An Arty but Superficial Take on Native Son
Richard Wright’s heavy-handed 1940 novel gets a stylish, disappointingly slight cinematic revamp.
This article contains spoilers for Native Son.
Just over a year after the author Richard Wright published his first novel, Native Son, in March 1940, the text was adapted for the first time. In March 1941, Wright and the playwright Paul Green staged a contentious, Orson Welles–directed production at New York’s St. James Theatre. Ten years later, Wright played his own protagonist in an unfortunate Argentinian film adaptation, Sangre negra (“black blood”). By 2014, there had been yet another Native Son film and two more plays.