When the critic met the Tramp

In the spring of 1947, Charles Chaplin brought “Monsieur Verdoux,” his first film in seven years, to New York for its world premiere. Those years had not been kind to Chaplin; his predilection for much younger women, culminating in a spectacular paternity trial in 1944, together with his radically leftist politics, had alienated substantial portions of the press and public. “Verdoux” -- chilly, charmless and preachy, unlike anything he had ever made before -- would only widen this breach.

There was the famous news conference where reporters, stirred by such journalistic paragons as Ed Sullivan (before his TV fame) and Hedda Hopper, bayed viciously at a bewildered Chaplin. He had perhaps expected that his obviously different and difficult film would not be universally acclaimed, but he was not anticipating a mob assault on his person and beliefs. In the hubbub, only one voice spoke up for him -- James Agee, then reviewing movies for Time magazine and the Nation. “How does it feel,” he asked, “to be an artist who has enriched the world with so much happiness ... to be derided and held up to hate and scorn by the so-called representatives of the American press?” Chaplin did not know who Agee was and, indeed, could not quite hear him. When the critic repeated himself, the star could offer only a “No comment” and a thank you.

More history led up to and developed from this encounter than is previously known, and it is the business of John Wranovics to explicate that narrative in “Chaplin and Agee,” which concludes with publication of the long-lost film treatment Agee wrote for the man he idolized above all other public figures.

We know, from the opening pages of Agee’s autobiographical novel “A Death in the Family,” that the terms of his endearment were adumbrated when he was 5 or 6 years old and his father took him to a nickelodeon to see a Chaplin film. He instantly fell in love with movies in general and Chaplin in particular. As readers of “Death” know, the elder Agee died in an auto accident shortly thereafter, and Wranovics persuasively speculates that the movie star became a sort of surrogate father to Agee.

That “sort of” understates the case. For it requires fandom of a peculiarly fawning sort to convert the image of a total stranger, appearing in fictions shaped to show him off to his best advantage, into a substitute for a real-life father. It is probably good that Agee became a movie critic, able to transfer adoration into appreciation, which he stated with high style and authority. In the particular case of “Verdoux,” his Time review prompted a growling memo from editor Henry Luce, wondering what was going on down there in the cinema section. The first draft of Agee’s Nation piece was 100 pages; even in cut form, it ran in an unprecedented three parts. One line excised from it: “Charlie Chaplin is, I believe, the greatest artist of our time, in any medium.” Oh Dad, dear Dad, hanging on the screen and feeling so glad.

Such greatness as Agee achieved -- and reviewing movies is a field that recruits clever souls but never noble ones -- derives from the purity of his enthusiasms and distastes and the rather sporty style he devised to convey them. Some of this manner he borrowed from a forgotten but more trustworthy reviewer, Otis Ferguson of the New Republic, who also died young (Agee was 46 when he died) but without leaving any book-length works behind.

Agee’s trick was to rationalize purely subjective responses in a confidential language that seemed to show a smart, good-natured fellow riffing casually on a subject everyone, in his day, was pretty casual about. He liked or disliked actors and directors because they did or did not speak to something deep and inchoate in his nature (Chaplin was but the grandest of these figures). But as Manny Farber observed in a tormented piece about the man who mentored him, Agee had no film aesthetic. Mostly, he praised movies that agreed with his liberal, humanistic and essentially literary biases. He rarely investigated imagery or editing, the visual language that sets film apart from the other narrative arts. He was like a music critic who attends operas for their plots.

This is, of course, a besetting sin of movie critics, doomed to write about an art that most entrancingly speaks in an un- (perhaps even anti-) written idiom. But at this time, Agee succumbed to another besetting critical sin: He wanted to make movies, not just review them. Frenziedly pursuing that goal, he surrendered a certain amount of critical and personal integrity, which Wranovics, in his otherwise excellent account, ignores. After Chaplin noticed him, Agee determined to write a movie for him, creating the untitled, virtually unreadable treatment Wranovics calls “The Tramp’s New World.”

Agee places Chaplin’s Tramp among the handful of survivors of an atomic holocaust. He, of course, is among the humble humanists, discovering the simple pleasure of living in an Edenic world free of mega-politics, mega-consumerism, mega-science. There is, naturally, another group of survivors, technocrats determined to reconstitute the world in a form that is, if anything, more oppressive than the one The Bomb destroyed. Their gadgetry seduces everyone in Chaplin’s little pre-hippy band to embrace their velvet-gloved fascism. Only the Tramp escapes and is last seen -- where else? -- heading down an open road toward freedom.

This document is as disheveled as Agee himself was. An alcoholic, an insomniac, with teeth rotting in his head and dress so slovenly and odoriferous he was banned from eating in the Twentieth Century Fox commissary, he evidently wrote this 79-page piece in the deeper watches of sundry drunken and desperate nights. Structurally chaotic, it is full of apologies for ideas not fully worked out. On the other hand, he devotes page upon page to scenes that, if they had made the final cut, would have required no more than seconds of screen time to realize. At best, it shows that Agee was a keen student of Chaplin’s basic tropes -- in particular, it offers many variants on “Modern Times” -- while demonstrating his natural sympathies for the Southern Agrarians, who in the 1930s proposed a Jeffersonian retreat to small farming as a cure for galloping urbanism and industrialism.

Agee’s treatment must also be credited for its panicky, naive, occasionally touching expression of a liberal-minded man’s fear of the dawning Atomic Age. But it is not, in any sense, the blueprint for a producible Chaplin movie. Chaplin’s true genius was kinetic. He had a natural, unsurpassed gift for conveying emotions through movement. What he had no talent for at all was verbalizing ideas -- his late movies sink under his attempts to do so. Agee, the literary gent, with minimal understanding of what makes film a unique expressive form, was playing to his idol’s late failings rather than to his early strengths.

The resulting treatment is a disaster. There is no firm evidence that Chaplin, who for better or worse wrote all his own material, ever actually read it. He did, however, befriend Agee, who became a kind of talismanic presence on the “Limelight” set. At roughly the same time, Agee attached himself to yet another hero, John Huston, for whom he wrote the first draft of “The African Queen.” There were other movie projects, although his prolix ventures that were produced had to be reshaped by other hands. He did, at least, make the passionately desired transition from critic to screenwriter, which was not, for him, an unambiguous triumph.

Paradoxically, Agee was lucky mainly in his early death, which permitted people to mourn the works unwritten and which assured his status as an object of the movie world’s largely unexamined reverence. Desperate and pathetic as it is, “The Tramp’s New World” may encourage a revised estimate of Agee’s gifts -- probably downward. *