Having long since given up most movies as a waste of time, I do not often read film reviews. Hence I came fresh to Agee on Film (McDowell, Obolensky, $6.50) and realized all I had missed. For here was a civilized, educated, highly literate critic, passionately devoted to what movies (and presumably radio and TV) could have become and did not.
The book is simply a reprint of most of his reviews of current films from 1941 to 1948, a few of them from Time, the majority from the Nation, plus a scattering of old essays from other publications. Quite frankly it is a gold mine of ideas, opinions, sharp insights and laments that practically all of the hundreds of movies he witnessed fell so far short of his own requirements—near perfection. In the Nation Agee poured out his soul; in Time, although he conformed to the prescribed Timese, he was brilliant, if occasionally smart-aleck, particularly in his briefs. In these he literally slaughtered his objects as no American has done since Mencken and Nathan of the Smart Set and the Mercury. Small wonder that he graduated from criticism to movie production, met the entrenched mediocrity, failed, and died at forty-five.
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