Saturday night's viewing of the 1952 film Bride Comes to Yellow Sky at the Square Room was maybe a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was at least the first time the old Robert Preston western, unavailable on videotape or DVD, has been seen in Knoxville in 57 years. Knoxville's literary icon James Agee wrote the screenplay. The movie is also his only big-screen credit as an actor--the legendary Pulitzer laureate appears in three short, comical scenes as an incorrigible jailbird. Agee appears as a tall, louche guy who's always stifling a grin.
The screening, organized by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound as part of a first-time-ever James Agee Film Festival to celebrate the author's centennial. Saturday evening's event also included the short Agee-produced documentary of random sidewalk life in 1940s New York, "In the Street"--as well as some home movies of the filming of the Agee-inspired movie All the Way Home in Knoxville in the early '60s, coincidentally also starring Robert Preston, and a short excerpt of R.B. Morris's rarely seen 1989 film, "The Man Who Lives Here is Loony."
The Square Room did draw some interesting people that night, including the young Pulitzer-winning playwright and screenwriter David Auburn (Proof), an Agee fan who introduced the film, and several other authors and academics from other parts of the country.
In all, about 35 Knoxvillians showed up.
Maybe the $5 ticket price was too high, but a few couldn't help noticing that TAMIS's several screenings of Cas Walker old TV shows have drawn sellout crowds in the hundreds.
On Sunday, as part of the same festival, TAMIS showed a restored copy of the Agee-written Robert Mitchum / Shelley Winters classic, The Night of the Hunter, at the Bijou. It was somewhat better attended, but not on a Cas scale.
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