Sang noir

A flawed but ultimately important 1951 adaptation of the seminal Richard Wright classic which he co-scripted & inexplicably starred in (?). Wright plays Bigger Thomas, a spiteful & angry black man living in the slums in Chicago (actually filmed in South America) w/his mother & younger brother & sister. Hoping to derail him from his path to infamy, a confidante of the family recommends him to become a chauffeur for a rich white family where he'll live & work from. There he meets the family's dangerous daughter who is more than willing to corrupt poor Bigger as she has him drive her & her boyfriend, an unabashed lefty w/revolutionary leanings, around as they drink winding up at a black club where Bigger's singer/girlfriend is debuting. Wrapping up the night, Bigger has to navigate the clearly overly intoxicated daughter to her room stirring the attention of her blind grandmother which sends Bigger into a panic whereby he accidentally kills her when he smothers her w/a pillow (to prevent her from exposing him). To make matters worse he chooses to dispose of the body in the home's incinerator & blames her apparent disappearance on the boyfriend. As tensions mount & a flurry of reporters descend on the manse to stay on top of the kidnapping angle Bigger has concocted, one journalist in particular continues to prod Bigger until the remains of the dead woman are found sending him fleeing w/his girl into the inner city slums to evade capture where things only get worse. If you can overcome the bad acting, obvious un-American locations, & colossally miscast Wright (who was in his 40's playing a someone in his 20's) then the social issues & inherent racism of the time makes sense why this wretched character, who is devoid of getting our sympathies, still does anyway making this black film noir (it was presented last week on TCM's Noir Alley w/Eddie Muller) a must for all to see.

As an admirer of Wright's written work - especially "Native Son" - I had incredibly low expectations for several reasons: there was next to no budget, the cast and crew (including the starring role) were all amateurs, the director was not American and had never made an American film before this, the film had to be shot in Argentina, and "Native Son" is such a dense, complex, psychological piece of work to begin with.

But, if you look at this as a simple B-movie melodrama with a racial subtext that was badly missing from almost all of the films of its day, it isn't bad. In film, you don't get motivation, you get action, and the novel "Native Son" was all about hidden motivations and desires. Maybe it was a bad idea to even attempt to make Wright's novel into a film, but one must give him and the filmmakers credit for trying. In the era just before the McCarthy hearings and the blacklist, a feature film released to the public that was even half as potent as Wright's novel would have been commendable.

An idea actually occurred to me while watching this: someone should make a feature film about the making of "Native Son." From what I've read, the production faced many obstacles and setbacks, both physical and ideological, and I think the story behind this would be fascinating - especially the difficulty of an author playing his own creation while trying to maintain his artistic integrity. Of course, Wright's life was fascinating in and of itself. Spike Lee, are you listening?

This movie had an incredibly troubled history. Hollywood would not touch Native Son even during its brief 1940s flirtation with liberalism. A 1944 Orson Welles stage production with Canada Lee playing the teen-aged gang member Bigger Thomas, though critically successful, had been quashed by the Catholic Legion of Decency. Wright's novel was sold through the Book of the Month -- its first African-American author -- and won incredible notices. It also scared the daylights out of mainstream white culture. He sympathetically portrayed an African-American murderer (the Legion's stated complaint about the play), unambiguously showed white female desire for a black male and gave a rather jaundiced view of the left-wing, jazz-loving bohemia hidden among the youth of the very wealthy. (And by portraying the thrill seekers of the left as merely that, Wright also alienated many of his Communist and left-wing friends.) It was all too much for Hollywood. Still, a number of people tried to get a film of the play made independently with Canada Lee eventually opting to shoot in Argentina with a French director (not Welles). However, Lee couldn't get out of the U.S. (Oddly enough, he and Sidney Poitier were sneaked into Apartheid South Africa as indentured servants that year so they could appear in Zoltan Korda's masterful adaption of Cry, The Beloved Country.) At the last minute, Wright was called upon to play the lead role and he is terrible! The great writer could not act. He does the one thing a serious black actor should never do -- he pops his eyes constantly. In fairness, the production values are outstanding. This is basically a crime story with a racial subtext and Chenel nails the film noir ambiance. Unfortunately, the supporting actors are Argentinian with Americans dubbing their voices. And there's Wright, already over 40 -- too old to play bigger teenager Thomas -- popping his eyes. When I saw this screened at the AFI, Stanley Crouch, who had written a laudatory essay about the film, spoke afterwords. I seriously wondered if he had seen the movie before he wrote about it. Crouch mumbled throughout his question and answer session and the audience kept telling him to speak louder. The movie deserves preservation simply because of its historic significance but not a wide audience. Read the novel instead.

It's a drama about systemic racism against African Americans in Chicago in the early 1940s. It follows Bigger Thomas (Richard Wright), the oldest child of Hannah Thomas (Willa Pearl Curtis), a widow whose husband was lynched in the South 12 years earlier. Bigger is a small-time criminal with a fairly clean record; his girlfriend, Bessie Mears (Gloria Madison), is a waitress and aspiring singer in a bar run by Ernie (Charles Simmonds).

Bigger gets a chauffeur job with the wealthy but liberal Dalton family. Henry Dalton (Nicholas Joy) is an entrepreneur, and his wife, Helen (Ruth Roberts), is blind but deeply interested in helping African Americans. Their daughter, Mary (Jean Wallace), is a university student who hangs out with radical political organizer Jan Herlone (Gene Michael). Bigger's first job is to drive Mary to school, but she diverts him to meet Jan and go on a round of drinking. When they get home, Mary is drunk, and Bigger has to assist her to bed. Suddenly, Mary's blind mother enters the room, and Bigger fears he'll be caught in a white woman's bedroom. He puts a pillow over Mary's mouth to keep her silent and accidentally kills her. The film then follows Bigger's downward spiral as he tries to survive the systemic racism closing in on him. It does not end well.

"Native Son" was controversial as a novel and as a movie. Pierre Chenal made the film in Argentina; no United States studio would make it with African American actors. The novelist Richard Wright played the lead role because no North American actor would. Wright helped write the screenplay based on the Broadway play version mounted by Orson Welles.

So, the movie had a difficult context when it came to its creation. The acting, including Richard Wright, is bad. The acting reminded me of a high school play. It's a real shame since the movie's ambition is noble, and the 1951 film is closer to the novel than the later versions. This "Native Son" is overtly preachy at times. I suspect a more faithful film adaptation of the novel is yet to be made.

... partially because the subject matter at the time it was made prevented it from being produced in the United States. Instead, much of it was shot in Argentina with Argentine actors and actresses who later had to be dubbed because you couldn't have people with South American accents in a film that was set in Chicago.

This is based on the novel by Richard Wright, and he adapted it for the screen and played the lead, African American Bigger Thomas, the oldest of three children of a widow woman whose husband was lynched in the South. The family fled to Chicago, and is living in squalor.

Bigger is a bitter fellow, considering the hopeless poverty the family is living in, and immediately he is established as a gray character. He procures a hand made gun and with his "gang", plans the armed robbery of a white owned establishment. This never goes off, basically because the group chickens out at the last minute. Yet when he is offered a job opportunity, chauffeur for the wealthy Dalton family, he accepts and shows up for the job.

But events overtake Bigger on the first day. He is supposed to drive the Daltons' college age daughter to the university library and wait for her, but she demands that he instead pick up her date, a labor leader and a radical, and drive them to black Chicago night spots. What is he to do? If he refused, Mary could get him fired. If he obeys, her dad could get him fired. He takes the path of least resistance and takes them to the night spots. When he returns home with Mary, she is so drunk she cannot stand up. If dad finds out what Bigger did, he is fired, so he carries her to her bedroom. Trying to get out of one bad situation leads to a worse situation which leads to Bigger accidentally killing Mary. He then disposes of her body in the most gruesome way possible. Her total disappearance the next morning has the wealthy parents believing she's been kidnapped. What happens from there? Watch and find out.

The point is, Bigger's behavior, at every turn, has been completely dominated by fear, and warranted fear at that - the fear of what happens to a black man if he is even suspected of having harmed a white girl at this point in history. He had my complete sympathy in this situation, but then he does some things that somewhat made me lose that sympathy. It really does take some unexpected turns.

The production values were actually quite good. Time was taken to make buildings, the mansion, and the nightclubs look authentic. Perhaps lots of it was shot on location or the equivalent of it in Argentina. One of the big problems is that Richard Wright is 43 years old and playing somebody 20 years younger. And although he does look young for his age he does not look like he is in his twenties. Another problem is that some of the actors are stiff and the dialogue a bit stilted. Yet it is very much worth seeing. Kino Lorber recently restored this film to its original length since almost half of it was missing from what was allowed to be seen in America because of the censorship of the era.