Focus Features

Cinema and, in particular, the way we look at it was greatly changed by James Agee, who was born today in 1909. Agee was a writer, poet and journalist and collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941), a depiction of poor farmers in the Depression era South, with seminal photographer Walker Evans, a project that grew out of the pair’s work together for Fortune magazine. In 1942, Agee began to write film criticism for Time (another magazine in Henry Luce’s media empire) and later went on to write on cinema for The Nation, where he did some of his most significant work. As a critic, Agee was a transformative figure: he had high standards, believed in movies as more than simply entertainment but felt they should convey truth and be relevant to the modern world, and wrote with passion and fierce intelligence about films that had often been dismissed elsewhere. A huge fan of Charlie Chaplin, he almost singlehandedly championed Chaplin’s widely panned dark, serial killer comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and his epic, three-part review-cum-defense of the film played a major role in the film’s critical reevaluation in later years. Agee’s strong views on the role of cinema led to him pursuing a career in Hollywood (including an abandoned project with Chaplin), and he ultimately penned adapted screenplays for three films, two of which – John Huston’s The African Queen and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter – are still considered among the very finest of the 1950s. Agee died of a heart attack, aged just 45, in 1955; his novel A Death in the Family (1957) posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize and his collected criticism, Agee on Film, is essential reading for all cinephiles.

Cinema and, in particular, the way we look at it was greatly changed by James Agee, who was born today in 1909. Agee was a writer, poet and journalist and collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941), a depiction of poor farmers in the Depression era South, with seminal photographer Walker Evans, a project that grew out of the pair’s work together for Fortune magazine. In 1942, Agee began to write film criticism for Time (another magazine in Henry Luce’s media empire) and later went on to write on cinema for The Nation, where he did some of his most significant work. As a critic, Agee was a transformative figure: he had high standards, believed in movies as more than simply entertainment but felt they should convey truth and be relevant to the modern world, and wrote with passion and fierce intelligence about films that had often been dismissed elsewhere. A huge fan of Charlie Chaplin, he almost singlehandedly championed Chaplin’s widely panned dark, serial killer comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and his epic, three-part review-cum-defense of the film played a major role in the film’s critical reevaluation in later years. Agee’s strong views on the role of cinema led to him pursuing a career in Hollywood (including an abandoned project with Chaplin), and he ultimately penned adapted screenplays for three films, two of which – John Huston’s The African Queen and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter – are still considered among the very finest of the 1950s. Agee died of a heart attack, aged just 45, in 1955; his novel A Death in the Family (1957) posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize and his collected criticism, Agee on Film, is essential reading for all cinephiles.