Of all the film critics practicing their craft in 1946, the most interesting was James Agee who reviewed movies for both Time magazine and The Nation.Time readers of the day most likely would not have known his name; none of the magazine's reporters or critics had bylines, as if the whole magazine were written by a single anonymous writer. The Nation had a small readership of a left-leaning cognoscenti, some of whom who were well acquainted with the 36-year old writer and few of whom were frequent moviegoers.
Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, originally assigned and then killed by Fortune, was published as a book to critical acclaim and dismal sales in 1941. He had published essays and poems in Partisan Review,The New Masses and the New Directionsannual. One well-received prose poem, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," an elegy to his childhood, would be set to music by Samuel Barber in 1947. He had attracted negative attention, as well as caustic ridicule from the New Yorker, for his piece for Partisan Review decrying the kind of "pseudo-folk" art that he wrote one encountered in "Oklahoma!," "Carmen Jones" and the Paul Robeson version of "Othello." The problem was that he admitted he had not actually seen any of these productions because he was certain they would be bad. He would not become truly famous until his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family was published in 1957, two years after his death.
Agee's reviews are still read today, mostly because they are very funny and very intelligent. He often argued with himself in print and sometimes he changed his mind between his review for Time and his column for The Nation. He had retrograde taste, feeling that movies had gone to hell since the silent films of his youth. He championed Charlie Chaplin, and silent film comedy in general, the neo-Realists working in Europe and the low budget horror films of Val Lewton. He usually disliked over-produced, big budget studio-made dramas with soaring musical scores and was skeptical of the pseudo-realism he found in agit-prop drama, film noir and New Yorker articles and fiction. He liked Ingrid Bergman, the top female star of the time, but had mixed feelings about Orson Welles, the critical darling.
Agee’s film reviews as well as his screenplays for “Night of the Hunter” and “African Queen” were collected in the two volume Agee on Film. In 2005, Library of America published a two-volume collection of his fiction and articles. His film reviews for The Nation and selected Times reviews and features for Time are included in Volume Two. His unsigned reviews from Time can be found at the magazine’s free online archive. The hard-drinking Bohemian, who was the conflicted son of a blue-collar father from the Tennessee hills and an Anglo-Catholic Knoxville society lady, has been the subject of several biographies and critical studies. Among the many recent online sources on Agee’s life and career are biographical appreciations from David Denby in The New Yorker, Phillip Lopate in The Nation, John Leonard in The New York Times and Stephen Henighan in The Times of London.