Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - Verdoux Redux

One of my personal heroes is the writer James Agee (1909-1955), who worked as a film critic for Time Magazine and The Nation between 1942 and 1948. He went on to write a new kind of fictional non-fiction book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as a novel, A Death in the Family, that was published after his death, and which won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the screenplays for The African Queen (1952) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) as well as numerous other articles, stories and scripts. But it's his film criticism that I most admire. I re-read it every year or so, and it always re-charges my batteries.

Agee could pry apart a movie and lay bare its inner workings in an astonishingly tiny amount of space and with an extraordinary use of language. Best of all, when reading the book Agee on Film in order, you get a sense of the movie critic's beat, and all the time spent watching, thinking about and writing about bad movies. It reminds us that the majority of movies have always been bad, and even when the present moment seems like it probably contains the worst lot of movies ever produced by man, it probably doesn't.

One of my favorite Agee moments comes in the spring of 1947, almost exactly 60 years ago. In the column dated May 10, he expressed his regret at not being able to review Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux in detail. He hoped to regroup his thoughts in order to present a more coherent opinion, one worthy of the movie. He added, however, that he considered it one of the greatest movies ever made, not faint praise, given the large number of pans and mixed reviews in the book. In the three weeks following, Agee wrote about Verdoux, postponing all other movies in order to thoroughly consider this masterpiece. By the third week, the movie had already left theaters. "I think most of the press on the picture, and on Chaplin, is beyond disgrace," he wrote.

For those who haven't seen it, Monsieur Verdoux casts Chaplin as a Bluebeard-like killer who woos rich widows, marries them, kills them, inherits their money and uses it to support his own (real) wife and kids. Most people used to seeing the Little Tramp, or even the benevolent and responsible creator of The Great Dictator (1940), understandably balked at this bleak, black comedy. Other writers besides Agee have come to its rescue (Robert Warshow, Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, etc.) but its reception today is still rather chilly. When the AFI did their list of comedies ("100 Years... 100 Laughs") back in 2000, they neglected to include Monsieur Verdoux on the original ballot of 400 films. And when Warner Home Video released the Chaplin library on DVD in 2004, Monsieur Verdoux was the only title relegated to a single DVD instead of the usual two-disc set.

But Agee's feverish response to the film leads us to believe that in his mind, it was the only movie worth anything in 1947. It was so far above and beyond all other movies that it caused his head to spin. Considering the 60th anniversary of Chaplin's film and looking at the current releases, I have come to the conclusion that there is another film this year so far above and beyond its fellows that it makes my head spin. And to my amazement, I checked this week's box office list and discovered that David Lynch's Inland Empire has (like Monsieur Verdoux) suddenly and prematurely disappeared from theaters, which is apt.

I'm not comparing Chaplin and Lynch as stylists, quite obviously one has very little to do with the other, but I am comparing their talent and their knack for displaying a singular vision onscreen. And like Monsieur Verdoux, Inland Empire is not easy to describe in a limited amount of space (though I spent nearly 1,300 words trying on my website). But I believe that Mr. Lynch has created a masterpiece for the new century, one about the death of cinema, the rise of video, the limitations of video, the nature of acting and stardom, the rhythm of dreams and nightmares, the road not taken and the fragility of the human psyche.

I guess it's not surprising that this three-hour long, non-narrative, grungy-looking film did not inspire a wide audience, especially since its goal is to suggest puzzles without solving them. But I'm disappointed that so many critics were unable to see (or even to try to see) anything in it. On Rotten Tomatoes, only 73 critics bothered and only 49 of those even found it worth recommending (67%). Metacritic.com's score was only a few points higher (72%). As for box office, it made less than $700,000 in the United States and about twice that in Europe.

As a consolation prize, there are still a few lesser auteur movies playing in American theaters below the 400 screen mark: Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (376 screens), Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (86 screens), Bong Joon-ho's The Host (69 screens), Martin Scorsese's The Departed (68 screens), Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (9 screens) and the re-releases of Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (2 screens) and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (3 screens) and The Holy Mountain (1 screen).

All that is insignificant next to the knowledge that it's only March and the odds of me getting to see anything nearly as good as Inland Empire during the rest of the year are pretty slim. But when I look at Agee, I'm reminded that it's merely business as usual, and that 60 years from now, I'll have the benefit of being right.