Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies
by James Agee

Series Editor Martin Scorsese 
Introduction by David Denby

The Modern Library $14.95 paperback

In his Time review of Robert Florey's God Is My Co-Pilot (1945), James Agee wrote, "The picture is not as bad, I must admit, as I am making it sound; but it is not good enough to make me feel particularly sorry about that." 

Yes. James Agee (1909-1955) delivered intelligent, serious, playful, moral, graceful reviews and film-related commentary for both Time and The Nation for most of the 1940s. There were also landmark pieces for Life, such as his cover story on silent comedy and an intricate profile on John Huston ("Nobody in movies can beat Huston's record for trying to get away with more than the traffic will bear.") Agee would later work with Huston as scriptwriter on The African Queen (1951).

After Agee's posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a demand arose for a collection of the author's movie writings and in 1958, Agee on Film was published to great acclaim. The present edition in the Modern Library: The Movies series, can introduce Agee to new readers and save longtime fans the haunting of used book stores.

There is something salubrious about most of the films being from the '40s. Knowing that Agee watched them during that period roughly between the end of the Depression and the start of the Cold War - with WWII in its midst - and reading his reviews one after another in long gulps, give us a unique perspective on ways political-social climates influence filmmaking. And vice versa. Also to note, as New Yorker film critic David Denby writes in this volume's introduction, "Agee was still in touch with the heroic age of the cinema. Agee on Film is pre-television criticism; Agee was not inundated by images, as we are..."

The book makes a great classic Movie/Video Guide, for in addition to Agee's insights on direction, cinematography and performance, there are shots-in-the-arm pieces on Sergei Eisenstein, Rene'Clair and D.W. Griffith.

Agee could be hard to please, though as Denby says, he "worked with his characteristic 'yes, but' or 'no, but' fairness on movie after movie."

Oh, and did I mention how funny he is? When he wrote that Preston Sturges "always understood the liberating power of blending comedy and realism, wild farce and cool intellect," James Agee knew what he was talking about. 

-Lisa Mitchell

Kubrick
by Michael Herr

Grove Press - $18.95 

In the wake of Stanley Kubrick's unexpected demise a little more than a year ago, the biographers, commentators, naysayers and glory boys have been out in force. Paradoxically the last year was a big one in Stanley Kubrick's life, as it actually featured the release of a Stanley Kubrick film; an event that came around about as often as Halley's comet. The conspiracy theorists wondered if we would ever know if the film was "finished" or not, finished that is to the satisfaction of its celebrated creator, who had been known to still be twiddling with his babies even as they played to packed houses of awestruck novelty-seekers.

In the scant four months that elapsed between Kubrick's passing and the film's release, Frederic Raphael, the co-screenwriter of Eyes Wide Shut, had rapidly murdered some trees and had his own memoir ready and available for the public's delectation. The book, a self-loathing diatribe unoriginally titled Eyes Wide Open, would have us believe that Kubrick's greatest failing was his inability to identify the level of Raphael's own genius. Surprisingly, despite Raphael's many attempts, which included talking at Kubrick in numerous languages and writing the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut in various country houses around the world, Kubrick remained resistant, resolutely unmoved in his refusal to acknowledge the accumulated wisdom of his writing partner.

In the sorry aftermath of Kubrick's death, Eyes Wide Shut's critical and commercial failure, and the Monday-morning quarterbacking of Kubrick experts everywhere, it has taken former Kubrick-collaborator Michael Herr to set the record a little straighter. That Herr is a better writer than Raphael is not in doubt. (In fact, it could be argued that Eyes Wide Shut would be a better film if Herr had been co-screenwriter.) But is Kubrick by Michael Herr a better book?

On the evidence of the pages at hand it doesn't look like it. In fact, it's not really a book at all, it's more like a pamphlet they used to hand you on street corners in the old days, inviting you to join an obscure sect. Thin and weirdly laid out, the tome is comprised of two lengthy essays Herr penned for Vanity Fair, both published in the magazine during the last year. Don't get me wrong, both essays are terrific, the first the stronger than the second, but do they a book make?

There is some previously unpublished transitional material, but none of any consequence. Michael Herr is a great writer, and it's fun reading his prose on any subject, and he is fired up to describe his friend and colleague the great Stanley K. "Stanley was the big fisherman. He played everybody like a fish, but all different fish, from the majestic salmon to the great white shark, from the agile trout to the sluggish mudfish, each to be played in its particular way according to the speed of the current and the fighting capacity of his adversary, and of course his desire and even need for the fish."

Herr met Kubrick 20-odd years ago through a mutual friend. They had great conversations, endless phone calls, epic episodes of literary endeavor and of couse the culminating experience of working together on Full Metal Jacket. (Herr had written the Vietnam memoir Dispatches and contributed to Apocalypse Now.) He found the director to be tireless in demanding diligence, rapacious in his appetite for all his writers could provide - and he was cheap too. "It really was Stanley's feeling that it was a privilege to be working with him, and it wasn't remotely the way it sounds, it was a reality that existed far beyond any question of arrogance or humility. I agreed with it then, and nothing ever happened to make me feel any differently. Still, it made him happy, knowing that I would never make more than the lamest pro forma difficulties over what he loved to call 'emoluments.' Probably somewhere he pitied me for being so careless with my 'price,' for offering him my soft white throat like that, knowing as I did that he would never find it on his pathological screen not to take advantage of it."

The overriding sense of Kubrick that Herr conveys to us is his essential greatness; his singularity of mind and purpose, and his devouring and abiding interest in almost everything. He chose to make films but Kubrick would have excelled in any business; the fact is he made Kubrick films that are almost an entirely different product. Designed by hand as it were, built to mathematical precision and then delivered like a giant edifice; an ocean liner launched into the cinematic waters. Herr's second essay is his defense, angry at times, of Eyes Wide Shut. A former film critic of The New Leader, Herr professes himself not to have been much of one, but his commentaries are pithy and idiosyncratic. In truth, can Eyes Wide Shut be defended in traditional terms? It's a movie that would have been directed by no one else. Those that "get" Kubrick "got" it, and those that don't, didn't care. Herr gives up his defense early on, realizing intuitively that it's a waste of breath. "As a friend of his, I never used to care that much when I'd read some of the crap they wrote about him, but now that he's dead, I have to say it upsets me. Of course it's always painful to see a great artist belittled by fools, simply because of their mean confused negative conjectures, misconception layered upon misconception, awesomely committed to misconception."

Herr's eloquent monograph brings Kubrick into sharp relief and conjures the reality of Stanley the man better than anything I've previously read. Not a biography, not an analysis, barely a book. It's more like a letter from a friend, explaining his sadness at the loss of someone you didn't know, but wished you had.

-Nick Redman