FILM CHRONICLE
dulge himself by composing charcoal drawings, "mood pictures" pretty
enough to hang on your wall but which chop the film into static blocks.
Consequently, a movie that should have been swift and exciting is mere–
ly slow and interesting.
Faulkner's absence from the picture might be tolerable if only his
characters were present. But Lucas, as played by Juano Hernandez, is
stubborn and passive rather than "intractable" and impervious; troubled
rather than the kind of Negro who, in Mississippi, fails to Mister white
folks. Hernandez' sincere but insufficiently forceful performance throws
the picture off balance, for he is unable to make Lucas into the dominat–
ing center of action he actually is in the novel. Most miscast and mis–
directed is David Brian as Uncle Stevens, who in the book is Faulkner's
mouthpiece for the odd blend of shrewdness and ignorance Faulkner
takes to be Southern liberalism. The movie has left out most of the ig–
norance, but has replaced it with liberal cliches. Unlike everyone else
in the film, Brian speaks without a Southern accent, which is baffling
liince he is supposed to represent a strand of Southern opinion. (Or did
the producers
think
that a "liberaI"Southerner talks with a Northern ac–
cent?)
Of Faulkner's: inner meanings-that to survive, Nigger Jim has had
to become the crotchety Lucas and that to remain just, Huck has had
to become a boy in momentary opposition to white society-the movie
suggests almost nothing. But to give due credit, the
film
does try. twice
to say some serious things about Negro-white relations. In a scene where
Stevens, questioning Lucas in jail, instinctively assumes the Negro's
guilt,
the director has meant to convey the comparatively startling idea that
even the best whites are full of ambiguous feelings toward the Negroes
and hence are not wholly to be trusted by them. Unfortunately, this
scene is spoiled by Hernandez' excessive rolling of white eyeballs and
Brian's sheer embarrassment at being placed in such a peppery situation.
More successful, though less important, is a scene in which Lucas
pays off Stevens for his services and demands a receipt, visible evidence
of his triumph. But this is ruined by a sequel added by the producers,
in which uncle and boy sententiously acknowledge Lucas to be their con–
science. As doctrine this is pernicious, because the Negro's claims to
equality must be honored not out of regard for the white man's con–
science but out of regard for truth and justice. As movie-making, it is
pernicious because the boy whom Faulkner had led us to imagine as a
descendant of Huck Finn is here merely blood-kin of Huck's priggish
friend Tom Sawyer.
Irving Howe
