James Agee on silent comedy

James Agee wrote a piece for Life magazine called “Comedy’s Greatest Era” which appeared on September 3, 1949. It was Agee’s tribute to the masters of silent films – the Charlie Chaplins, the Buster Keatons, and more. If you are interested in silent films, if you love Chaplin or Keaton, then I cannot recommend this piece of Agee’s highly enough. It’s one of those moments when someone steps up to the plate and expresses FOR you what might be in your heart. Like: you know why you love Buster Keaton, and you could rave about this or that movie, or what it was about him that so touched you … but it takes a master to come along and clarify things, put them into context. What is so marvelous about Agee’s article is how much you can feel the LOVE behind his words. He LOVES those guys. A lot of times, I LOVE people (like – er – Cary Grant, for example) … but it’s difficult to put into words WHY. I certainly give it my best shot, and it’s a fun exercise for me … but then I read Pauline Kael’s famous piece on Grant (thanks, Stevie!!!), or I read Richard Schickel’s book of appreciation on Cary Grant … and they can do it so much better than I can. They put into words what I can’t. I read their stuff and find myself nodding, thinking: “Yes, yes, that’s it, that’s perfect!!” A great critic of anything can do that.

While I was on the Cape, we went to a used bookstore, and I came across the compilation of all of James Agee’s film writing (he was a reviewer for The Nation) – and bought it up greedily. The book starts with “Comedy’s Greatest Era”, which was a massive article – and apparently, it received one of the greatest responses in the history of Life magazine. It brought back a resurgence of interest in Charlie Chaplin, in silent films, and to this day – Agee’s piece is referenced whenever any of those guys come up. It’s the high water mark.

I’ll be posting bits and pieces from it, just to give you a taste of it. It makes you want to run out and rent all of those old silent films!!

Here is Agee on Chaplin:

With Tillie’s Punctured Romance, in 1914, he became a major star. Soon after, he left Sennett when Sennett refused to start a landslide among the other comedians by meeting the raise Chaplin demanded. Sennett is understandably wry about it in retrospect, but he still says, “I was right at the time.” Of Chaplin he says simply, “Oh well, he’s just the greatest artist that ever lived.”

None of Chaplin’s former rivals rate him much lower than that; they speak of him no more jealously than they might of God. We will try here only to suggest the essence of his supremacy. Of all comedians he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion. As for pure motion, even if he had never gone on to make his magnificent feature-length comedies, Chaplin would have made his period in movies a great one singlehanded even if he had made nothing except The Cure or One AM…

Before Chaplin came to pictures people were content with a couple of gags per comedy; he got some kind of laugh every second. The minute he began to work he set standards — and continually forced them higher. Anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook trout in The Gold Rush or embarrassed by a swallowed whistle in City Lights, has seen perfection.

Agee feels that movies (comedy, in particular) really lost something when they switched to sound. By relying on the words to be funny, as opposed to physical action, much of the hilarity was lost – became intellectual. The generosity of these silent comedians is extraordinary, when you think about it. There was nothing they could rely on but their own physical genius, and their own driving desire to tell a story with their faces and their bodies.

More on Chaplin:

The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplin’s work. He could probably pantomime Bryce’s The American Commonwealth without ever blurring a syllable and make it paralyzingly funny into the bargain. At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.

(Trivia moment: the blind girl in City Lights was Cary Grant’s first wife. ONWARD!)

Now for Agee’s words on Buster Keaton, which, frankly, blew me away. I would love to hear people’s responses to all of this – people who are fans of these old silent films. There are those staunchly in the Chaplin camp, and then there are those firmly in the Keaton camp … I would love to hear people’s thoughts on these genius guys.

But here’s Agee on Buster Keaton:

Very early in [Keaton’s] movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

Gorgeous. I love people with pro-active comedic minds.

And here, in my opinion, Agee outdoes himself:

Much of the charm and edge of Keaton’s comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies — the negatives of which have been lost — were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because “dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than “dry” wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

That is some damn fine writing and analysis there. I have found his last sentence to be very true. People who love Buster Keaton really LOVE him. They ‘cannot care mildly’.

And, until James Agee had expressed it, I hadn’t been really conscious of the “freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia” in his work – but I think that is so right ON. Yes. Melancholia. Indeed. It may just be me projecting stuff onto that handsome stoic face … but if so, then all the better!

I’ll post more from this ground-breaking essay later.