“He was far from reliable — he could write off Kane as a reservoir of hackneyed tricks, and he was of the opinion that Chaplin and Huston were without equal in America. But he wrote like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it — out with it, as if it were a girl, drinking with it; driving in the night with it. That direct physical response was new, it was done with terrific dash and insight, and it surely intuited the way people responded to movies in the forties. It was also, it seems to me, a powerful influence on Pauline Kael — I have a fond dream of the two of them snarling at each other, like the characters in The African Queen.”
From David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated
Agee’s ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ rests on my ‘Books To Be Read Multiple Times’ shelf along with Ulysses, The Horse’s Mouth, Day of the Locust, Life;A User’s Manual, All Quiet on the Western Front, Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain, etc. and so forth and so on and even including would you believe it Lorna Doone.
I love Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – he’s SUCH an amazing writer.
And, uhm … Lorna Doone? Really?? I don’t think I’ve ever read it – good, huh?