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Greetings from Los Angeles, where Savant is enjoying Warners Controversial Collection and sniffing around a new stack of goodies, like Fox's House of Bamboo and Media Blasters Varan, the Finally Reviewable - Believable. This column is long, to cover something Savant doesn't normally cover:
Today Savant has a book report, on Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, The Writer and the Lost Screenplay by John Wranovics, from Palgrave MacMillan. James Agee was one of the first film critics to have his reviews published in print; Savant's perceptive sister gave me a copy of Agee on Film when I was in high school. This book does tells the untold story of Agee's publishing career and how he championed both Charles Chaplin and John Huston in print, and came to Chaplin's defense during the days when the comedian was persecuted by politicians and newspaper columnists. In what now might seem an opportunistic move, Agee's association with Huston led to an erratic Hollywood career of only a few years. This led to his becoming the principal screenwriter on two classic films, The African Queen and Night of the Hunter.
Agee mingled with a lofty Hollywood crowd and was present at the waning days of the Salka Viertel salon, a gathering place for intellectuals, European émigrés and poets like himself. Val Lewton and Greta Garbo might cross paths there. He takes a job doing a recut and narration track for a Phillipino movie about Genghis Kahn, which loses him the writing job on Huston's Moby Dick. But the book keeps as its backbone Agee's unending attempts to interest Chaplin in a screen story that eventually takes on the the title The Tramp's New World, the extended (78 pages) prose treatment for which is printed here for the first time. Agee had alcohol problems, suffered heart attacks and died in 1955, before Night of the Hunter was released. It's unlikely that Chaplin ever read his treatment, although we read a number of letters between the two men that might make the project possible, if the actor/director seriously thought of becoming the Little Tramp again.
The surprise here is that The Tramp's New World turns out to be a post-apocalyptic fantasy, conceived before the core movies in that subgenre - the first is probably Five, made in 1951. The little tramp is initially seems the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust, similar to the "purple death" that makes Harry Belafonte think he's the last man on Earth in 1959's The World, The Flesh and The Devil. As The Tramp has nobody to talk to, this part of the story is practically a pure silent film; Agee invents the cartoonishly morbid idea of the bomb leaving the city intact but converting people and vehicles to 2-dimensional photos of themselves, freezing the moment of their death on walls and leaving them like human puddles on the street. The story goes through a number of Chaplin themes as he first discovers a baby, then a woman, and finally a split society in which logical scientist survivors impose a regimented, non-spiritual rebirth of man. Charlie takes the other, more natural direction. A wordy and unwieldy document, the treatment pauses continually for Agee to explain that he hasn't worked out some aspects of his story, and devotes two pages to the reaction of The Tramp and the woman to hearing a piece of classical music. The writing has a fine understanding of Chaplin's kind of comedy but builds to an unwieldy clash of intellectual concepts far beyond anything in Monsieur Verdoux - or Things to Come or The Fountainhead, for that matter. It's also very difficult to read.
But the book is fascinating. Agee's literary celebrity was based on a lot of good film criticism and a few outspoken essays, and it launched him into refined Hollywood company where he only partially fit in. Wranovics' research connects a lot of dots in detail and depth, linking Chaplin's falling political fortunes to his steadfast friendship with composer Hanns Eisler, whose brother was a communist. It also explains strange tangential stories, like the series of events that make Lupita Tovar, the heroine of the Spanish version of Universal's Dracula, almost directly responsible for the eventual production of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre! Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at May 17, 2005 05:47 PM