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Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay

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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.

Two major things I learned from this book are 1) James Agee had an obsession with Chaplain's character, Little Tramp, and 2) he was deathly afraid of the Bomb which America had created. Other supplemental things I may have rather not known is that he drank too much, could down a whole bottle of scotch and still not be drunk and, during the last month of his life, he had a total disregard for personal appearances. It is said tht he wore the same shirt, and hardly every changed clothes. He was allowed to basically die alone, like Dean Martin. Stardom is soon forgotten.

Those 'facts' I could have lived without knowing. Now, there is a group in Los Angeles called the 'Society of Singers' who help retired and elderly members of the movie world (Agee was part of that in a big way.)-- those destitute and in need. Chuck Southcott and Wink Martindale are members. As is fact, Agee died in May of 1955.

In the end, his life "was bookended by his admiration of Chaplain." The Tramp was his inspiration to his art and life from his earliest remembered childhood until the last days of his life. In the movie, that dad took Rufus to the Roxy theater across the L&N viaduct from the neighborhood where they lived, to see and laugh at Chaplain's "Tramp' silent features.

Agee's talent and his love for the poetic art of silent comedy films is shown in Part Two of this book. His previously unpublished screenplay was untitled when he died that fateful May, but here they call it 'The Tramp's New World.' He finished it in 1949, but no one ever considered making it. The premise was that only the innocence of childish adults could survive the Bomb. The scientists were safe in their underground shelters, but they have no real feelings or common sense. Its "timeless message of respect for humanity and the dignity of the individual are needed now more than ever."

Agee claimed to one and all that writing his autobiographical novel "was killing him." Sometimes it is best not to remember, or at least have a selective memory. It was named after his death and edited quickly, leaving much material on the wayside, to be published in an expedient way so as to use the publicity of his death. It won the Pulitzer Prize, a well-deserved reward for his work and hardship at the end.

I marvel at how the majority of people tend to think about the sordid or bad things which happened to an important person after they are gone instead of remembering the good they had achieved during their peak years. The same happened to my friend, Bob Lobertini. Helen Gee, in her memoir of Limelight, the photraphy gallery she founded and named after the Chaplain film, was one to dwell on the 'unmentionables.'

Agee was a native Knoxvillian, though he did not spend much time here after his mother remarried and moved up Northeast, and there is a marker on Cumberland with his name and history, a park named after him as well as one of the streets on the UT campus. He is remembered here as a 'native son' who did good out in Hollywood.

Notwithstanding back cover puff about a "deeply significant episode" or a "rough-hewn dazzling masterpiece by James Agee", it is difficult to understand what John Wranovics might have intended by this book. While not overtly denunciatory, it might certainly be taken as such, as it significantly detracts, perhaps inadvertently, from whatever "urban legend" might have grown up about Agee as some kind of super-intellectual, mid-century, Liberal saint.
Wranovics coolly details Agee's blatant use of his perch as The Nation's film critic as a platform from which to curry favor with Charles Chaplin, to whom he was--even while shamelessly stroking the little fellow in print--hustling a screenplay of his own.
Even though offering his pronouncedly puerile "treatment" quite gratis, asking nothing more for himself but permission to rub his forehead against the Great Man's trouser cuff, there's no eliding Agee's questionable ethics. It must have been enigmatic, not to say embarrassing, to friends and colleagues, for Agee to have taken on so extravagantly about the supposed excellences of Chaplin's then current and controversial "Monsieur Verdoux"--which he rated scarcely a tic or two south of Hamlet and Lear. (One's reaction to MV became a kind of political litmus test in those days, the cinematic equivalent of the Alger Hiss Case. It was somehow letting down the side to express dismay at it's snail's pace, all-around sub-standard trade craft, forced humor, and trite, petulant, adolescent philosophizing at the close) And the assemblage of over 100 pages of notes for Agee's famous, 4000 word, 3-part, Great American Review, must have left even well-wishers simply babbling. (It should not be surprising that among the literati (who are forever distilling profundities from the after-shave of prize fighters and matadors), the funniest fellow ever on roller skates ought to be closely attended to on questions of Faith, Morals, and Matters of State.
Chaplin had begun a pretentious, monomaniacal out-of-frame monologue at the close of "The Great Dictator", ( "I can't speak" "You must. Or we're doomed." or words to that effect) a Polonial mélange of middle school epiphanies he lost no opportunity to re-visit in every wretched "talkie" he made thereafter, and Agee's turkey of a "treatment" might, indeed, have been well suited to such juvenilities. Chaplin wasn't taking, though, even at the price, so "The Tramp's New World" became a lost "masterpiece" reprinted in 2005 with discreet rum-tum-tum by Palgrave Macmillan, and blurbed by The Village Voice as "an unmade movie so vivid that it practically sears the mind's eye." (There is apparently no "use by" date on litmus.)
The greatest shock to the system of any Agee groupie still left standing, however, is likely to be caused by a couple of letters Agee wrote to CC in early days. These are sniveling, cap-twisting, forelock-tugging, an-it-please-yer-Lordship unctuous-beyond-belief, "base spaniel fawning" of a kind that might be regarded as excessive even when addressing The Lord of the Universe in full regalia.