James Agee, Pulitzer Prize winning author, was born in Knoxville in 1909. The intense writer was to enjoy little real success in his lifetime, but after death won accolades. In 1958 he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his uncompleted biographical novel A Death in the Family. Agee also wrote the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with Walker...
[reviewing Tycoon (1947)] Several tons of dynamite are set off in this movie, none of it under the right people.
2
[reviewing The Iron Curtain (1948)] If it could be proved that there is any nation on earth which does not employ spies, that would be news. This is just the same old toothless dog biting the same old legless man.
[on John Huston]: A natural-born anti-authoritarian individualistic libertarian anarchist, without portfolio.
5
[on Gracie Fields] I think Miss Fields is about as nice a woman over 40 as I have ever seen; I have certainly never seen anyone in movies to approach her in that age bracket.
6
[on Preston Sturges] Preston is like a man from the Italian Renaissance--he wants to do everything at once.
7
[on D.W. Griffith] There is not a man working in movies, nor a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anyone else.
8
[on Judy Garland] How good she is! She is no Venus, let us admit--but how delightful is her smile, how genuine her emotion, how sure her timing, and how brilliantly she brings off her effects.
9
[on Lauren Bacall] She has a javelin-like vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood had dreamed of in a long, long while.
10
A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints, halts, the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten. Now is that night one blue dew.
11
All over Alabama the lamps are out--Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
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Fact
1
He never lived to see "The Night Of The Hunter" (1955), the film of perhaps his best screenplay. He died in the back of a New York taxi some four months before its opening. After his death, the director of the film, Charles Laughton, sent his widow a telegram simply saying, "I loved him".
2
Once lived at 172 Bleecker Street (between MacDougal & Avenue of the Americas) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village district during the 1940s and 1950s.
3
He was also a film critic, and wrote for several magazines, including "Time". He sometimes reviewed the same film for more than one of those magazines, writing a completely new review each time rather than simply re-publishing the same one. His evolving opinions on these films can be gathered from these reviews. Among his most famous are the several he wrote for Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V (1944) before and after the British film opened in the U.S. in 1946, and the several he wrote championing Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was then receiving a very hostile reaction from audiences, who had no desire to see Chaplin playing a wife-murderer.
4
Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 7-11. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 1005.
5
He was buried on his farm in Hillsdale, New York, USA.
6
Loved the films of Charles Chaplin, and championed some of Chaplin's then-underappreciated work.
7
Engineered tryst between his best friend and second wife.
8
Once hung calmly out a 52nd-story window in New York City's Chrysler Building.
9
Posthumous Pulitzer Prize, 1958.
Writer
Title
Year
Status
Character
A Death in the Family
2002
TV Movie novel
All the Way Home
1981
TV Movie novel "A Death in the Family"
All the Way Home
1971
TV Movie novel "A Death in the Family"
All the Way Home
1963
novel "A Death in the Family"
Festival
1961
TV Series teleplay - 1 episode
The Night of the Hunter
1955
screen play
White Mane
1953
commentary: english-speaking version
Omnibus
1952-1953
TV Series writer - 5 episodes
Face to Face
1952
adaptation - segment "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"
$300,000
