James Rufus Agee (1909-1955), was the posthumous winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1958 for his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family. He is our family’s most distinguished member and comes from the Tennessee side of the family.
After reading A Death in the Family, I decided to read his collection of film criticism, published posthumously (Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (2000). Film was a lifelong obsession for Agee and he literally wrote hundreds of reviews for The Nation and Time Magazine from 1941 to 1948. The English poet W. H. Auden who didn’t enjoy films, nevertheless declared his writing in The Nation as “the most remarkable regular event in American journalism.” Agee is considered the first writer to recognize movies as a great new twentieth-century art form.
Additionally, Agee wrote five screen plays, including The African Queen (1952) directed by his friend Walter Huston and the creepy thriller The Night of the Hunter (1955) directed by Charles Laughton. (I had the opportunity to have lunch with John Huston in London and asked him about their friendship. Huston told me that he had “no idea that Agee was up all night writing the film script and still playing tennis with him first thing in the morning.”) Agee died when he was forty-five.
So, it is unsurprising that my sister and I inherited (among other obsessions) a deep and abiding love of film. We love to spend time together discussing our favorite films and directors.
My sister and I diverge greatly in our tastes in film. I am passionate about the English films of Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988). They worked together as The Archers (1939-1972), while my sister is drawn to French New Wave films and directors.
My three favorites Archer films are: A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I Am Going (1945), and A Matter of Life & Death (1946). I could rhapsodies about these films for a number of blogs with their ability to reveal the hidden motives and depths of the characters; show the deeper spiritual and mystical elements inherent in our ordinary and everyday experience; the influence of the past in the present, and the magical expression of nature as a force in our lives. They are masterful and I gravitate towards them over and over.
The Powell and Pressburger films remain so influential that Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation was instrumental in having their film The Red Shoes (1948) restored in 2009. Interestingly, Scorsese’s film editor Thelma Schoonmaker was married to Michael Powell. Schoonmaker was the editor on many Scorsese’s films from the 1980s onwards including Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, and Gangs Of New York.
Although I never had the opportunity to meet James Agee, his dedication to film, his legacy as a film critic and as a script writer has supported my passion for films as an art form and as a forum for ideas, imagination and unlimited pleasure.
