Native Son

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.

Imagine, if you will, J.D. Salinger playing Holden in a film adaptation of "Catcher In The Rye" or Lillian Hellman essaying Regina in "Little Foxes" instead of Bette Davis and you have some idea of the sheer awfulness of watching Richard Wright, actor, (as opposed to reading Richard Wright, writer), as he first hijacks and then smothers this film in a pillow of amateurishness. In this endeavor he is ably assisted by Gloria Madison as his girlfriend. Indeed the scenes featuring the two of them display the worst acting by a male/female duo, well, ever. Give it a D plus. PS...Little attempt is made to convince the viewer that he or she is not in Buenos Aires. How else to account for the plethora of palm trees in background shots?

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.

Richard Wright's novels are famous in France.When he had to escape from his native land in the McCarthy years he lived in Sartre's and Camus' country .So it was only natural that the first version of his "native son" was filmed by a French.Pierre Chenal was not a beginner when he made "Native Son" aka " Sangre Negra"-it was actually made in Argentina- he considers his best work.But Chenal had already succeeded in the Film Noir genre:he was the first to adapt for the screen "the postman always rings twice" (Le Dernier Tournant) and "La Foire Aux Chimères " (starring Von Stroheim,one of his favorite actors) was his towering achievement.

Not only Wright adapted his own novel but he also played the part of Bigger.This is rather a mistake ,for Bigger is supposed to be about 25 and the novelist was in his forties and it shows.But it's interesting because it's very rare that a writer becomes an actor in one of his stories (another example is Erich Maria Remarque in Sirk's "a time to live and a time to die" ,but the German writer had a small supporting role).The budget was certainly rather low and the director is to be commanded for he made the best of it,particularly in the scene of Mary's "murder" and in the sequence of the nightmare (the cotton field and the building near decay where Bigger and his girlfriend are hiding). The movie is rather short (90min) and some of the aspects of the novel are botched : Mary and her boyfriend ,who are activist students ,want Bigger to join the union ,and the fiancé gives him "books" which are probably not politically correct,all this is only skimmed over.The Dalton family is a human one ,and Wright ,who was an "Uncle Tom"'s grandchild (his grandparents were slaves) does not make them the bad guys .Bigger is a victim of fate ,and of his condition:had he been white he would not have killed ,he never meant to do it.

As Leonard Maltin wrote ,it was defeated by its low budget.The 1986 remake,starring Victor Love,Elizabeth McGovern and Matt Dillon is pretty good .Both versions are worth a look.