Michael Sragow first encountered James Agee’s 1940s film writing for
Time and
The Nation during boyhood trips to the library in New Jersey, where Sragow grew up. After attending Agee’s alma mater, Harvard University, he wound up a film critic himself, writing for various alt-weeklies (including the
Boston Phoenix,
SF Weekly, and
Seattle Weekly),
Rolling Stone,
The New Yorker, Salon.com, and, since 2001,
The Sun. And now, Sragow, 54, is poised to help pass potential inspiration on to a new generation of movie nerds by editing
Agee on Film, a new deluxe Library of America edition of the late literary polyglot’s collected film reviews, as well as some of his other journalism pieces and his script for the sui generis 1955 Southern-gothic fantasia
Night of the Hunter. Genial, voluble, and somewhat abashed at being on the other side of the questions for a change, Sragow sat down to chat recently at a Mount Vernon café about Agee, the state of film criticism, and why people just didn’t get that last Ashley Judd flick.
City Paper: Most filmgoers these days have no idea who James Agee is. What do you think the value of his work is for people reading him now, especially since they probably haven’t—and probably won’t—see most of the movies he’s writing about?
Michael Sragow: It’s funny you say that. A few years ago my old friend Terry Rafferty, who I used to share the Current Cinema column at The New Yorker with, was doing a course at Princeton on critical writing, and he asked me to come in one day, and it happened to be the day he was doing Agee on Film. A lot of the reaction from the kids—and these are highly motivated Princeton undergraduates—was, Why do you expect us to read about these movies when we haven’t seen them? And we looked at each other, ’cause the movies he’d asked them to read about were like Hail the Conquering Hero and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Children of Paradise. (laughs) And I said, “Well, what’s the problem? When I started reading Agee, we didn’t have video or a nearby rep theater. Now, go out and see these movies.”
I’ve always been a believer in journalism that puts things in front of people’s faces that seem to be a little beyond their immediate recognition, whether it’s vocabulary or references, and that if you do that, and there’s a sort of compulsion element to the writing, a sort of inner passion to the sentences, a raving hyperbolic commitment to the subject at hand, that that’s going to compel you to figure something out about it. I hope that’s what happens with Agee.
The other thing with Agee is that I think he really is the critic as artist. I think you can read his criticism and almost get the purest expression of a lot of the things people love about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Death in the Family or any of his more completely rounded, isolated literary works.
As a fiction writer, he’s known as this great American chronicler of childhood—A Death in the Family has probably been taught in as many child psychology courses as literature courses, as a record of a child losing a parent at an early age and what that does to you. But in a way, I think that trauma opened him up to the idea that, especially in a country as open-ended as America, that there’s this constant sense of self-creation and renewal. Even Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, despite its social documentation, is as much, in a good way, about someone trying to find out who he is. In the movie stuff, even when he’s writing about Meet Me in St. Louis—the great immediate connection he has with Margaret O’Brien in the Halloween scene—it connects to that really raw side of him. It finally gets expressed in this beautiful poetic prose, but it comes out of this place where childhood is this extremely vulnerable state that he never really leaves behind.
People are likely to read film criticism for thumbs up or thumbs down, or a viewer’s guide, and I don’t think those are completely unimportant functions by any means. But I hope people will read Agee and get a sense of criticism as literature. And as fun reading—he’s hilarious.
CP: Well, one of the things that’s so distinctive about his writing, compared to a lot of criticism now, is that emotional quality. He’s not hedging or intellectualizing if he likes something—he’s all in.
MS: Yeah. I think he’s at his best when he says he loves something. [In his review], he first says Shoeshine is just one of the greatest things ever made and he adores it—and it is. And near the end of the year, maybe one of these year-end pieces, he writes that he may have overvalued it, and [you’re] like, “No, no, no. . . . ”
On the other hand, I like that he sort of ruminates and ruminates on why he feels a certain way. People think that’s hairsplitting or woolgathering these days, but to me it shows this other lost thing about his criticism, and maybe people will find it quaint or maybe people will find it galvanizing, but he really wrote as if there was a posterity in movies. And just the whole culture’s not geared to that now. When he writes about The Best Years of Our Lives and he lists all these caveats that he has and yet still thinks it’s this great movie, I think it’s partly because he’s looking so far in the distance and thinking, One day this movie will be seen for, whatever its faults and virtues, one of these great steps towards a realistic view of American life in the movies. And I love that about his writing. I don’t know where you could write like that anymore.
CP: Well, he also wrote movies, and considering that among the small number of scripts he wrote were The African Queen, a major Hollywood classic, directed by John Huston, and Night of the Hunter, directed by actor Charles Laughton. That’s a pretty good track record. When working on the book, how did you decide what screenplay to print?
MS: African Queen is a wonderful movie, but a lot of it’s dependent on the director’s work with those actors. And it was much less Agee’s film than Night of the Hunter. There’s so much apocrypha about the movie, including the widespread belief that Laughton just threw out Agee’s script and wrote it himself. We got a copy of Agee’s first draft, which only became available in 2003, and it was just shocking to me. Here was this legend about this nine-pound script that was unwieldy and had nothing to do with the finished movie, and almost everything people remember about that movie is in Agee’s first draft. And it’s not nine pounds. (laughs) It’s maybe 140 typescript pages over the usual 140 typescript pages.
CP: There’s an interesting lineage traceable here. Agee was the first major American film critic, and the late Pauline Kael, who’s maybe the only writer who had a more profound influence on American film criticism, was an Agee fan. You were a friend and colleague of Kael’s and just edited Agee’s collected criticism. Do you think it’s possible for film criticism to still have that same kind of literary or intellectual influence that Agee and Kael had?
MS: Well, I think you’ve got to go on in the belief that it’s still happening, or it’s still possible within whatever limits you have.
Pauline’s voice was so different, and equally seductive. I think what she took from Agee, and something I think hasn’t been remarked on enough, in the very first column [Agee] wrote for The Nation, he said basically that he wanted it to be a conversation between movie lovers. And that was the great breakthrough—not to take this high position as a critic or viewer, but to speak about it in this very informal, improvisational way. And she really took that and ran with it.
I think that one thing that Agee had was that it was a time when people did appreciate the literary quality of journalism more. Even at Time—his editor was T.S. Matthews, who later wrote a book on T.S. Eliot. These were guys who understood where he was coming from, and he used that very well. He had incredible latitude to write about whatever he wanted to do.
The thing that was great about Pauline was that she was intransigent—if she saw a Godfather II, there was no way she wasn’t going to write 6,000 words about it and get it into The New Yorker.
I think there are a lot of people today who are writing as well as they can. I think you have to blame editors a lot—editors and publishers and the way they see reviewing now. I think part of it is, though, that they’re responding to the audience. I don’t know whether it was just a blip on the cultural radar that people took movies seriously and wanted to read about them [in the past], or whether it was the kind of movies being made that demanded that kind of expression. But I think you’ve got to find ways, in today’s format, of getting at the heart of a movie.
CP: Are there particular filmmakers working these days whose work you almost always love? Or hate?
MS: I must admit that the whole Clint Eastwood thing, to me, is one of the great mysteries of contemporary film criticism. I don’t get what his directing is supposed to be about, and I don’t get what these movies are supposed to be about. But then Unforgiven is an example of a how even filmmakers I don’t like can surprise me. Of course, Unforgiven had a gifted screenwriter, David Webb Peoples.
I’m in a hopeful state about American movies, but a lot of the veteran directors I really, really like are having a hard time. Unless you’ve had that Spielberg-sized hit, you don’t have enough clout to get the movies made that you want to get made. And most of my favorite directors, and maybe this says something about me, are people who still believe in movies as this great popular art and entertainment but still want to do interesting things with it.
Like Phil Kaufman, who did The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I think he’s just a great director, and I think a lot of his recent movies have been unfairly panned because he tried to do interesting things with them. Right before I moved out here, I was teaching a class at Berkeley and showed them Rising Sun, with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, based on the really xenophobic Michael Crichton book, which Kaufman managed to turn into this kind of admiring look at Japanese culture. It’s amazing how rich it is, and yet it was panned. And it even did well [at the box office], but it was so disliked. . . . I think Kaufman probably has five projects up his sleeve that would probably be better than anything in theaters.
CP: He did Quills as well, right?
MS: It was one of the last ones, which, again, I found a really, really entertaining movie. Again, it was a serious movie that was also a showmanlike movie. He did this other movie, a straight-ahead thriller called Twisted with Ashley Judd, that just got royally panned, and I thought it was a really, really interesting movie, and fun and surprising.
CP: I think people got tired of movies featuring Ashley Judd in peril, holding a gun.
MS: Well, you hop on things at different times, and you try to do something different with it, like have her actually play a character who you’re not sure if she has a heart of gold or not. (laughs) She’s this sort of sex addict, but at the same time she’s doing things that’d be really cool and funny if it were Brad Pitt. That’s sort of the strategy of the movie.
The whole idea of American film, these genres, were built on doing things like that—taking established forms that people liked and twisting them a little bit. It seems to have gone.
A lot of the films I’ve most enjoyed are like that. And I still get e-mails, mostly from people who haven’t seen the movie, saying, “You’re the only one who liked this movie! What are you doing?” (laughs) And I ask, “Well, have you seen it?” “No.”
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