Heroes

 

James Agee's screenplay for Chaplin wistfully featured the actor's long-abandoned Tramp character.

I read a book. I don't have much to say about it.

(Update: I was wrong. Consider yourself warned.)

That's not to say that I didn't learn anything from Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay by John Wranovics. For starters, I had known nothing about James Agee other than that he was a film critic, wrote "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (which I haven't read) and that he and Whittaker Chambers had worked together at Time magazine and admired each other's work. Now, though, I know that he was close to a saint, everyone loved him, and he worshipped Charlie Chaplin.

Let's get to that first item, the sainthood thing. I'm not going to write a biography of Agee here--there are many better ones out there than anything I could sketch out here and even after reading this book, I don't feel like I've gotten the whole story .What I do know, though, is that Wranovics is a very diligent researcher who quotes from Agee's correspondence and his friends at great length, with all of the quotes being of an extremely positive nature. My point is that this isn't the place to find a full-out, critical biography of Agee, nor is that the intent. It's just the story of how Agee left film criticism to go to Hollywood and work as a screenwriter, an action that--in Wranovics's version--seems to be almost solely motivated by Agee's desire to get a screenplay he'd written to Charlie Chaplin.

 

Agee worshipped Chaplin...but couldn't write for him.

Wranovics shows how Agee's admiration of Chaplin appeared throughout all forms of Agee's writing, from his fiction to his profiles of other people in the film industry and criticism; based on Wranovics's account, one might believe that Agee could have been writing a review of a pie recipe and thrown in an outburst about how Chaplin used pies in film, how Chaplin represented the simple piemakers of the world, and how, if this recipe had been composed by Chaplin, it would have been much, much better. I suspect that this is not quite the whole story of Agee's writing, but it is the point that Wranovics wants to make, and he makes it as thoroughly as a good student writing a paper after being told to put in many supporting examples.

Did that sound mean? I suppose it did, but I don't mean to be mean. I just mean that (I mean to find out how many times I can use "mean" in a paragraph) that there is something of the earnestness and focus of a thesis in this book. That doesn't make it unpleasant to read--I always enjoy reading about old Hollywood and Wranovics puts it all together well enough (much better than I'm putting together this little essay; I might have to fire myself). It's just that it is earnest, and slight and...worshipful. I get the feeling that Wranovics holds Agee in the same regard that the writer had for Chaplin and there's something about the tone that made me suspicious, that made me feel like I was just not getting the whole story.

Oh, the story! Back to that. Anyway, Agee had his first encounter with Chaplin at a press conference Chaplin was holding for his 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux." The event had quickly become an attack on Chaplin's politics and personal life, and Agee stood up for Chaplin with a question meant to direct the attention towards how badly the other writers were treating the actor. The story grew in telling over the years, but nonetheless, Agee felt that it, along with other connections he had to Hollywood, was enough to give him entree to write to Chaplin asking him to read a screenplay he was writing for him. That didn't work, but Agee manipulated assignments from Life magazine to send him to Hollywood, eventually quitting the magazine life to concentrate on writing for film. He managed to become part of Chaplin's social circle, and did get the screenplay to him. It seems unclear whether Chaplin actually read it; Wranovics says that he gave it other people to look at, but doesn't explain whether that was with a, "Here, I haven't read this, take a look at it and see if it looks interesting to you" or "I thought there was something here and want you to take a look at it." Whichever, Chaplin obviously didn't make the film. He was in the middle of "Limelight" when Agee came to Hollywood (by this time, it often took Chaplin several years to make a movie), and then left the US, never to return.

The first part of the book is about Agee and his attempt to get Chaplin interested in the screenplay; the second half is the rarely seen screenplay itself. That was the part that I most wanted to read in this book, but good lord, it's a mess. It's not an actual screenplay, but rather Agee's attempts to work through a number of synopses, or maybe you'd call it a treatment--except it's not tight and organized enough to be a treatment. It's really nothing more than a number of ideas and segments, some very detailed, some just sketches. What it is not is anything that could have been even remotely filmable.

Agee's screenplay is titled "The Tramp's New World" and stars Chaplin's tramp character as one of the few survivors of a nuclear holocaust. A large chunk of the story, as indicated by Agee's notes, would have involved Chaplin doing an extended pantomime sequence of the Tramp playing and getting into comic scrapes in the remains of the world (clearly, Agee wasn't familiar with radiation poisoning; I'm not sure how aware the general public in the 1940s was of that problem). He eventually finds a baby, and then a young woman. She's not the mother of the baby, but the three settle into a pseudo-family situation. That only lasts a short time, though--another man enters the picture and becomes the husband/father/head of the family, leaving the Tramp to be something like a fond uncle and babysitter (Agee seemed extremely anxious to make sure the Tramp didn't get the girl or even had a hint of love or sexuality). Meanwhile, somewhere, there are a group of scientists who survive, but Agee regards scientists as the bad guys--they are pure intellect and only interested in creating cold, dehumanizing machines. A sketch shows how they can't open a can of food and have to find a "simple housewife" to do it for them. Another vignette has them inventing a machine that will allow a couple to have a baby without even touching each other. Agee describes a melodramatic illustration of this with a young couple who are paired off together but only are allowed to sit next to each other in glass booths, and when given the baby they created, they are discouraged from showing it any affection. Meanwhile, another group of people, off where the Tramp and his little family are living, have formed a new utopian community. People don't have to work, but work because they like to work. They share everything, they only make simple tools and things; there are no more machines. They wear bright, charming clothes. They sit and tell stories and dance with daisy chains for amusement. Okay, that's not in the synopsis, but it might as well be.

And it goes on and on like that. There aren't scenes or dialogue, only descriptions. Anyone who read this would be inclined to believe that Agee had no use for the modern world whatsoever, and wanted to turn the clock back in so many ways. The film itself, as Agee writes it, is virtually a silent film, something which had disappeared about twenty years before. His idea for a Chaplin film revives the Tramp character, who Chaplin had left behind years before and had no intention of reviving. Wranovics writes that Agee had a great deal of anxiety about living in a nuclear world--obviously, that was a big, new fear for everyone in the 1940s, but it plagued Agee beyond the norm. There are always two types of people when some kind of potential danger is in the air. For example, some people hear there might be a flu epidemic and think, okay, better watch out for that and go on with their lives. Others, though, put on masks and gloves, stop making contact with anyone they don't have to, decide they'd rather quit their job than work in an office with potential germ carriers, and make maps marking off places where people die of the disease. Agee wasn't quite the latter case, but he definitely leaned towards that category. Yet, as much as he feared the destruction of the world by a nuclear bomb, his screenplay (I keep calling it that, but it really isn't) shows that he also thought it would be an opportunity for people to start over, shed the modern industrial life, and go back to simpler times. Agee's writing here is less a screenplay than a fantasy about what he'd like the world to be, or maybe what he expected it to be when he was a child--a world where silent films still rule, Charlie Chaplin is still the same actor/character he had been twenty years before, evil scientists are banished, and people live in bucolic happiness in a society built on sharing. Unfortunately for Agee, this doesn't work--movies looked lifelike, so people wanted them to sound lifelike; Chaplin grew and changed; people can only take so much sharing before they begin to desire their own things (it is interesting that Agee believes scientists steal individualism, but doesn't seem to get that a society built on sharing and communal work also demands that people subsume individual needs and desires).

Agee did get screenwriting credit for "The African Queen" and "Night of the Hunter," and also produced some material for television, so he must have been able to work in a script form. His rambling synopses are interesting more as a portrait of a time, though, rather than as anything related to film. I think I had gone into this hoping I'd get to read a lost gem that would leave me imagining what it would have been like if Chaplin had been able to do it. But I suppose that if it had been brilliant, someone would have found a way to make it during the last fifty years. As it is, it is best left alone.

"Chaplin and Agee" is a good addition for those fascinated by either man, but definitely more sidebar material than serious information. On a purely technical note,the index is a bit shoddy, and the book contains one of the all-timers on the fact-check failure list: Wranovics writes that Eisenhower defeated Truman in the 1952 presidential election. Ouch. Hello, is there an editor in the house? Anyway, I didn't love it, but it did get me just interested enough to maybe look for more about Agee, or at least his film reviews. Because I need all the help I can get when it comes to writing reviews.

 

Hello goodbye.