October
10, 1949—William Faulkner had spent
a sizable portion of his most creative years in Hollywood, but it was a
different experience for him to be attending the hometown premiere of a movie
adapted from one of his novels. Yet,
though the screenplay was written by others and he had only showed up at the
opening at the insistence of one of his aunts, Intruder in the Dust
overwhelmingly reflected his
influence—including choices for location shooting, suggestions on the content
and acting of key scenes, even a behind-the-scenes defusing of locals’
resentment over his treatment of an issue gaining in urgency with each passing
day: racism.
Most
Oxford, Miss., residents ended up enjoying the film when it opened that day at
the local Lyric Theater. (After all, so many knew family members or friends who
had acted in it—or had even done so themselves). The problem was that not
enough Americans as a whole did so.
MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer had predicted this outcome nearly a year before, and
now it seemed that events would be proving him right: the film underperformed
at the box office.
Mayer
thought that Americans would not turn out for a socially conscious film
implicitly critical about the American political system, but the truth was a
bit more complicated. Veteran MGM director Clarence Brown, who came from
Tennessee, had been haunted by race riots he had witnessed in 1906 in Atlanta,
and he had wanted to purchase the rights to Faulkner’s novel of a
racially-charged murder trial even before publication.
But
Mayer’s point-blank refusal to secure the rights meant that, by the time another studio champion of the project, Dore Schary, had been installed as head
of production, three other films on racial issues were well on their way to
release: Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave,
Elia Kazan’s Pinky, and Alfred Werker’s
Lost Boundaries. The U.S. public,
perceiving a glut of movies devoted to this one issue, may have simply decided
to stay home.
Contemporary
reviewers, as well as historians of film since then, hailed the movie for its
feel for the region and its fine acting, particularly by Juano Hernandez in the
pivotal role of defendant Lucas Beauchamp.
Even so, most who saw Intruder in the Dust could not have been aware that the adaptation could only begin to suggest the experience of reading Faulkner’s complex novel—a work with extraordinarily vivid description that nevertheless challenged at every turn with its long sentences; characters that, like so much of his other fiction, harked back to other novels and short stories in his loose ongoing saga about “Yoknapatawpha County”; and a treatment of race as complicated as its current state in the Deep South (e.g., the film never indicated that Beauchamp, with black and white ancestors, tended to identify with the white ones, because Brown, who could accept the idea of political equality for African-Americans, found miscegenation to be beyond the pale).
Even so, most who saw Intruder in the Dust could not have been aware that the adaptation could only begin to suggest the experience of reading Faulkner’s complex novel—a work with extraordinarily vivid description that nevertheless challenged at every turn with its long sentences; characters that, like so much of his other fiction, harked back to other novels and short stories in his loose ongoing saga about “Yoknapatawpha County”; and a treatment of race as complicated as its current state in the Deep South (e.g., the film never indicated that Beauchamp, with black and white ancestors, tended to identify with the white ones, because Brown, who could accept the idea of political equality for African-Americans, found miscegenation to be beyond the pale).
Faulkner’s
own personality and struggles make him the equal of anything that sprang from
his fecund imagination. The Coen brothers’ movie Barton Fink exploits this persona through a character, W.P. Mayhew,
strongly suggested by Faulkner in the early Forties: a Southern novelist
moonlighting in Hollywood, carrying on an affair with a script assistant when
he is not falling-down-drunk. It is an exaggeration of his actual situation
(there are no indications in the novelist's real life, unlike in the film, that a script assistant with
whom he was carrying on an affair wrote any of his works).
While
in Hollywood, Faulkner, while called upon to adapt the works of others
(notably, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and
Have Not, which had virtually nothing to do with the original), had only
been called upon to translate one of his own for the big screen: his first
screen credit, Today We Live, from his World War I short story “Turn About,” done during his short stint in the
early Thirties at MGM. The original had been short enough to allow him space to
expand, including an invented part for one of the studio’s principal female
stars at the time, Joan Crawford. It is hard to say whether he could have done
a better job of streamlining the vastly larger canvass of his novel than the screenwriter who got
the job, Ben Maddow.
Unlike
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner had little invested emotionally in film as a
medium; he simply regarded his screenwriting assignments, even the ones he did
in partnership with the understanding Warner Brothers director Howard Hawks, as
jobs to pay the bills. (That last phrase was literally true in his case: in
January 1941, he couldn’t afford to pay a $15 electricity bill.) While
pleasantly surprised that Brown did such a good job with Intruder in the Dust, he was also thrilled to receive extra
remuneration from one of his works.
As
it turned out, this film adaptation came at a time when his financial situation,
though not his health, was about to undergo a dramatic improvement. A couple of
years before, a volume that critic Malcolm Cowley edited, The Portable Faulkner, had led American reviewers to raise him
higher in the pantheon of native writers, to the point where it approximated
his long-lofty position abroad. A month after the premiere of Intruder in the Dust, 15 of 18 members
of the Swedish Academy had voted to award him the Nobel Prize in Literature,
and though he did not receive the award immediately (rules required a unanimous
vote), that showing had put him in a strong position to win the following year.
Within the next five years, he would not only win the Nobel but also the
National Book Award (for his Collected
Stories) and the Pulitzer (for a novel, ironically, regarded as among his
weakest, A Fable).
All
this came at a time when alcoholism, long a powerful influence in his life, would
now affect his work. Like Hemingway, poor health, with drinking a significant
contributing factor, had begun to cloud his creative power. Faulkner didn’t
experience Hemingway’s extreme inability to finish work, but in a way, it might
have been better if he had: the novels he wrote in the last dozen years of his
life did not measure up to his extraordinary output from 1929 (The Sound and the Fury) to 1942 (Go Down, Moses).
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