On September 5, 1949, a largely unknown forty-year-old writer named James Agee had an essay published in Life magazine. Titled “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” it was a paean to the silent screen comedians of yesteryear, and to the fine art of physical humor developed by their collective genius into an art form. The coming of sound to Hollywood in the late 1920s was a mass extinction event that swept a generation’s worth of talent from the cultural stage. Now, at the dawn of the 1950s, these pioneers and their herky-jerky films were all but forgotten. In a world before VCRs, late-night cable, Netflix, or the Internet, it was all but impossible to see them even if you wanted to.

Agee, afire with a sense of purpose and mission, sought to arrest that forgetfulness with his essay. An early film critic and soon-to-be screenwriter (his work in Hollywood would later include the scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter), he was, in the words of a friend, “a big, untidy man who frequently looked like a tramp and who cared not a bit for material things. . . Agee was extremely fastidious about many things — about people, about humanity, about music, movies and, above all, about writing. In his years as a critic, he anguished over books and films that less patient critics would write off as trash: somewhere, Agee felt, there had to be something worth praising.”

A thrice-married, hard-drinking insomniac with the tender heart of a poet, Agee began his now-classic treatise with a description of the type and quality of laughter that America had lost with the death of silent movies:

In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the bellylaugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a bellylaugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. . .

The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has had that treatment. . . The laughs today are pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short. They almost never build, as they used to, into something combining the jabbering frequency of a machine gun with the delirious momentum of a roller coaster.

In Agee’s view, those meticulously crafted and constructed laugh fests of yore — inspiring in audiences what he described as the “laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall” — had given way to cheap isolated one-liners strung together with little thought to momentum, timing, and nuance. As a reminder of what he was describing, he profiled a rich selection of the era’s shining lights, from Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon to Mack Sennett and his Keystone Cops. (more…)

Film blogger and sometimes Turner Classic Movies’ programmer,The Self-Styled Siren, came up with a terrific idea for a movie list: That which we love in filmdom that puts our cool credentials into question (And yes, I do have Cool Credentials. My mother keeps them with my badminton trophies). Siren describes the criteria for the list this way: 

“As always, it’s best to define terms. By uncool, the Siren doesn’t mean “slightly offbeat” or “quirky” or “underrated.” She means “courting hoots of derision from critical colleagues.” Picking a lesser work of a widely admired auteur doesn’t cut it, because after all, even late Hawks is still Hawks. And picking a film that was once lambasted, but is no longer, is also not exactly what the Siren had in mind.”

I would also add that there are certain uncool films that are now cool to like. The work of Ed Wood, for instance. Those choices shouldn’t count, either. We have to go for what’s embarrassing to admit to, and lucky for you there’s plenty to clean out of my uncool closet.

1. Fox Musicals: Everyone loves those big lavish MGM musicals of the forties and fifties, and those triumphs do represent for me the highest level of  artistic achievement we will ever see on film. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the hell out of the musicals Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century-Fox produced to help Americans through a Great Depression. The name of the game was “simple”; simple stories, simple tunes… And not one true classic film emerged from the bunch. These films weren’t about that. They were about innocent, joyful escapism and to help you along were such stars as Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda, Betty Grable, John Payne, Edward Everett Horton, Billy Gilbert, Charlotte Greenwood, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, and Cesar Romero. (more…)