AGEE ON FILM, volume 1, Essays and Reviews by James Agee
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B0027WZJZU
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Wesleyan Film)
Reeling: Film Writings 1972-1975
An American in Paris (BFI Film Classics)
Withnail & I (BFI Modern Classics)
desire to honor went into it, and I have no desire to laugh at that; but it is impossible to accept the result, except in a kind of fascination. This is probably the most deadly-accurate picture that will ever be made of what war looks like through the lenses of a housewives'-magazine romance. In those terms it is to be recommended. Some reviewers who grant that the story itself is painful feel that the picture is redeemed by the deep sincerity of the players and by the powerful realism of the
beyond our comprehension. (Watch especially the guerrilla leader, the girl, and the two leading Nazis.) I was particularly interested to see the almost slapstick scorn with which a dying German is treated (good, I infer, for howls of laughter), and the attitude toward religion. God is repeatedly scratched behind the ears as He passes and slapped affectionately on the rump to make it stick; and toward the end, in a clear bid for applause, an old priest grabs a Nazi soldier and bashes his skull in
you can do in that way is as dead as an inch-by-inch description or a perfectly naturalistic painting, compared with accepting instead the still scarcely imagined difficulties and the enormous advantages of submerging your actors in the real thing, full of its irreducible present tense and its unpredictable proliferations of energy and beauty. I regret too that with sets even as good as they had they gave only token shots of the city for its own sake, free from the advancement of the plot or the
insipid, but I think she is touching and exact in her defenseless romanticism and in a special kind of short-lipped English beauty, appropriate to the period and to Sibyl's class, and evocative of milkmaids in eighteenth-century pornographic prints. In general, too, Mr. Lewin's modifications of the story and his outright in· ventions seem sensible, and I feel, sympathetically, that he has tried very hard to transfer the tone of the novel to the screen. Yet for all its oddity and outright weakness
the visual character, tore his intensely silent style to bits and destroyed the illusion within which he worked. He gallantly and correctly refuses to regard himself as "retired." Besides occasional bits, spots and minor roles in Hollywood pictures, he has worked on summer stages, made talking comedies in France and Mexico and clowned in a French circus. This summer he has played the straw hats in Three Men on a Horse. He is planning a television program. He also has a working agreement with
