Spiritual Quote of the Day (James Agee, on the Wonder of ‘High Summer’)

“High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, poet, screenwriter, and film critic James Agee (1909-1955), “Sure on This Shining Night,” in Permit Me Voyage (1934)

This Day in Film History (Buster Keaton, Silent Film Innovator, Born)

Oct. 4, 1895— The son of vaudevillians, Joseph Frank Keaton was born on a barnstorming tour in Piqua, KS—but he would become better known to audiences as Buster Keaton, part of the “Great Triumvirate” of the most popular silent film comedians, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

At six months old, the child survived falling down a flight of stairs. A visiting family friend, Harry Houdini, picking him up, said the youngster could really take a “buster,” or fall, giving rise to his nickname. At three months old, the boy was incorporated into his parents’ vaudeville act.

If his father Joe gave Buster an early boost in the entertainment industry, he also foreshadowed his own fate. The elder Keaton fell victim to alcoholism, breaking up his family and his act, falling on hard times until the love of another woman years later led him to curb his drinking at last—all circumstances repeated in the case of his son.

But at the height of his popularity in the 1920s, “The Great Stone Face” (a nickname given for his cinematic impassivity in the face of staggering disaster) set standards for comedy that influenced filmmakers for generations.

In a series of shorts from 1917 to 1920, Keaton learned the tricks of the trade from another ex-vaudevillian, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Several years later, when Hollywood shunned the roly-poly comic after a sensational sex scandal and three manslaughter trials in which he was eventually cleared of all charges but still found his name blackened, Keaton showed his loyalty by giving him financial assistance, securing directing work for him, and even testifying publicly on his behalf.

Keaton’s reputation rests on nearly 20 shorts and 11 silent features in which he wrote, directed and starred in the 1920s that made use of his of the acrobatics he learned in vaudeville. Several not only still leave modern audiences shaking with laughter but industry professionals shaking their heads that Keaton could even pull off such hair-raising stunts on his own so early in the life of Hollywood.

The Steamboat Bill Jr. sequence, for instance, when a house collapses around him and he miraculously escapes unscathed, could no longer be filmed as is because of insurance-company considerations, according to Gary Giddins’ “Speechless” essay on Keaton and Chaplin in the critic’s 2006 collection, Natural Selection. 

Stunt men are still flabbergasted that he could be pulled onto a speeding train with just one outstretched arm in the short Cops. And Keaton did not realize until a doctor visit years afterward that he had broken his neck while filming a railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr.

Many of his gags resulted from his fascination with mechanics and his careful discussion with associates on how to use this to pull off a sequence. In the 1921 two-reeler, The Boat, he finally figured out how to film the launch of the ship from a pier. (The boat name in this film gave rise to the identification used by members of The International Buster Keaton Society: the Damfinos.

This fascination with mechanics may have reached a height in Sherlock Jr., where his projectionist character falls asleep, dreams that film’s villain and love interest are his rival and girlfriend, and leaps into the theater screen to set matters right. (Woody Allen would use the same idea in his 1985 comedy, The Purple Rose of Cairo.) And, in The General, the climactic train crash cost the equivalent of more than half a million dollars in today’s terms, in what is believed to be the most expensive scene in silent film history.

No account of Keaton’s persona can fail to mention two other items: his pork pie hat and still, unsmiling face.

The actor, feeling he needed a different kind of hat to distinguish himself from other screen comics, decided to fashion the pork pie by cutting a Stetson, stiffening the brim with sugar water, adding granulated sugar in a teacup of warm water, then wetting the top and bottom of the brim before letting it dry until it became stiff. He would have to make multiple such hats for each picture, as he did more water stunts than most comics of the time.

As for the face: he would later claim that he was so caught up in the details of making a movie that he didn’t realize he wasn’t smiling. But it turned out to be an ideal counterpoint to the manic motion of his stunts. As critic James Agee explained:

“He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patients and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue.”

The prospect of talkies did not faze Keaton in the least, because his voice had been trained in vaudeville. But he was tripped up from an unexpected quarter: his brother-in-law, Joseph Schenck.

Schenck, who had handled the business end of operations while Keaton handled the creative details, persuaded him, following the box-office failures of Steamboat Bill Jr. and The General, that he should give up his own studio and join MGM. The new arrangement proved a straitjacket for Keaton, as the studio sharply curtailed his practice of performing his own stunts and required prior script approval from an artist who depended heavily on improvisation. 

At the same time, the collapse of his marriage led wife Natalie Talmadge to initiate bitter divorce proceedings—and Keaton to drink heavily, lose his contract with MGM and suffer a nervous breakdown.

On the rebound, Keaton married his nurse—but that relationship fell apart, too, in a few years. It was not until 1940, when Keaton wed his third wife, dancer Eleanor Norris, that he achieved emotional stability, and not until the end of the decade—a full generation after his emotional and creative downward spiral began—that he came back into the public’s consciousness, through three major events:

*Agee’s seminal 1949 Life Magazine essay, “Comedy's Greatest Era,” spotlighted Keaton and fellow silent comics Chaplin and Lloyd;

*Sunset Boulevard (1950) included Keaton among bridge players who meet at the home of fellow silent-film star, the fictional Norma Desmond (played by the real-life Gloria Swanson);

*Limelight (1952) teamed Keaton for the first and only time with Chaplin.

From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, Keaton worked constantly, mostly in television, with the occasional film supporting appearance (e.g., Beach Blanket Bingo, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). By his death in 1966, he had gained a new generation of admirers, a cadre that, over the years, has included Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Richard Lewis, Bill Hader, and Dick Van Dyke (another physical comedian, who gave the eulogy at the funeral for his friend).

Appreciation of this multi-talented innovator only grows. Earlier this year, for example, the U.K. newspaper The Guardian published an account of two previously unpublished sketches—typed out completely by Keaton, most likely in the 1950s—that spell out two of his gags. The discovery was likened by Alek Lev, vice president of the International Buster Keaton Society, to a “holy relic.”

Quote of the Day (James Agee, on the Appeal of Lenten Hymns)

“The leaden melodies of the Lenten hymns had appealed to him as never before; lines in certain hymns seemed, during that time, to have been written especially for him. Jesus, I my Cross have taken, he would sing, already anticipating the lonely solace of tears concealed in public: all to leave and follow Thee; destitute, despis’d, forsaken, were words especially dear to him; Thou from hence my All shall be….he saw crowned God and Heaven shining and felt, in a humble kind of way, that he literally owned them.”—James Agee, The Morning Watch (1951)

Quote of the Day (James Agee, on Chaplin’s Tramp)

“Of all comedians he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion.”— James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life Magazine, September 3, 1949, from Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot (1966)

His first appearance onscreen, as a swindler, was all wrong and audiences stayed away. But his boss, Mack Sennett, gave him another chance. Rummaging through the studio’s costume closets, 24-year-old Charlie Chaplin pulled together the accouterments of the character who would make his image among the most famous in history: “Pants baggy, coat tight…hat small, shoes large,” he recalled in his autobiography. The finishing touch was a toothbrush moustache meant to camouflage the character’s age.

When audiences got their first look at The Tramp in Sennett’s Kid Auto Races at Venice on this date 100 years ago, the young actor became famous overnight. The Tramp would make his last appearance on film 26 years later, as a barber, in Chaplin’s first talkie, The Great Dictator, when the other half of the actor's screen time was devoted to satirizing the murderous leader whose moustache (unfortunately) resembled his own, Adolf Hitler's. But for most audiences, the last real time The Tramp was on the screen was in the silent that Chaplin released, stubbornly, nine years after the introduction of sound, Modern Times (1936), as his beloved character wiggled away down the road with Paulette Goddard.

The article by the great film critic (and very fine novelist) James Agee quoted above listed actor-writer-director-producer Chaplin as one of the four great “silent clowns” (the others being Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon). Of the four, Chaplin enjoyed the longest success, became the most controversial (because of his leftist politics and taste in very young women) and endeared himself to posterity most enduringly. When cold, corporate IBM wanted to recast its image in the 1980s with its personal computer, it brought the rights to the image of the Tramp and used it in a series of well-received commercials.

Last month, Susan King wrote a perceptive article for the Los Angeles Times describing “The Evolution of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp”—of how he knew little about film when he came to Sennett’s studios; how the character tended to be rowdy in its initial incarnation; and of how it started to take full shape with the release of The Kid in 1921.

This Day in Presidential History (FDR, “Soldier of Freedom,” Dies)

April 12, 1945—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, worn out from a dozen years of facing unprecedented challenges from the Great Depression and the Axis Powers, died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at age 63 in his “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Ga.

Chances are, the only thing many Americans today know about his death is that FDR was in the company of onetime mistress Lucy Mercer Rutherford that early afternoon when he was stricken. That historical amnesia is well and good, if it makes people aware that the President was human like the rest of us.

(While we’re at it, let’s stipulate that FDR was in his element that day, because he was in the company of several women who thought the sun, moon and stars revolved around him. Not only was Lucy there at his cottage, but also devoted cousins Margaret “Daisy” Suckley and Laura Delano, along with Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a rock-ribbed Republican who, like countless others over the years, became absolutely charmed by him as she painted his portrait.)

But what gets forgotten today is that Americans reacted with a shock and grief not experienced again for another generation, on an afternoon in Dallas. James MacGregor Burns subtitled his biography of the President during the war years “The Soldier of Freedom,” and Americans were now suddenly, painfully, aware of how much he had expended of himself in their service. He had served so long--winning an unprecedented four terms--and fought so many political battles that Americans had a difficult time even conceiving of anyone else in the Oval Office. In Preston Sturges' cheeky 1942 romantic comedy, The Palm Beach Story, Mary Astor's character, "Princess Centimillia," observes: "Nothing is permanent in this world - except for Roosevelt.”

Now even that certainty was gone. Here’s just one example of the general shock and sadness, part of a marvelous piece by film critic-novelist James Agee in the April 23, 1945 issue of Time:

“At home, the news came to people in the hot soft light of the afternoon, in taxicabs, along the streets, in offices and bars and factories. In a Cleveland barbershop, 60-year-old Sam Katz was giving a customer a shave when the radio stabbed out the news. Sam Katz walked over to the water cooler, took a long, slow drink, sat down and stared into space for nearly ten minutes. Finally he got up and painted a sign on his window: ‘Roosevelt is Dead.’ Then he finished the shave. In an Omaha poolhall, men racked up their cues without finishing their games, walked out. In a Manhattan taxicab, a fare told the driver, who pulled over to the curb, sat with his head bowed, and after two minutes resumed his driving.”

The mourning was international as well. New Yorker Paris correspondent Janet Flanner quoted an editorial from the French newspaper Le Monde: “Let us weep for this man and hope that his wise and generous conception of the human communities remains like a light to brighten the path for all men of good will.”

(The Agee and Flanner articles are reprinted in the Library of America anthology, Reporting World War II, Part Two—an absolutely indispensable tool for understanding how Americans perceived the tumultuous war years while they were happening.)

Roosevelt certainly had his faults—notably vindictiveness and a tendency to prevaricate in an effort to charm. It’s also true that he could have done far more to aid Holocaust victims and, as Burton Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom contend in today’s Wall Street Journal, that his economic policies didn’t end the Depression.

And yet the thousands of ordinary Americans like the stunned barber and taxi driver in Agee’s article were right to mourn the passing of the Hyde Park patrician.

No other President so made it the government’s business to safeguard the economic and military security of the nation.

No other President preserved so much—forests, infrastructures, capitalism itself.

No other President broadened opportunity for so many Americans—not only the largely urban-based African-, Jewish-, and Irish-Americans who formed part of the so-called “New Deal coalition,” but also millions of others who joined the middle class as a result of the Wagner Act and the G.I. Bill of Rights.

FDR died in Warm Springs, but it’s equally correct to say he experienced a second life there after his devastating bout with polio two decades before. Visiting this rural community for its recuperative waters, he came in contact with people from all walks of life brought low by the dreaded disease. He and they taught each other how to hope again, and he eventually transmitted his hard-won optimism to a nation desperately in need of it.

In choosing the image for this post, I thought seriously of using either Ms. Shoumatoff’s “Unfinished Portrait” or another photo from 1945 depicting the careworn face of the President. Ultimately, I decided that this one—the man of charm and cheer that Americans grew to cherish—was preferable.

Quote of the Day (James Agee, on Silent-Film Comedy)

“When a modern comedian gets hit on the head, for example, the most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license, and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a land of poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it-look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palms downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.”—James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life, September 5, 1949

Where do you begin to consider the contributions of James Agee, born on this date 100 years ago? It’s impossible to consider him reaching old age, just as it is inconceivable to think of John F. Kennedy—who likewise died at age 46, after a life of increasingly heightened risks—to have done so.

I first encountered Agee in his sensitive and moving semi-autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957. For those who find Thomas Wolfe a baggy monster of a novelist, this work—another novel about life in the South, with a traumatic death at its center—is an appealing alternative. (Agee’s death, just before an appointment with a doctor about his heart troubles, occurred on the anniversary of the demise of the father he commemorated unforgettably in that book.)

Agee was also a masterful journalist (Let Us Know Praise Famous Men), poet, screenwriter, and letter-writer (Letters to Father Flye). But as a lover of cinema, I also deeply value his film criticism for Time and The Nation. The quote above comes from perhaps his most influential essay, which revived interest in silent clowns Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. Has there ever been a better description of the near-balletic grace required to succeed in this form?

Essayist Phillip Lopate, with characteristic verve, offers a fascinating but by no means uncritical assessment of this compelling writer and personality here.