Sang noir

When Native Son was made in Argentina in 1950 some of the actors were not from the United States, thus they spoke English with accents not realistic for the characters they portrayed. Dialogue was then dubbed using the voices of local American residents of Buenos Aires. I was then a student at an American high school in BA; they came to the school looking for an American boy and girl to be the voices of Bigger Thomas' brother and sister. I did Vera Thomas' voice and a boy whose Dad was in the Navy did the voice of Bigger's brother. We got off school for two days and as I recall we were paid 300 pesos. Mr. Chanal drove us home afterwards. My big line was, "Eeek, eeek, a rat!". It's a long time ago but I seem to remember that some parts were actually played by non-actor local Americans. After 49 years, I saw this movie again in 1999 and couldn't believe how amateurish it is, but in many ways the making of this movie was Amateur Night, so that makes sense.

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.

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?

Author Tom Clancy has been very critical of the way his novels, including "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger," have been adapted for the screen, and he has been especially critical of the casting, believing that Harrison Ford is too old to play his CIA agent hero, Jack Ryan. Perhaps Clancy should do what black novelist Richard Wright did in 1950: play the lead role in the film version of his novel. The novel in question is "Native Son," the now classic tale of Bigger Thomas, a poor black youth who takes the job of chauffeuring the daughter of an affluent white liberal, only to kill the girl out of fear rather than malice.

The movie was produced on a miniscule budget in Europe, and despite poor acting, low-class production values, and a generally amateurish tone, it is of definite interest due to the casting of Wright as Bigger. Sure, Mickey Spillane would play his creation, the hard-nosed private detective Mike Hammer, in 1963's "The Girl Hunters," but whatever Spillane's merits as a writer, he has never been considered a "serious" novelist. Wright, on the other hand, was the first black author to break from the literary ghetto in which Negro writers were usually placed, and be acclaimed as a distinguished man of letters regardless of race. His is a prestigious name in literature, so it comes as quite a shock to see this great writer willing to be seen as a bad actor. But Wright is surrounded by thespians who are just as bad, and can't boast of having written a literary classic. Most of the cast is as amateurish in their portrayals as the stock company Edward Wood employed in such laughably inept productions as "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Bride of the Monster." The overall production is not as shoddy as Wood's films, but the middle-aged Wright's portrayal of 19-year-old Bigger Thomas is more than enough to thoroughly sink it.

Still, this is a definite curio, and worth a look for anyone as interested in literature as they are in cinema.