Was Agee’s moviegoing so virtuous, or did he, perhaps, now and then, like the rest of us, enjoy decadent, sleazy, slick commercial pictures? We ought to be able to see a reasonably lousy picture without feeling we’ve been violated. Agee always seemed to feel personally betrayed by synthetic elements in a movie, by “sophistication.”

Because Agee was so great a critic, there is a tendency to take over his terms, but his excessive virtue may have been his worst critical vice. Agee’s demands were, in some ways, both impossibly high for the movie medium and peculiarly childlike... I don’t think we would be expected to respond to this sort of thing in literature, but, possibly because of Agee’s influence, we are expected to have very simple tastes when it comes to movies. Yet simple people in simple stories made some of us yawn even as children — which is probably why we started going to the movies. The place for goodness is in life, not on the screen. I realize that Agee used words like “love” and “purity” in order to get away from clever language and professional jargon — that he wanted language as well as movies cleansed — but though movies need cleansing more than ever, we mustn’t throw the whore out with the bath water.