Judge Priest

Judge Priest (dir. John Ford, 1934) is a small-town comedy set in Kentucky around 1890.  An introductory message suggests that events and characters are based on reminiscences of small-town life by Irwin S. Cobb, author of the stories that inspired and provided models for the film.  Many elements in Judge Priest might prevent it from connecting with modern audiences, and it would take some time to list them all.  The opening credits list among the actors Hattie McDaniel, the ever-present Mammy in films of the 1930s and 40s, and, in bolded type, Stepin Fetchit, the embodiment of offensive African American portrayals in film in the first half of the 20^th century.  In the film he plays Jeff Poindexter, servant to Judge Priest.  He shuffles, walks in a slouch, mumbles almost incoherently, is lazy, covets fancy clothes, and seems not too intelligent.  He follows Judge Priest around like a loyal hound and shows little will or thought of his own.  He’s like a cartoon figure, and it’s difficult to imagine a figure more insulting to African Americans or to people in general who appreciate the dignity of humankind.  (In Cobb’s stories Poindexter is less of a clown figure—he’s literate, articulate in his light dialect, but possessed of many of the traits one might expect in the stereotypical figure of a 19th century African American male from the American South). The film plays Stepin Fetchit and, to a lesser extent, Hattie McDaniel’s character Dilsey, for comic effect.  Hattie McDaniel’s singing, her generally jolly demeanor, enliven the film whenever she appears, but she doesn’t seem to be acting so much as following directions, filling in the required elements of her role--she acts less in this film than in others I’ve seen her in—there’s no sense of the fully embodied character we see her play in Gone with the Wind. 

Judge Priest isn’t deliberately racist—that is, it doesn’t set out to embody a racist agenda (as we might argue such films as W. B. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation do).  It simply reflects the ingrained racism of its time, and of the Irwin S. Cobb stories on which it was based.  But the film certainly enforces the racist status quo of the times and the culture it portrays.

All that said, race is not a major aspect of the film.  We notice it because Stepin Fetchit appears early in the film. Because we are not accustomed to such blatantly racist stereotypes as the one he portrays, we are shocked.  In the 1930s, I suspect there was far less shock among white viewers, if any.  In a sense, the film’s racism is a reflection of its innocence—it gives no sense of the barest awareness that its portrayal of how African Americans live and act should be questioned.

In a similar way, the film doesn’t do much more than gently satirize the Confederate nostalgia that infuses it.  Set in a small Kentucky town that might be placed, because of the intensely Southern sympathies of its residents, in the depths of Mississippi or South Carolina, the film doesn’t explore any of the implications of the border state setting of Kentucky, which was not a part of the Confederacy.  Twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War, veterans sit around drinking and smoking and reminiscing about various battles and exploits they claim to have been a part of.  Some of them are blowhards; all of them are believers in the Cause.  The women of the town are no different.  As Judge Priest tells his sister-in-law, the women in the town have more war medals than the men.  Everyone is stuck in the past, except for a few, who represent the possibility of change.  These are a young man and woman in love (who could have guessed?) and Judge Priest himself, played by American humorist Will Rogers.

The Judge hasn’t necessarily abandoned his former Confederate loyalties, but his speech and actions show he believes the war is over, defeat was the outcome, and the town must move forward.  He brings this perspective to bear in the courtroom and in his advice to his young nephew, Jerome (Tom Brown), and the girl he loves, Ellie Mae Gillespie (Anita Louise).  Jerome has returned from the North with a law degree.  Ellie Mae is a school teacher and the daughter of a young itinerant woman who came into town, gave birth, and died.  She never identified Ellie Mae’s father, so the girl is not regarded by many in the town as acceptable in proper society, although the men leer at her because of her beauty.  (They never say the word, but they regard her as illegitimate and therefore as pariah).  She behaves in the prim and proper fashion of a young lady of her times, of course, and although she knows of the opinion others hold about her, she does her best to ignore them.  (She also speaks with a vaguely British accent meant, I think, to enforce her intelligence and good character).  Jerome’s mother Caroline wants her son to have nothing to do with Ellie Mae.  She stresses good breeding and respectability, and tries to interest him in Virginia Maydew, the daughter of a senator who is Judge Priest’s political rival.  The Judge clearly doesn’t approve of Caroline’s prejudices and does what he can to support and encourage his young friends.

The first half of the film establishes scene and ambience and character, while the second half focuses on the romance of Jerome and Ellie Mae and the courtroom trial of a man named Bob Gillis, who’s accused of attacking three men playing billiards in a local bar.  In fact, Gillis was himself the victim--the billiard players beat him with billiard cues because a few days earlier he had assaulted one of them in the local barbershop—he heard his victim joking about Ellie Mae’s attractiveness and punched the offender in the kisser.  Why does Gillis attack the man?  Because, unknown to her, he is Ellie Mae’s father, living under an assumed name, supporting her with the salary he earns at a local stable.  This revelation makes for much melodrama and pathos, of course.  Judge Priest withdraws from the trial when Senator Maydew accuses him of prejudice.  But behind the scenes, working with the local preacher and Jeff Poindexter, Judge Priest brings about Gillis’ release.  Ironically, he’s not released because he’s found innocent of the charges, but because the preacher, who fought with him in the Civil War, testifies to the courtroom about his heroic exploits.  Outside the courtroom window Poindexter assembles a band that begins playing “Dixie,” and all hell breaks loose.  The result is the trial’s collapse in a frenzy of hysterical hero worship and Confederate nostalgia.  What Judge Priest has managed to do is to play on the extremist Confederate sympathies of the townspeople to draw attention away from the crime Gillis is accused of.  As soon as they learn of Gillis’ Civil War record, they forgive him and his daughter everything.  All is made right.

Rogers doesn’t so much act in this film as pose.  He sits on his porch or in his courtroom bench smoking his pipe, sipping a mint julep, pondering the past, and issuing homespun witticisms.  Some of the most humorous exchanges come between him and Percival.  I remember my mother recalling how her grandmother, my great grandmother, wept at the news that Will Rogers had been lost in a plane crash involving aviator Wiley Post in Alaska in 1935.  My wife’s grandfather stopped watching movies after Rogers no longer appeared in them.  He was an important figure in the popular imagination of America in the 1930s.

The Sound and the Fury

The 1959 adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury chooses to tell its story through the frame of the fourth section of the novel.  This is the one of the four sections that narrates the 1929 novel from an “objective” viewpoint rather than through the first-person subjective view of a character.  This strategy solves some problems for the filmmakers, and creates others, in particular, how to convey information from the earlier chapters, without which the fourth one would make no sense.  It also causes a significant transformation in the story itself.  The existential confusion that marks Benjy’s narrative, the suicidal angst of Quentin’s, the fuming anger of the Jason chapter—all disappear, and the adaptation doesn’t seek to resurrect them.  Rather it makes the story one about a family in an advanced state of decay, attempting to adjust to its circumstances, set in contrast against the more modern setting of the town itself.  And it also becomes the story of how two individuals—Jason and Caddy--make their accommodation with one another and the world.  This is a reasonable approach to adapting the novel, but it carries risks. 

In the fourth section of Faulkner’s novel, two absences are crucial.  One is the absence of Caddy, the only sister in the family, who disappeared some 16 years in the past, since then never seen again, except briefly.  Her absence is the haunting, melancholic force that gives the final section and the rest of the novel much of its force.  She’s the tragic absent mother and sister.  The other absence is one that occurs midway through the chapter: the flight of the young Quentin, Caddy’s daughter, who runs away with her uncle’s money.  Of course, there are other absences too, in particular that of brother Quentin, who committed suicide in 1910, and of father Jason, who drank himself to death some years before.  How can a film convey the impact of these absences, especially Caddy’s, when they involve characters who play no role in the novel’s final section?

Normally, I would not emphasize differences between the source novel and the film itself.  I want to consider a film in its own context.  I am pleased when a successful film is also successful in retelling the novel it’s based on—but a successful film need not be faithful to its source in order to be a successful film. 

The changes made in the 1959 film to the story in Faulkner’s novel help to explain the film’s abject failure.  In The Long Hot Summer (1957), another adaptation of a Faulkner text, director Martin Ritt at least produced a film that had entertaining qualities.  The story as adapted was not really a Faulknerian tale, but the way the screenwriters Ravetch and Frank reinvented it, along with some wise casting decisions (Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick) and some profoundly bad ones (Tony Franciosa as Jody Varner, Orson Welles as father Will) made it amusing in ways they likely did and did not intend.  What one realizes about The Long Hot Summer, especially on repeated viewings, is that the screenwriters and director really had no interest in producing a film true to its source, no interest in fidelity to Faulkner.  Instead they wanted to use whatever elements they could distill from the original texts (the story “Barn Burning” and the novel The Hamlet) to capitalize on the public interest in Woodward and Newman and to make a film that would earn money.  The apparently true tale of Orson Welles mumbling his lines for the film with pebbles in his mouth, which necessitated that he record them again without pebbles, alone makes the film worth watching.

The Long Hot Summer is much more a Tennessee Williams tale—with its emphasis on father-son rivalries and on sexual repression—than a Faulkner story.

There are numerous similarities between the adaptations of The Sound and the Fury and of The Long Hot Summer.  Sexual repression and jealousy are a common issue.  Both films are centered in a plantation house.  Both feature a prominent young woman character attempting to find her place in life.  Both involve issues of patrimony, of inheritance, though in different ways.  Both occur in the same part of the American South in the late 1950s.  With all these points in common, what is curious is that one film works as well as it does and the other doesn’t work at all.  Casting certainly posed a challenge.   Yul Brynner portrays Jason Compson—his prominent Russian accent is noticeable whenever he speaks—the film had to come up with some way to explain the accent.  Joanne Woodward appears as the young Quentin[1] Compson in need of love, a mother, and womanly fulfillment—Woodward is too mature for the character she portrays, and it strains one’s credulity when the film suggests that her character would run off with a greasy haired carny.  To account for the odd casting choices, and to make accommodations for several missing family characters, the adapters make changes that fundamentally undermine, subvert, and ruin the story that might well have provided the basis for a successful film.

A major change is that the time of the novel’s story is moved forward from 1927 to the year (apparently) in which the film was made, 1959.  This is a problematic move, but not one necessarily insurmountable.  Pushing the story 30 years forward moves it further away historically from the time in which the older Compsons might actually have remembered their years of glory in the hometown.  The entire novel occurs within the shadow of that heyday and of its disappearance.  That shadow would have been considerably less visible in the late 1950s than in the 1920s, but at least the notion that older formerly well-established families in the town still mourn over their lost days of glory is plausible. 

The film also engages in several strategies to compensate for the absence of the dead Quentin Compson (who’s described simply as a brother who shot himself) and the dead Mr. Compson.  First, it creates a new Compson brother, Howard.  He does little more than sit around on the veranda and drink and look miserable, literally (much like Uncle Maury in the novel).  He has no other function, other than to repeat a few lines once uttered in the novel by the deceased Mr. Compson and to act out with the middle-aged Caddy an encounter that in the novel takes place in their late teens. 

To explain Jason’s accent, and to achieve other goals, the screenwriters create a backstory in which Mr. Compson marries a woman named Caroline.  He adopts her son and gives him the family name and (given the suicide and drunkenness and idiocy of his other three sons) makes him his heir, or at least his namesake. Over the years, Jason has taken on responsibility for saving the Compson family name, as he explains to young Quentin.  Biologically Jason is not related to anyone in the film, except his mother.  Played by Francoise Rosay, and like the aging mother of the novel’s fourth section, Caroline is always calling out to Dilsey for assistance and complaining about humiliations imposed on her by the family, but in the film she does so with a loud French accent.  That still doesn’t explain Yul Brynner’s Russian accent.

Why did the film need to make this change?  Yul Brynner in 1959 was a popular actor whose star was on the rise.  Undoubtedly, the filmmakers hoped to capitalize on his popularity by placing him in the film.  It had to find an explanation for Jason’s accent.  This change accomplishes another result as well.  Every film needs a little romance.  Jason’s identity as the adopted brother allows the constant hostility between him and Quentin that creates much of the tension in the film gradually to develop into what appears to be the beginnings of a romantic relationship.  To make clear to those who have read both the novel and the previous sentence in this paragraph, allow me to restate:  the end of the film prepares us for a romantic relationship between Quentin II and Jason.  Since they are unrelated, nothing wrong there.  And, I suppose, even if one does consider them related, there is nothing wrong there either--this is the Deep South.

The most significant absence in the novel’s fourth section is Caddy’s.  The film solves her absence by having her come home, permanently.  In the novel, she passes very briefly through Jefferson and pleads with Jason to allow her to see Quentin.  He agrees, and Caddy gets her chance when he drives by with her daughter sitting in his car.  This is a terribly painful moment.  Caddy then vanishes, to appear briefly again in what many refer to as "The Compson Appendix” (1945), when she has, at least according to the local librarian, taken up with Nazis.  The plaintive sadness of the novel is, among other things, deeply tied up with Caddy’s absence, with the vacuum that her name evokes.  In the film, Jason allows Caddy to come home.  She moves back in and reunites with young Quentin and begins talking about the parties and dresses she’ll buy for her daughter, and how a woman has to capitalize on her best assets, by which she means her body.  In the film, Caddy is a faded, histrionic, drunk and probable former prostitute.  She’s the reality we never see in the novel, and because she is who she is—a faded Southern belle from a Tennessee Williams play—she destroys the illusion.

Ethel Waters appears as Dilsey, a long-suffering black Southern woman and servant, the mammy of the family.  She does as well with the part as the writing might allow, which is not much.  She receives less attention in the film than the novel, an ironic difference given that she is a central character in the novel’s fourth section. 

Until the point of Caddy’s return, I was willing to give this film credit for at least making a failed try at adapting a difficult novel.  But with Caddy’s return, and with the promise of love between Jason and Quentin, I gave up.   A world of surreal absurdities had erupted.  Bruce Kawin, describing how the screenwriters undertook the adaptation of Faulkner’s novel, has observed:  “Their operating method was to retain as many of the novel’s scenes and characters as possible, rearranging and recasting them in the narrative present.  The problem is that they kept the surfaces and lost the meanings—and even this would not be so much of a problem if the new meanings they created had been dramatically interesting.”[2]  Alex North’s brassy, smarmy soundtrack, better suited for a Las Vegas story of sleaze and corruption, doesn’t help. 

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[1] The name Quentin here refers not to the dead brother Quentin of the novel but to the Joanne Woodward character of the film (whom Caddy in the novel names after her dead brother).

[2] Faulkner and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), p. 23.

Swamp Water

Setting is more interesting than story in Swamp Water (1941), the first of Jean Renoir’s two films set in the American South.  The film opens with a message explaining that the Swamp was once notorious as a place of dangerous alligators and cottonmouth snakes and that residents feared its “vast openness.”  Next we see a skull posted on a crudely constructed cross jutting out of the waters of the Okefenokee Swamp.  The camera pans over to a group of local residents in flat bottom boats hunting for two trappers who have disappeared in the swamp.  They find an overturned skiff and conclude that the men were “gator-et.”  Clearly the Okefenokee is a place of menace.  And in this film’s mythology, it is also a place of perdition, where the damned are consigned to suffer for their sins, hiding out from the civilized world that would bring them to justice.  The swamp thus occupies the same symbolic realm as it does in Hawthorne’s woods.

Swamp Water plies the same thematic territory as Deliverance (1972) and Southern Comfort (1981), both of which examined what happens when civilized individuals find themselves at odd with the natural wilds.  Those latter films take a distinctly Conradian view—civilized people lose their moral bearings in the wilderness and resort to primal means to survive.  Swamp Water doesn’t go so far, but it’s not necessarily in disagreement with the premise.   

The case in point is Tom Keefer (Walter Brennan), framed for a murder he didn’t commit five years in the past and fled to the swamp to avoid being hanged.  Local folks assume he’s dead. But when a local boy named Ben Ragan goes into the swamp to hunt for his lost dog, he encounters Keefer.  Let me say first of all that Walter Brennan’s performance as Keefer is absolutely outstanding—it is the most important reason to watch this film.  But there are others.  Five years alone in the swamp have marked Keefer—he behaves when Ben first meets him almost as a mad man.  He sneaks up on Keefer as he sits in front of his campfire and clubs him.  When Ben comes to, Keefer has tied him up.  He threatens to kill Ben or at least never to let him go.  Keefer has a vacant, distracted stare, and speaks disjointedly.  He lives in a clearing and sleeps on the ground.  When a cottonmouth bites him on the face (!!), he immediately falls unconscious, and Ben assumes he’s going to die and digs him a grave.  But the next morning Keefer wakes up, explaining that he has learned how to will himself to survive snake bites.  When he learns that Ben has taken care of him, they become friends.

Keefer is full of Emersonian insights with vaguely mystical connotations.  He talks to Ben about the importance of all living things, looks distractedly at the stars (“I hear tell that stars is other worlds, too, big shining rafts a-floatin’ in the ocean of God’s night”), isn’t sure he can survive in the civilized world when Ben tells him he can return.  There’s otherworldliness to his character, not the otherworldliness of a saint but instead of a man wounded by isolation and hardship (“Living alone in these swamps is just like living on another star”).  Even in the film’s final scene, after he’s been exonerated and welcomed back to the community, sitting in a chair at a town dance, watching the action, he seems uncomfortable and out of place.  He’s similar to Tom Joad in John Ford’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but without a humanist or political agenda.

Another reason to watch this film is its portrayal of life in an isolated Southern village on the borders of the Okefenokee Swamp.  Without much condescension or stereotyping, Renoir shows the people of this town engaged in the normal affairs of their lives.  We see dances, courtship, various forms of work, recreation.  As in The Southerner (1945), Renoir exhibits a remarkable gift for revealing the nuances of a particular way of life. 

I’m interested in Thursday Ragan (Walter Huston) and his younger wife Julie (Anne Baxter).  Thursday is an older man who has married a younger woman, and the film gently plays with the connotations of such a relationship.  He’s often absent from home, hunting and tending to business, and she misses him.  She tells him so, and the implication is that she misses him sexually.  While he’s away a local no good named Jesse Wick played by John Carradine tries to court Julie with his guitar, and although she repeatedly tries to rebuff him it’s clear that she isn’t entirely uninterested. 

Another interesting character is Tom Keefer’s daughter Mabel.  With her father convicted and lost in the swamp, she’s been taken in by a local family and spends most of her time doing menial work.  She’s a wild Ariel-like character, always running to and fro, taking care of animals, protecting kittens, constantly in motion, more or less tolerated by the local community but without a real place within it.  She may be 14 or may be 18—it’s not clear—but after Ben grows tired of his one-time girl Hannah’s capriciousness, he turns to Mabel.

In its attention to an isolated small Southern community Swamp Water is akin to Thunder Road (1958) and I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951).  As with The Southerner, one senses the influence of John Ford.  But riding up against Ford’s tendency to idealize his characters is Renoir’s effort to see them as fallible inhabitants of their world.  Renoir’s characters are more three-dimensional than Ford’s, more nuanced.  Yet this is really only a matter of degree, for neither Ford nor Renoir (at least in his Southern films) plumb human character too deeply.

Although I find his father Thursday more interesting, and although Tom Keefer is the fascinating center of the film, Ben Ragan is Renoir’s protagonist.  He’s a young man just starting out in the world.  He’s intelligent and idealistic, and like his father a stubborn individual.  Stubborn willfulness brings father and son into conflict.  A major argument erupts when Ben announces his intention to go into the swamp to hunt for his lost hound.  When Ben returns after a two-week absence, the argument erupts again, and Ben moves out.  What Ben doesn’t see is his father’s deep anxiety for his safety.  What Thursday cannot see is the effect of his dogmatic temper on his son. Ben’s own stubbornness is a virtue as well—once he decides that Tom Keefer is a good man, nothing will alter his loyalty, and even when the two men who framed Keefer for murder try to drown Ben, he refuses to give Keefer up to the local people who want to bring him back to be hanged. 

Much if not most of Swamp Water was filmed on location in and near the Okefenokee Swamp.  The result is a film with a relatively authentic feel that lacks the claustrophobic atmosphere of a studio production.  Only one scene in the swamp seems to have been shot in the studio, and it sticks out like the sorest of thumbs.

In 1952, a Technicolor remake of the film entitled The Lure of the Wilderness was released, featuring the same setting and many of the same scenes and dialogue from the original.  Walter Brennan reprised the same role, though the other cast members and character names had changed.