Vincente Minnelli's two masterpieces from the 1940s, Meet Me In St. Louis and The Clock, got their most perceptive and flattering contemporary reviews from James Agee, writing under his own name in The Nation and anonymously in Time. These reviews meant a lot to Minnelli and he included quotes from the Time pieces in his autobiography.
Agee was probably the best American writer who ever reviewed movies -- his reviews can be read with pleasure today solely for the excellence of their prose -- but his insights into cinema were oddly circumscribed. Agee was unusually sensitive to passages of visual poetry in movies but in a largely intuitive way. His eye was not precise.
The Clock has several crane shots of great grace and power. Agee noted them with approval and Minnelli says that this was the first time any critic had praised his use of the moving camera, of which he was very proud. But Agee went on to say that the The Clock was "largely boom shot". Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the film is shot against process screens, which virtually precludes, and certainly severely limits, the use of a moving camera. In his autobiography Minnelli observes that neither audiences nor critics of the time ever mentioned this aspect of the film.
What's going on here? I'm guessing that Agee didn't really see The Clock in visual terms except in moments when the visual technique called attention to itself -- as it did, for example, in the final shot of the film, when a camera on a tracked crane starts close on the figure of Judy Garland and then pulls up and back until it loses her in the crowds swirling through a busy train station. It's a breathtaking image -- Agee obviously appreciated it as such, and then apparently "remembered" the film he'd just seen as visually constructed along the same lines.
Part of this can probably be explained by "the enchantment of convention" in an artistic medium. When a spectator is familiar with and accepts a convention like back-screen projection, he or she tends not to notice it consciously, sees it as of a piece with the rest of the film, even though it's clearly a radically different kind of image from one shot on an exterior location or on a three-dimensional set. It's only when a convention is employed in an unusual way -- as the boom shot was employed in the final image of The Clock -- that the spectator becomes aware of it.
This explains the critical notion that Citizen Kane, for example, employed radical new techniques, when in fact almost all of them had been used before, just not so spectacularly and expressively. It also explains why Griffith was for so long given credit for inventing cinematic techniques which predated his work but which Griffith used in exciting new ways for more powerful effects.
But Agee had another limitation as a film critic. He seems to have judged all movies against an ideal kind of film of his own imagination, which was a novelist's imagination. In his own fiction, and much of his non-fiction, Agee tried to evoke transcendent spiritual values through a precise rendering of physical realities. This was why the film medium, founded on photographic reality, appealed so much to him.
Agee could accept expressionism in film, as with the work of the silent clowns he loved so much, when it was based on gags actually performed in real settings, and he could appreciate the pure expressionism of Disney's cartoons, which he saw as a kind of music, because it was divorced from all connection to physical reality. But the high theatricality of the movie musical did not capture his imagination or inspire his analytic gifts.
In his review of Meet Me In St. Louis, he concentrated on the novelistic rendering of what he called the film's "domestic poetry", and complained, for example, that the snowmen which Tootie smashes didn't look real -- as if anything in Minnelli's movie looks real by documentary standards. Agee comments on the pleasant nature of many of the songs in the film without seeming to see the ways they serve and advance the drama as integrated elements of the whole work.
In some ways, Agee was an amateur of movies, but an amateur of genius. Even though he later wrote film scripts in a professional capacity, he remained at heart a member of the audience -- often in thrall to the enchantment of convention and often projecting his own artistic and emotional values into films, rather than trying to read them on their own terms.
Agee was, all the same, a great critic, to my mind the greatest American movie critic, because his writing stimulates excitement and thought about cinema, and a passionate conviction that it could be more than it usually is or tries to be.