pride and prejudice
by Douglas Messerli
Ben Maddow
(screenplay, based on the novel by William Faulkner), Clarence Brown (director)
Intruder in the Dust / 1949
Although
Faulkner tells wonderful stories, the power of his works lie in the language he
uses to tell those tales, language that stretches out ideas, retelling them in
different ways, and turning the ideas connected to them back upon themselves,
so that what might be a simple event, a lynch-mob gathering around a small-town
jail, as his Intruder in the Dust,
takes on new and different meanings as his central characters react.
Given the complexities inherent in
Faulkner's works, it is almost impossible to imagine a film, particularly a
Hollywood, narrative-driven film, to create the same impact. Yes, Faulkner's
tale is about small-town prejudice and about a proud black man, Lucas
Beauchamp, who refuses to play the role of the "darkie" and almost
loses his life for that. The book is also about a murder, but Faulkner is not
as interested in the discovery of the murderer as he is in the relationship of
his central figures—two young boys, Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.) and Aleck (Elzie
Emanuel), an older woman, Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson), and a lawyer
reticent about getting involved, John Gavin Stevens (David Brian)—and how they perceive
and interact with the black central figure, Lucas (Juano Hernandez).
The genre of Clarence Brown's movie is
clearly more of a whodunit, with ancillary focus on the moral implications of
the characters' involvement. And in pursuing the narrative thrust of Faulkner's
work instead of following the psychological interrelationships between
characters, Brown and screenplay writer Ben Maddow, as some critics have noted,
erase the complexity of figures. The young black boy, Aleck, is portrayed in
the film as much more passive and indeterminate than he is in Faulkner's book.
And that most certainly effects the way we see blacks in the film. Since almost
all the black characters here are passive, Lucas Beauchamp's stubborn pride,
his refusal to reveal to the Sheriff and lawyer Stevens what he knows of the
murder and proclaim his own innocence, accordingly seems even more
inexplicable.
Also lost in this film is the gradual
awakening of conscience for Chick, as he faces his own frustration for not
being able to make restitution to Lucas for having given him shelter after
falling in a creek. By refusing to grant a white payment for the act, Lucas has
clearly put himself apart from the rest of the black community with which the
boy is acquainted. The relationship here, at least in the book, is a subtle one
of both resentment and respect, a kind of hatred and a hushed, unaware love
that is difficult to portray in a straight-forward narrative. And the young
actor chosen for that role, perfect for conveying his sense of innocence and
unawareness (just right for his earlier role in The Yearling), has a face that often remains too inexpressive and
flat, making it hard to imagine that he is slowly growing in comprehension as
the film proceeds.
Yet for all that, Brown does capture some
of the strange transformations through his splendid cinematography. In the
scene where Chick returns alone to confront Lucas, we see first Lucas' eye behind
the wooden bars of the cell, and then are shown the view from within looking
out at
Brown's ghoulish presentation of the
night voyage to the cemetery, the horse's refusal to enter the stream because
of quicksand (in the film, Chick announces this, while in the novel it is Aleck
who recognizes the horse's alarm), and the digging up of the empty coffin by
Aleck, Chick, and Mrs. Habersham quite chillingly represent an act of not only
irreverence, but actions that these societal
"outsiders" take to convert their desecration into a kind
resurrection—at least for Lucas, since it proves that someone else has been
involved in the crime.
And then there is Juano Hernandez's
magnificent portrayal of Lucas as a strong bull of a man willing to die rather
than abandon his sense of moral righteousness. His portrayal of a proud black
man, long before Martin Luther King and the vocal advocates of black pride, is
perfect.
It is not surprising that black author Ralph Ellison described the film in his The Shadow and the Act as being the only one of four recent race-themed movies that a Harlem audience could take seriously and with which black audiences could truly identify.
If in the end, accordingly, some of richer
nuances of Faulkner's novel have been lost, the film Intruder in the Dust still is a strong portrayal of the author's
concerns. In the context of my objections to To Kill a Mockingbird, it is clear that Brown's Intruder offers a solution to many of
the same issues that Harper Lee's novel and Mulligan's film did not. Although
Atticus Finch may share some of the gentle values of Gavin Stevens, the
children and outsiders of that world could not save the innocent black man from
either being destroyed or even destroying himself.
Los Angeles, June 15, 2012
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2012).
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