanford Schwartz on the “emotional rightness and believability” of Pauline Kael’s film criticism

Interviews David Bordwell pays homage to the “daredevil criticism” of four pioneering film writers

The Moviegoer The primal pull of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter

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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. 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.

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.

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.

Michael Sragow, editor, is the film critic for the Baltimore Sun and author of a forthcoming biography of Victor Fleming. His reviews and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Examiner, and The New Yorker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian Of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents
Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments

Uncollected Film Writing

The Night of the Hunter

Selected Journalism and Book Reviews
Tennessee Valley Authority
Cockfighting
The U.S. Commercial Orchid
Book Reviews:
- After Many a Summer Day Dies the Swan, Aldous Huxley
- The Hamlet, William Faulkner
- In the Money, William Carlos Williams
- Ida, Gertrude Stein
- Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf
- James Joyce, Harry Levin
- Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy, Hugh l’Anson Fausset
- The Dream Department, S. J. Perelman
U.S. at War: “A Soldier Died Today”
Victory: The Peace
Europe: Autumn Story
The Nation: Democratic Vistas

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ISBN: 978-1-93108282-2 748 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 160 Library of America Series

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