I picked up James Agee’s A Death in the Family mainly on the strength of Agee’s reputation as a great film critic and co-scenarist of THE AFRICAN QUEEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, but also because of it’s first sentence:
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
BRILLIANT, I thought. Not content with the imaginative feat of seeing childhood as a mere disguise, Agee goes beyond that and sees it as a disguise designed to fool oneself, and then byond that to see it as successful. That’s a lot for one sentence.
But, before deciding to pay the £2.50 I flicked past the italicised prelude to Part One, and got this:
At supper that night, as many times before, his father said, “Well, spose we go to the picture show?”
“Oh, Jay!” his mother said, “That horrid little man!”
“What’s wrong with him?” his father asked, not because he didn’t know what she would say, but so she would say it.”
“He’s so nasty!” she said, as she always did. “So vulgar! With his nasty little cane, hooking up skirts and things, and that nasty little walk!”
She’s talking about Charlie Chaplin of course, and the vulgarity situates the film, if Agee hadn’t already told us, in 1915. He then goes on to describe the film that the family see, and it sounds like typical Heystone stuff, sort of. Charlie steals some eggs and hides them in his baggy pants. Then he flirts with/molests a woman, hooking her skirt with his cane to lift it, just as mother predicted. Then the woman shoves him in retaliation and he falls on his eggs.
I’m not sure that Charlie ever lifted a skirt the way Agee describes (in movies, anyway) — revealing frilly panties and everything. And I don’t recall this incident (and I have, as you know, spent the last (checks notes) three years or something insane like that watching every single Charlie Chaplin film. But I may have forgotten this scene. Or maybe Agee was remembering a Billy West movie. Or more likely he wanted to make something up that suited his purposes. Crazy that mother’s description of his smutty doings was so dead-on accurate here, considering that the skirt business is DEFINITELY not something Chaplin did a lot of.
If anyone out there has a vivid memory of seeing this scene though, let me know.
Anyway, I now own this book and will probably someday read it.
A still from the movie version of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (itself adapted from the theatrical version, All the Way Home) courtesy of Donald Benson. Thanks!
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