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CHAPLIN AND AGEE is the story of a screenplay and, as a result, has the right to be a little bit glamorous. Unfortunately, like a lot of screenplays, it is a story about failure, disappointment and heartache, but there's enough glamour along the way to compensate for it.
You may know the story of Charlie Chaplin, even though his best work is from the long-ago silent film era. CHAPLIN AND AGEE focuses on the latter part of his career, in the 1950s, when he is best known for his Communist political leanings, and the subsequent hounding he took for them from Senator Joe McCarthy and his followers. (Readers who are not convinced that McCarthy was the darkest character in modern American political life will find CHAPLIN AND AGEE slowgoing.) At this point, Chaplin is in the process of leaving his "Little Tramp" character behind (the Tramp's last appearance was in the 1940 classic The Great Dictator) and moving on to different fare.
Chaplin's 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux, plays an outsize role in CHAPLIN AND AGEE as it never did in real life. The movie --- Chaplin's second talking picture, after a career making silent films --- is little-known or remembered today. It's a dark comedy where he plays a charming serial killer --- not the sort of thing that would resonate with postwar audiences. It is an utterly unimportant film, except to the extent that it is discussed here, and that is only because of its effect on novelist and film critic James Agee.
The screenplay at the heart of CHAPLIN AND AGEE is Agee's, and Agee was no slouch as a screenwriter. He did the screenplays for two of the most enduring films of the 1950s --- The African Queen and Night of the Hunter. As the book begins, the multitalented Agee is splitting his time between being a reporter for Time and doing movie reviews for The Nation. While at Time, he got the assignment to write up the magazine's report on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which profoundly affected his worldview.
The result was The Tramp's New World, the screenplay that is the basis of John Wranovics's book and that takes up the latter third of the volume. The screenplay is for a Charlie Chaplin movie, and Wranovics deftly details the lifelong admiration that Agee had for Chaplin's work. The screenplay sets the Little Tramp in New York --- but a New York that has been destroyed in a nuclear explosion, leaving the Tramp the only survivor, exploring the burned-out buildings and horrible silhouettes of the dead. It is a screenplay that had been lost for years and only now has been recovered, and Wranovics is to be credited for his scholarship.
But the fascinating thing about The Tramp's New World is not the screenplay itself. In fact, the screenplay is quite near unreadable, with great masses of impenetrable stream-of-consciousness dreck and some ham-handed political parody. What's fascinating is the length that Agee went to bring it to Chaplin's attention. (Chaplin, reasonably enough, seems never to have given it any serious consideration.)
What Agee did, in his role as a film critic, is remarkable. He wrote his initial review of Monsieur Verdoux for Time magazine, and it was fairly noncommittal and unenthusiastic. But in The Nation, he changed his tune sharply, arguing in three different installments that Monsieur Verdoux was the best movie of the year and one of the best that he had ever seen. The Nation reviews are treated uncritically by Wranovics, as evidence of Agee's respect for Chaplin. But seen from a reviewer's perspective, especially given that this reviewer was trying to sell Chaplin a screenplay, they are embarrassing at best, horrifying at worst. Wranovics obviously admires Agee, even as he chronicles his slow descent into an alcoholic stupor. But CHAPLIN AND AGEE perhaps ought to be a bit more skeptical about Agee's motives than it is.
Wranovics does an excellent job of bringing Agee, and his times and his politics, to life. Even those not particularly interested in the novelist will find it an absorbing enough read. Those who are interested in the era, and scholars of Agee and Chaplin, will find the book to be a small treasure.
--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds, who writes movie reviews at TXreviews.com.
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