Carmen Jones

Produced and directed by Otto Preminger in 1954, Carmen Jones was based on a 1943 Broadway musical that in turn was based on the Bizet opera Carmen. The cast is entirely African American; the setting has been moved to the United States and set during World War II, in or near an army training base and in Chicago. The first two-thirds of the film appear to take place in the American South, although the evidence for this is faint and subtle—one character says he does not want to return to working on a farm after the war, the setting is generally rural, with a few small towns. And the film is about African Americans—or at least it features an entirely African American cast.

One has to question why it was necessary to update Carmen. The film follows the plot of the opera loosely but relatively faithfully. The opera's matador becomes a prizefighter in the film. The military officer becomes a corporal in the army who has just been accepted to flight training school. Carmen in the film is much like Carmen from the opera—passionate, headstrong, flinging men this way and that once she is done with them. She works in a parachute factory rather than a tobacco warehouse. And the military officer is as much a foolish victim in the film as in the opera.

The film exchanges the setting of Spain for the setting of African America. Instead of passionate, impetuous Spaniards, we have impetuous, passionate African Americans.

The film doesn't explore any theme that could be identified as "Southern" or as "racial" or as "African American." Rather it takes a Bizet opera and updates it with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The characters sing in a light African American dialect, but for the most part they could be singing the same songs that Shirley Jones sings in Oklahoma, or she could be singing these songs herself. That is, the performers bring nothing of themselves to the music, other than their talent.

The film was a genuine attempt to highlight African American talent—Pearl Bailey, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and others. It is a genuine attempt to celebrate and appreciate African American culture. But the film insists on accomplishing these admirable goals using definitions and conventions entirely imposed and defined by white American and European culture—the American musical, the European opera. Maybe part of the point is that music and opera are supposed to be universal languages through which anyone can express the universal emotions of love and jealousy and passion. Little that we associate with African American culture finds its way into the film—there is some wild dancing, some jazzy singing, but one senses that these are all permitted and defined and constrained by the white filmmakers.

World War II had a tremendous consequence for African Americans. Their role in the war provided support and justification for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s--how can you deny rights to people who fought and sacrificed in a national war effort. Joe himself, as we are told, has been accepted into flight school—a landmark achievement for an African American in World War II. Yet by showing how he throws away this opportunity by giving up everything to chase after Carmen, the film seems to argue that blacks are, after all, too unreliable and irresponsible to fly planes in the war effort. Since the Broadway play premiered in 1943, one can understand why it showed no awareness of the significance of World War II for African American citizens, but no such excuse can be made for the 1954 film. Evidence of what the war meant was already available and apparent, but the film exists in a social vacuum as far as such issues go.

By limiting the world of the film entirely to African Americans, so that whites or other ethnic categories play no role, Preminger avoids all the sticky and complicated issues of race. The civil rights movement was about to burst forth in America in 1954, the year of the Brown vs. the Kansas Board of Education decision, and clearly much tension was in the air. Preminger avoids the tension by simply omitting any concern with relations between different races. His focus on a single group of people, allows him to appear to be taking sides with an oppressed group without really taking a stand. Thus he offends no significant portion of the audience and even receives praise for his liberal mindedness. During the 50s, such evasive stands of liberal broadmindedness were not uncommon in film.

The film certainly invokes its share of stereotypes and racial characteristics. Pearl Bailey sings at one point of tom-toms ("Beat Out dat Rhythm on a Drum"). Song lyrics are littered with "dese" and "dats." A woman speaks disdainfully of how a man smells. But the film's treatment of sexuality and moral license is a major way in which it makes racial assumptions. Are there any other Rogers and Hammerstein films in which a scene begins by showing a man in an under-shirt fastening his trousers—the clear statement here is that the man and a woman have just had sex—there's no doubt about it. In Chicago, Carmen and Joe share a one-room apartment in which the bed is the center of the room. Though they are not married, the clear implication is that the bed is the center of much activity. Dorothy Dandridge parades around in bra and underwear in one scene. Three women are enticed to accompany a group of men to Chicago in return for promises of diamonds, minks, and a good time. You wouldn't see such details in a predominantly white film, especially one with lyrics written by Oscar Hammerstein. The assumption here is that African Americans are passionate, sexually free, and open folks who don't see moral compunctions as a hindrance to sexual expression. Perhaps Preminger thought that using an all African American cast would allow him to present Carmen as he really thought it should be produced and at the same time pay tribute to African American talents and culture. In retrospect, certainly from the vantage point of 53 years later, the decision to make this film seems to have been a bad one.

This is supposed to be the way of black people, right—sexual libertinism. Sex between whites was verboten on screen in the 1950s. A predominantly white audience would be offended by open sexuality among white actors on screen, but by black actors it is more acceptable because that is what white audiences and filmmakers expect of blacks.

Carmen Jones occupies the same territory as Porgy and Bess (1959), The Green Pastures (1936), and Cabin in the Sky (1943), which use all-black casts to celebrate (and satirize and ridicule) black culture without really seeking to explore or understand it. It's tempting to view these films as Margaret-Mead type anthropological explorations of primitive culture. In celebrating the free passions of African Americans in 1954, Carmen Jones is really trying to make its mostly white audience happy for their more upright whiteness.

In general the African Americans in the film provide a vehicle for updating a story of love and passion in a way that wouldn't have been possible for a film populated mainly by whites. I wonder how comfortable Dandridge and Belafonte and Bailey felt in these roles. For the most part the scenes and dancing are competent and entertaining but executed with little excitement or passion—an irony in a film based on an opera about love and passion.

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Nothing but a Man

Nothing but a Man is remarkable and unusual. Released in 1964, filmed in black and white, set in an unidentified part of the American South, it focuses on a black man named Duff Anderson. He works on a railroad gang laying rails. Nothing but a Man attempts to show what life is for a young black man in the small-town South in the 1960s. Ivan Dixon portrays Duff. He was a relative unknown when the film was made, and his role in this film was the outstanding role of his career.

A number of actors in this film later became significant figures in the American entertainment industry, primarily Yaphet Kotto, who plays Duff’s friend Jocko, and Esther Rolle, who appears briefly in a church service. Abby Lincoln, already known by the time of this film for her beauty, her acting, and her jazz singing, plays Josie Dawson, a young schoolteacher to whom Duff is attracted.

This film is low key and seemingly objective. It displays Duff’s life and problems without preaching about them. It has the style of a documentary, following Duff as he works on the rail line, sits in a bar, attends a church service, and flirts with a young woman selling food outside the church. Her name is Josie and she turns out to be the preacher’s daughter. When Duff asks her to go out with him, she agrees.

The schoolteacher is one of a number of challenges Duff faces in the film. She is part of a respectable middle-class black family in the small Southern town. Her father and mother disapprove of her friendship with a manual laborer. She has gone to college and is a teacher. He lays rails for the railroad. The differences in social class between Josie and Duff pose a problem that he feels more than she does. While she has a stable job, he works as a laborer, and after he quits his job to settle down with Josie, stable employment is an issue for him throughout the film.

Josie as a character stands between Duff and her father the minister, Reverend Dawson. She speaks critically of her father on several occasions, blaming him for not standing up against the whites at crucial moments. Reverend Dawson himself tells Duff that it is difficult to know how to talk to white people—he apparently sees relations with white people as a matter of diplomacy and negotiation. He may have his own welfare and respectability in mind, but he also cares about the welfare of the black community as a whole—that welfare depends on peaceful relations with the whites, and in the community where Duff lives peaceful relations mean a subservient role for African Americans.

Duff contrasts with Reverend Dawson and other black men in the film as well. He is an individual who wants to live by his own terms. He is not comfortable being deferential to whites. He is also not religious, and this distances him from Josie’s father. When he gets a job at a mill, he is bothered by the failure of other black workers to stand up for themselves. He tells them they should not accept mistreatment from the whites. They tell him that they have families to worry about, that they can’t afford to make their employers angry. After one of them tells the white employees that Duff is trying to make trouble, Duff loses his job.

Duff is not insolent or disrespectful or aggressive towards white people. He is simply himself. He isn’t particularly talkative, and his silences are taken for rudeness. He refuses to be subservient and deferential. He refuses to joke around with white men who try to talk down to him. His refusal to play the game causes problems.

After he loses the job at the mill, he tries unsuccessfully to find other work. He considers picking cotton, but refuses to accept the low wage of $2.50 a day. When his father-in-law helps him get a job at a service station owned by a white man, he loses the job after a carload of white boys threaten to burn the station down if the owner doesn’t fire him—when one of them makes a lewd joke about his wife, Duff tells him to watch how he talks, and this leads to trouble. Duff feels that employment that allows him to earn a decent living wage is a key to his hopes for a successful life. It is certainly a key factor in the growing tension between Duff and Josie. He becomes increasingly worried about how he is going to care for her and the baby that is on the way.

A complicating factor is Duff’s conflicted relationship with his father, whom he goes to visit at two important moments in the film—once when he is thinking about asking Josie to marry him and again when he has left Josie to look for work in another city. Duff’s father is a bitter broken man, afflicted by alcoholism, chronic unemployment, depression, and high blood pressure. He hardly recognizes his son during the first visit, and although there are tentative efforts at friendly talk, he ultimately tells his son to leave. In the second visit, he is so drunk that he can hardly stand, and he suffers a stroke, dying in Duff’s car on the way to the hospital. We can infer that Duff’s father was afflicted by the same problems that Duff has encountered—difficulty in finding work, unhappiness with the narrow set of roles and behaviors allowed him in a predominantly white society, chafing at an environment of disrespect and oppression. Duff knows that his father represents one possible future for him.

The father-son issue is further complicated when Duff reveals to Josie that he has a son. He sends the boy’s mother money each month but goes for two years without seeing the boy. When he finally does visit, he discovers that the mother has left town and left the child in a neighbor’s care. He rebuffs Josie’s suggestions that he bring the boy home to live with them. He is therefore replicating the same pattern of absent fatherhood that his own father followed.

Nothing but a Man displays all the reasons why Duff might feel beaten down and why he might turn out like his father—drunk, bitter, estranged. Finally, it is his father’s death that convinces him not to follow the same path. His love for Josie and his desire not to follow that path lead him to return to Josie with his son in tow, intent on the struggle to make a life with her and to hold his head up, to be a black man in a white world, as difficult as that might be. The implication, as the film ends, is that he will try to set an example and stand up against the whites in the town where he and Josie live.

Nothing Bu a Man at moments is slow and awkward, and there are occasional pauses and plodding moments, a few melodramatic moments. But for the most part it is extremely effective in portraying the limiting forces that Duff faces, and that ultimately he refuses to allow to defeat him. Some might find the end of the film too optimistic, an obligatory happy ending. Instead, the conclusion strikes a necessary note of determination and resolve. Facing the problems he faces—of class divisions, broken family histories and difficult parental relationships, the constrictions of a society that refuses to accept him on his own terms—he is presented both as the representative American black man and as the example of hope and resolve that will lead black America forward. But the film is not a call to arms, by any means, but rather a call for understanding and compassion not just of the man of the film’s title but of the society and the forces that oppress and hold him down.

The film makes excellent use of setting—landscapes, cityscapes—to depict the world in which Duff lives. It begins with images of Duff and colleagues driving spikes as they lay new railroad tracks. Several panoramas of junkyards superimposed against the skylines of a large city, further superimposed against Duff’s face, help explain the forces that oppose him. The film never names the part of the South in which it is set. Characters mention the North, and it is clear that the action is taking place somewhere in the South. But the cinematography focuses us on the locations and the places where the characters work and live—the school where Josie works, the cotton field where Duff briefly considers picking cotton, the mill and the gas station and the pharmacy. It therefore evokes a vivid sense of place without specifying where the place is. The film’s “place” is, ultimately, a generic South whose name does not matter. For a low budget black and white film, the cinematography in Nothing but a Man is impressive and highly effective. So too is the low-key soundtrack, drawn from 60s era Motown—it tells us what the characters are listening to, gives us a sense of their emotional states of mind and their musical interests, locates the film in a particular time frame, but it does not dominate the film nor does it, as is the case with some later films about African Americans (Hustle and Flow is an example), in any way become a substitute for the problems the characters grapple with.

The setting of Nothing but a Man emphasizes the world of the industrial white man—of finance, industry, technology—that excludes and oppresses and ultimately challenges Duff to be the “man” that the movie shows him struggling to be.

Infamous

Infamous is more a study of Truman Capote and his relationship with the two men who murdered the Clutter family than of his writing of In Cold Blood. The film Capote focused more narrowly on the character of the author and his deepening involvement in the writing of the book. It argued that Capote exploited the two murderers, and others, so that he could produce the book—the notion was that he ruthlessly used other people’s lives, and deaths, to feather his own fame and success as an author. Both films suggest that the experience of writing In Cold Blood transformed Capote and damaged him as well. Capote suggested a gradual corruptive transformation in the writer, while Infamous offers another explanation.

Infamous followed Capote by a year, though both films were made around the same time. This is unusual, to have two films made more or less simultaneously, on the same subject, with many of the same characters. The two films complement one another rather than cove the same precise territory. Capote offers a sometimes cold and clinical analysis of the author, while Infamous is more humane and compassionate in its treatment. It also seems to be more speculative.

Infamous begins and ends with Capote writing down the title of his novel Answered Prayers, which he was beginning to write before he learned of the Clutter murders, and which he struggled to finish through the remainder of his life after the publication of In Cold Blood. The title carries a certain irony—irony that Capote’s chance reading of the short newspaper article on the murders led to his discovery of the subject for his greatest work, irony that he never finished the book called Answered Prayers—not finishing the book was the price he paid for In Cold Blood.

Infamous begins by showing us the social gadfly Truman Capote and his circle of women friends in New York—Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and others. We see how he loves hearing the details of their private lives and how he gleefully violates their confidences by passing on their secrets to others. He feeds on their love affairs and disappointments. He charms and insinuates himself into their lives. He begs them for news about scandals. Later, as he gathers information about the Clutter murders, he shares his discoveries with these same women—in a sense, another kind of gossip.

This same kind of charm ultimately enables Capote to win his way into the graces of the Dewey family and other residents of the small Kansas town with his gossipy stories about Humphey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Jones, John Huston, and other actors.

Infamous hypothesizes that Perry Smith and Capote developed a close relationship, that Smith fell in love with Capote, who may have Capote reciprocated, at least emotionally. The film thereby sidesteps (though not entirely) the idea that Capote exploited Smith and Hitchcock in the writing of In Cold Blood. Capote is torn in Infamous by his realization that his great work cannot be published until the murderers are executed and by the fact that when the book is published, it will be at the price of Perry’s death. Both films show Capote distancing himself from the murderers, refusing to answer their calls and letters, though Infamous implies this is because he felt helpless rather than because he had finished with them, or at least finished with Perry.

The film emphasizes how Capote and Perry Miller felt of abandoned by their parents, especially their fathers. This draws them together. Similarly, Harper Lee and Capote are connected by their efforts to finish novels—Lee has already finished To Kill a Mockingbird by the time the film begins, and she is struggling to write another novel—one she never finished—throughout the film. She talks about how writing takes a lot out of a writer, quoting Frank Sinatra on how every time Judy Garland sang a part of her died. She suggests that the same can be true for writers and that when Smith and Hickock were executed, Capote in a sense died with them. There is an implication in some abstract sense that Lee’s inability to finish her book, which at one point she tells Capote “won’t come together,” is connected to Capote’s failure to finish Answered Prayers, or at least in some sense explained by it. It is Lee in Infamous, as it was Lee in Capote, who tries to reason with Capote about the difference between fact and fiction and who confronts him with the suggestion that he might be toying with the lives of his subjects. In Capote it is this exploitation that leads to Capote’s corruption—his purported indifference to the lives of the people he writes about; in Infamous this blurring of truth and fiction leads Capote to involve himself in the life of one of the murderers to such an extent that he becomes, in a sense, his own victim.

Capote tells his editor that he wants to write an article about the town where the murders occurred so that he can examine the loss of trust in a small town—a topic that ties him to the small town of the South where he lived and grew up.

Infamous makes good use of Kansas as a setting. There are numerous shots of people standing in relief against the Kansas sky, especially at sunset, and the film therefore gives a sense of what it is that Capote is learning about the town and the people who live in it. It’s surprising that a man as openly gap and effeminate as Capote—the film suggests that he reveled in his effeminacy, laughing when townspeople mistake him for a “strange woman.”

There is a documentary frame to the film, where a series of interviews apparently conducted after Capote’s death with the various people he knew—Vreeland, Lee, Alvin Dewey, and others—talk about him and the experience of writing In Cold Blood.

The actor who plays Capote is excellent. He captures the exuberance of the young and wild Capote, though at times he seems more of an caricature than an accurate portrait. I preferred the acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, whose study of the writer was less mannered and more insightful, but the main character in Infamous was nonetheless excellent, as was Daniel Craige as Perry Smith.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

Director Kevin Willmott’s faux documentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) considers what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. A parody in ways of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, complete with a wise, avuncular Shelby Foote-type commentator, the film uses actual and fabricated film clips, interviews, photographs, and narratives to tell its story. Historical figures such as Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman are interspersed with figures invented for the documentary. (The actual footage is taken out of context, understandably). The film is presented as a BBC documentary about Confederate history, suppressed in America until the public demands to see it. It is periodically interrupted by commercials that make the effect of a documentary shown on American television more convincing.

According to the documentary, the tide turned for the South in the Civil War when Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin successfully negotiates with the British and French governments to bring their armies into the war on the Confederate side. As a result, the South wins the Battle of Gettysburg, takes Washington, sacks and burns Northern cities such as Boston and New York, and wins the war. Lincoln flees for his life with the assistance of Harriet Tubman, but they are captured before they can enter Canada. Lincoln is imprisoned and later exiled to Canada while Tubman is hanged. Jefferson Davis becomes the revered senior leader and conscience of the nation.

According to the scenario in this film, the Confederate victory leads the new government to mandate the institution of slavery throughout the United States. Northerners who do not purchase slaves are required to pay high taxes. Anyone who has black blood is legislatively declared a slave. Chinese workers in the West are enslaved by their employers, with government approval. Congress declares that America is a Christian nation, and non-Christians are expelled, except for a small number of Jewish Americans allowed to live on a “reservation” in Long Island. The Confederate America becomes a nation built on racial purity and white supremacy, and the notion many Southerners held before the Civil War that slavery was a benign and civilizing institution becomes widely accepted.

According to Willmott, American history would have developed in ways that are both different from and parallel to actual history. The Confederate States seek to expand into the South American continent. They win the war against Native Americans, who are essentially wiped out. American leaders and Adolf Hitler become allies, and the American nation does not enter the Second World War against Germany as a result. There is a war with Japan. Instead of a Cold War with the Soviet Union (hardly mentioned in the film), hostilities develop with Canada, where many former slaves and abolitionists settle. The C.S.A. erects a “cotton curtain” to prevent border crossing between Canada and the Confederacy, and abolitionist terrorist groups in Canada carry out attacks on the C.S.A. states.

In the 1950s and 1960s, sentiment arises in favor of emancipation, and when John F. Kennedy is elected as a Republican President in 1961, he seems likely to emancipate slaves, but he is assassinated. After a period of unrest and upheaval, most advocates for emancipation and for social change are imprisoned or exiled, and the Confederate nation settles back into stability and complacency.

As this summary suggests, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America offers a detailed and imaginative series of speculations as to what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. Some of the speculations seem likely and reasonable; others do not. One of Wilmott’s major objectives is to argue that although there would have been major differences in American history, many of the same developments would have occurred as well. A brief set of messages shown at the end of the film make clear that many of the products featured in the commercials that occur throughout the film—products with racist brand names like “Sambo”—are in fact the actual brand names of products sold in the United States until well into the 20^th century. Some names still in use, Willmott notes—Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemimah—are camouflaged slave names. His point is that racism, concepts of racial supremacy and racial difference, are engrained in American culture.

In an interview included on the DVD of this film, Willmott states that one of his purposes in the film was to show how history would not have changed. He says that the South was “allowed not to change” after the end of the war—that the rest of the nation changed around it. Such a notion is at the least debatable and in fact is perversely wrongheaded.

Virtually all the actors in the film are unknown. This enhances the authenticity. The film employs a number of well done commercials and interviews—one is an interview with an elderly Lincoln in 1905 (it stretches one’s credulity to believe that Lincoln would have lived to the age of 96 and still been able to speak coherently). Another is a recreation of a D. W. Griffith short feature about the hunt for Lincoln following his flight from Washington. A parody of the Fox television show “Cops” is called “Runaway” and follows Confederate police as they seek to capture escaped slaves.

The low-budget nature of the film also imposes limitations. Many of the episodes or scenes in the film come across as Saturday Night Live sketches, played for laughs (largely based on racist jokes), and the film becomes repetitious and redundant in its continued insistence on the pervasive role of slavery and racism in American society under the C.S.A.

In fact, the film’s emphasis on slavery and racism—as crucial as these issues are in any version of American history—is myopic. According to Willmott, had the C.S.A. won the war and replaced the United States government, it would have devoted all its energies and resources in subsequent years to defending slavery, much as the American South did prior to the Civil War. In Willmott’s version of history, slavery becomes the main product that America markets to the rest of the world. This speculative view is at least plausible, but it also has its flaws. It does not allow for the possibility of progress, change, evolution. Would the C.S.A. never have abolished slavery, especially after the advent of industrial farming equipment made the functions of field slaves unnecessary? The film actually denies the economic context of slavery, insisting instead that in the C.S.A. slavery was an institution necessary to the concept of racial purity. Slavery was a complex phenomenon. It can’t be oversimplified or reduced down to a few platitudes. Would social movements that succeeded in abolishing slavery never have arisen?

One point Willmott seems to be making is that although the Civil War in real American history did abolish slavery, race and issues of racial purity continued to play a crucial role in the national culture. In the DVD interview, he notes that Hurricane Katrina revealed the fact that poverty-stricken people are “invisible” in our culture. He suggests, with good reason, that the nation depends on the invisibility of the poor and on economic disparities that empower some and not others. But his film does not reflect these nuances.

To a certain extent, Willmott’s film also assumes that world history would have developed only in response to the power of the C.S.A. Communism does not arise in the film, and the C.S.A. has no apparent adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, Wilmott’s documentary comes across as a one-note effort. It makes some good and undeniably valid points. But it is also frequently shallow and superficial. Willmott receives plaudits for the originality of his efforts in this film, but not for the accuracy or acuity of his cultural and historical commentaries, though some of them do hit the mark.

Philip Roth’s The Plot against America gives a far more credible (up to a point) alternative history of America based on the idea that Charles Lindbergh runs for president, defeats Roosevelt, and institutes changes that take America to the far right—the nation does not enter WWII and adopts measures that seem aimed towards interning Jews and other minorities. Finally, even Roth cannot carry this speculative scenario through to a conclusion and instead has Lindberg disappear while flying his plane, so that sanity and order are restored to the American nation through what amounts to a deus ex machina device.

Early in the 1960s, the Saturday Evening Post featured a story entitled “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinlay Cantor. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America reminded me of Cantor's story, though Willmott’s film is more inventive and creative in its portrayal of alternative history. It also has a sense of humor and wit, though as suggested above these extend only so far before they become repetitive. My recollection is that in the Saturday Evening Post alternative history the Confederate nation does finally abolish slavery.

4 Little Girls

Spike Lee filmed the HBO documentary 4 Little Girls thirty-four years after the event that it chronicles—the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young girls getting ready for Sunday morning church service died. Their names were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. They ranged from eleven to fifteen years in age. The film is basically a series of interviews with members of the families of the girls, leaders of the local and southern Civil Rights movement, and white leaders of the town, including the attorney who defended the accused bomber Robert Edward Chambliss in the 1974 trial and the district attorney, Bill Baxley, who successfully prosecuted him in 1977. 4 Little Girls presents the events in chronological order. It first describes the girls themselves, mainly through the words and memories of their parents and close relatives. It presents a general overview of the racial environment in Birmingham in the 1950s and early 1960s and the development of the local civil rights movement, whose activities centered in the bombed church. The film’s focus gradually widens, but it never wavers from the primary subject of the girls.

Lee pursues the telling o this story in a highly objective manner. He interviews one subject after another, often filming them at close range, so that their faces fill the screen as they talk. Their expressions and tones of voice, the glistening tears that often gather in the family members’ eyes, are effective in conveying the emotions and the grief that more than three decades later continue to well up. Although clearly there are historical and political dimensions to the bombing of the church, dimensions that link the event to the larger context of the civil rights movement in the South and the rest of the United States, Lee does not make this context the focus of the film. Instead he focuses on the family members, the surviving parents, the brothers and sisters, the friends, who knew the dead girls and grieved most deeply for them. As a result 4 Little Girls is above all about a personal and private tragedy that took on wider significance because of the time and place in which it occurred.

The style and method of Four Little Girls is similar to that of When the Levees Break: A Tragedy in Four Acts, Lee's 2006 HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans residents.

Lee’s artful editing, his deft use of a subtle and sometimes hardly apparent musical score, his willingness to let people talk, his careful selection of photographs, newsreel footage, and interview subjects enable him to create a fascinating and emotionally powerful documentary that brings the history alive by never allowing polemic, propaganda, or political agendas to overwhelm the personal and private dimensions of the story. There are a few moments of awkwardness in the film, the main ones being scenes in which an elderly and frail George Wallace attempts to prove his progressive racial views by arguing that he provided free school books for poor black children and that his best friend, Ed, is a black man. Ed, who was apparently a hired companion for the frail Wallace, is summoned on camera twice by Wallace, and the result is embarrassing both for Wallace (who is incapable of seeming anything other than foolish) and for the film. Lee apparently wants to present Wallace both as one of the fundamental forces behind the racist environment that led to the church bombing and also as an aging relic of an old dispensation soon to pass from the scene. The scene seems to take advantage of Wallace's age and frailty, and it should have been omitted or at least significantly abridged. It is similar to Michael Moore’s similarly exploitative interview with a slightly addled Charleton Heston in the film Bowling for Columbine (2002).

Other scenes are more artful, and as a whole the film is skillfully and artfully made. It is far more artful and effective than any film Michael Moore ever made.

The film illustrates the importance of the family and the church as the sustaining center of African American life in Birmingham, as the heart of the civil rights movement, and therefore as the logical target of the bombers. Lee devotes significant time to interviews with the mothers of the dead girls, and with the father of Denise McNair, and these scenes drive home the sad and painful impact of the murders. Mr. McNair narrates an especially poignant scene in which he remembers having to explain to his daughter during the 1950s why she cannot eat at the lunch counter of a segregated Birmingham department store. The eyes of the mothers who still grieve over their daughters, dead more than thirty years, say as much as any number of other scenes in the film.

Contrasted against the family members are the religious and movement leaders—Fred Shuttlesworth, Andrew Young, Martin Luther King—whose decisions inadvertently pulled the girls and their families into martyrdom and history. Lee is careful not to pass judgment in an overt fashion. Often the words of the people he interviews accomplish this. And of course images, photographs, film clips that Lee places on screen while interviewees talk do this too. When the attorney for the bomber talks about how Birmingham in the 1950s was a nice place to live, Lee projects images of lynched black men and of Klansmen on the screen to suggest a different story.

Above and beyond being a film about victims of a tragic incident from the civil rights movement, this film is about the intersection of private lives with a regional and national history. It is about how all of us participate in the making of history and how, sometimes, we pay for participation with our lives, or with the lives of those closest to us.

Is the title of the film a play on the title of the surrealistic play by Picasso, Four Little Girls, written during the 1940s? This is the kind of allusion that Lee would make.

Wise Blood: Novel and Film

Flannery O’Connor’s short novel Wise Blood, the first of two short novels completed during her lifetime, was published in 1952. It was the first major work of her short career. The novel is set in the latter half of the 1940s. at a time when the American South was entering a period of major change. GIs, returned from the Second World War, were taking advantage of the G. I. Bill and entering institutions of higher education. When the graduated, they would enter the work force and contribute to major expansion of the regional and national economy. Institutions of higher education would never be the same and began a period of expansion that continues today. Eisenhower’s interstate road act (1956) formally initiated a period of road building that had been ongoing for some time and that would connect the South with the rest of the nation. Faster and safer airplanes would connect it with the rest of the world. The continued growth of radio and the new industry of television began a leveling process that began to chisel away at many aspects of the distinctive southern character: dialect, lifestyle, isolation. David Halberstam’s book The Fifties discusses the crucial changes that occurred nationally in the 1950s and that contributed significantly to the national character. Some of the changes mentioned here were going on before the novel was published and continued afterwards. The Eisenhower Act is evidence of a trend in road-building that was in evidence when Wise Blood appeared.

One of the major changes that continued and intensified in this area (a trend that had begun decades before but that now accelerated) was urban growth. Southern cities offered excitement, connections with other people and other parts of the nation, and jobs. As agriculture increasingly relied on mechanization, therefore requiring a smaller work force, people who decades before would have lived out their lives without ever entering a large city now moved there. A major population shift began to occur.

Socially, culturally, demographically, these changes heralded the birth of the modern South. I mark 1945 and the end of World War II as the starting date for that new era. For Flannery O’Connor, the changes were symptoms of a shift away from spirituality towards secularism. This shift from the traditional to the modern, from a way of life where matters of the spirit were important, to a way of life where for many people religion had lost its importance, if it continued to be evident at all, occasioned struggles and conflicts that became the central focus of O’Connor’s fiction. They are at the heart of the novel Wise Blood. These changes are hardly specific and limited to the American South. They began with the Renaissance and represent a marked distinction between the medieval world and the modern. It is this difference that O’Connor was most interested in.

When Hazel Motes returns from four years of service in the military, presumably service in the Second World War (he was wounded, apparently, but does not want to reveal where on his body), he discovers an altered and transformed world. The small town near where he grew up has almost disappeared. Everyone has moved to the city. The house where he grew up is a broken down shack. His mother had died before he left for military service, and now all that remains of her is the chiffarobe on which he leaves his note threatening that anyone who takes the chiffarobe will be “hunted down and killed.” It’s evident in both the film and the novel that his family has been gone from the house a long time. One can imagine their leaving almost as soon as Hazel left for military service. He did not stay in touch, nor did they with him, and therefore he has no idea what happened or where they have gone. His world has wholly vanished. In the novel, O’Connor tells us that Hazel sleeps the night through on the kitchen room floor. In the film, Huston shows Hazel gazing at the family cemetery where his grandfather, the preacher, lies buried—the preacher whose memory haunts him throughout the film. Whatever it is that happened to Hazel in the war, along with the disappearance of the world of his family and his childhood, clearly contributes to the new religion he goes to spread in Taulkinham.

O’Connor intensifies the atmosphere of change in the novel with descriptions of commercialism and technology (the potato peeler salesman, the movie theaters), sexual looseness, false prophets, and images of apes, monkeys, mummies, and zoo animals. Why the references to animals and monkeys? One of the concerns of the novel is the question of the nature of man without a spiritual existence. The soul, O’Connor might argue, is what distinguishes the human world from the animal world. When Enoch Emery enters the zoo and looks suspiciously at various animals, especially the chimpanzee, he is looking in a sense at reflections of himself. In the modern world, governed by science, belief in scientific theories such as evolution, which argue for the interconnections of the animal and human worlds, these images have a specific meaning. Enoch’s fascination with the mummy, which actually once was (presumably) a human being, builds this theme. His donning of the gorilla costume at the end of the novel is its culmination.

John Huston’s adaptation moves the time of the story from the late 1940s to around 1970. Rather than returning from the Second World War, Hazel is returning from Vietnam. Thus, we can if we wish see him as a wounded war veteran (shades of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country) But Huston is faithful, or largely so, to the text of the novel. Just as in the novel, with a slightly altered sequence of events, Hazel comes home, visits his abandoned family homestead, and recognizes that the world where he once lived has disappeared. Because of his insistence on fidelity to O’Connor’s text, the themes of change in the novel remain in the film, though in fact the South of the film has already largely undergone the changes that had been underway when the novel was published in 1952. By modernizing the story, Huston forfeits a certain degree of authenticity. In the film, it is not so much the changed world that Hazel must cope with as it is the modern city, and all the evils and temptations that it offers. Hazel goes to the big city because there is nowhere else for him to go, but also to preach the new religion, the Church of Christ without Christ. By re-dating the story, Huston forfeits some of the logic and sense that lay behind O’Connor’s portraitures of Hazel and Enoch and of the other characters as well. In the long run, this does not much affect the film, which succeeds in large part because of Huston’s skill as a director and his insistence on presenting in the film the tone, characters, and themes of O’Connor’s novel, pretty much using the same terms with which she presented them. trying to cope and adjust to his life back from the war.

Huston succeeds in modernizing most aspects of the novel, but there are a few exceptions. Mrs. Leora Watts charges $4.00 for a night of pleasure in her bed. Even given that it is Leora, $4 seems a small charge for 1970. Also, the car that Hazel buys (in the novel, we are told that it is an Essex, an automobile that was manufactured in America between 1918 and 1932) looks as if it could have been a jalopy in 1952, not to mention 1970.

O’Connor presents in Wise Blood three different but related avenues to belief in the modern world. Huston’s film preserves these, but because it leaves out details, especially about Enoch Emery and Onnie Jay Holy, the distinctions are blurred. In Huston’s film, Hazel Motes is clearly the main character, with Enoch as a kind of sidekick who moves in and out of the film, disappearing permanently in the gorilla costume towards the end. In the novel, O’Connor parallels Hazel and Enoch. Although not of equal importance (Hazel is, because of his nature, the ultimate focus of the story) they are of more nearly equal importance.

Huston’s film obscures the religious themes in the novel without removing them. One can recognize O’Connor’s themes and concerns in his film because he has been so careful in adopting the novel. Yet the differences between Hazel and Enoch are much clearer, and more thoroughly outlined and explained in the novel than in the film. Huston’s characters in Wise Blood are country folk come to the city in search of whatever adventure or opportunity might be there, but they are also deeply in search of meaning, a way of understanding and explaining the world that has changed unexpectedly on them. For O’Connor, in addition to that theme, there is the additional theme of the nature of faith and belief in the modern world. She presents that theme far more clearly in her novel than Huston does in his film, because Huston has chosen a slightly different emphasis.

Why is Huston’s film a successful adaptation? First, it’s clear that the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald understood and appreciated the novel. He made a few major changes, such as changing the action of the film from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, downplaying the character of Enoch and leaving out several scenes such as one at the swimming pool near the zoo, but for the most part he retained the important characters, setting, themes, images, and moods. Fitzgerald has written screenplays for only a few films. In addition to Wise Blood, he contributed to the screenplay for The Passion of the Christ, a 1998 television version of Moby Dick , and a 1994 television version of Heart of Darkness. His involvement in The Passion evinces a willingness to deal with close to the bone religious content, and that willingness is I think a key to the success he had with O’Connor’s novel.  She was a religious novelist, and her novel Wise Blood is dealing with concerns about the state of religious faith in the modern world. Fitzgerald does not veer away from that subject matter, although he and Huston do seem to simplify and perhaps to obscure some of the themes O’Connor was exploring. Huston himself was a lapsed Irish Catholic. He brought that background to bear in his adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead. He may have been able to view O’Connor’s novel through the same theological lens that she did, or at least he may have been able to understand her perspective. In the film, Huston plays the role of Hazel Mote’s grandfather. He comports himself well in that minor role, which he fills with an apparent relish.

The script is a minimalist kind of effort. It follows O’Connor’s own dialogue fairly closely, though some lines are altered or moved from one character in the novel to another in the film. But for the most part it is O’Connor’s dialogue that the film employs.

The film’s setting is well chosen. Much of the film was shot in Macon, Georgia, and if you visit that city even today you can recognize areas that the film portrayed. The setting provides much local color of a sort that is suited for the story—movie theatres, crosswalks, churched, run-down boarding houses.

I have always had to give thought to the question of whether the musical tune that Huston chose for his theme is appropriate—“The Tennessee Waltz.” There is a sentimentality to the tune that threatens at a few moments to infest the film, but instead it has the effect of encouraging the viewer to see Hazel with a bit more empathy and sympathy the viewer would otherwise feel. On one occasion bluegrass music turns a scene with Enoch Emery almost into slapstick comedy—this is when he is stealing the mummy from the “Mvsevm.” The film makes Enoch out to be more of a clown than the novel does, and it does not fully investigate the nature of his obsession with the money. In general, however, the “Tennessee Waltz” theme invests the film’s treatment of its characters with a sympathy and humanism that one might be tempted to argue is missing in O’Connor’s novels. O’Connor was very effective at portraying characters but not especially willing to show them any sympathy. Witness the fate of the family at the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or even of Hazel Motes’ fate at the end of her novel.

Huston himself excelled as a director of literary adaptations. One of my favorite by him is the 19657 version of Moby Dick. The film is marred by poor special effects, but it has a genuine intelligence in its treatment of the story, and a respect for the story itself. Huston apparently felt the story was worth telling because it was a good story, and his treatment of Melville’s novel, as well as of O’Connor’s, reflects that respect. Another successful adaptation is his 1986 film The Dead, adapted from the story by James Joyce, the last story in his book Dubliners.

Huston in the film uses mostly minor actors, some of them amateurs. Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty are the major names in the film, though Dourif was emerging as a known actor after his rolls in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings. None of these three was an acting phenomenon, a celebrity, so there is no actor in the film whose celebrity overwhelms the acting and the story. The part of Onnie Jay Holy is the kind of role at which Beatty excels. Dourif was not a major actor at the time of the film. In particular the roles of Sabbath Lily and of the boarding house keeper (played by Atlanta actress Mary Nell Santacroce) were excellent. (The film strips away the deceit and underhandedness of the boarding house keeper in the novel. The film’s house lady is more sympathetic, less devious than her counterpart in the novel). The casting allowed the actors in this film to inhabit their roles in a transparent way, so that they became the roles they played—they were not celebrities playing their roles. This is an argument in favor of casting unknowns or little knowns in film roles—so that their public personae do not run away with their parts.

Wise Blood is an excellent novel. It improves with each reading. By sticking close to the text of the novel, the movie was able to exploit and appropriate its strengths. The film is distinctive for the same reasons as the novel. It effectively projects O’Connor’s vision of the modern South, even though it is set two decades later than her novel. Wise Blood is one of a number of remarkable films made during the 1970s, one of the two great decades in American cinema, the other being the 1930s.

The fact that this film is not available on DVD is most unfortunate!

All the King's Men 2006

Steve Zaillian’s remake of All the King’s Men did not deserve the sound critical drubbing it received. It is a serious, ambitious, and in many ways satisfying failure. It makes a genuine attempt to adapt Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel by reading it closely. I am not of the camp that feels filmmakers are obliged to honor the texts of the literary works they adapt. What is most important is that the end result be a good film. In trying to adapt Warren’s novel, Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for his film, made some concessions and changes that determined the ultimate outcome of his project. He also made a number of decisions, one of which, by my mind, was a serious error, and others whose wisdom was at the least arguable.

Zaillian made his film by borrowing novelistic devices from Warren’s story. It was interesting to read critical complaints about these devices—subplots, baroque language, jumps between past and present, voiceover—when in fact these devices were so fundamental to the novel. Zaillian makes extensive use of voiceover, always narrated by the character Jack Burden as portrayed by Jude Law. Often voiceover scenes begin with a view of Jack Burden tossing and turning on his bed, presumably mulling over in his mind the events he is talking about. Often voiceover in the film cues us into a transition back to the past (as to remembered scenes on the beach of Burden’s Landing) or forward to the present or to another geographical location. All the King’s Men in a sense is an interior monologue that takes place within Jack Burden’s mind. He narrates the novel, and the course of his thinking determines the direction of his narration. (Of course, Warren’s decisions as author truly determine the narrative’s direction). Critics complained of how the film jumped around from present to past and back again, but this struck me as a logical and useful way for the film to tell its story, especially given that the film and novel are about the interrelationships of past and present.

Jack Burden’s voiceover narration of the film calls attention to his own role in the events he describes. In the 1949 Robert Rossen All the King’s Men, there is no voiceover narration, and none is needed, since Burden in that film is mainly a secondary character. Broderick Crawford’s Willie Stark was the central character. In Zaillian’s remake, as in Warren’s novel, Burden is one of two main characters. And he is the only character trying to come to terms with the events he narrates--the only character who bears the burden of his own past and who to some extent finds that past inextricably tied up with events of the present time in the film.

In the concluding pages of the novel, Jack Burden comments that in telling the story of Willie Stark he is telling his own story. This is a crucial element of the novel. Zaillian replicates the parallelism between Stark and Burden in his film. The film traces the arc of Stark’s career, of the complicating events that end in assassination. Unfortunately, he does not include events that follow Willie’s death, in particular events involving Jack Burden. By ending with Willie’s death, Zaillian fails to complete the story he set out to tell, so that the film feels incomplete.

The voiceover allows Zaillian to include in the film much of the actual language of the novel. Warren was at his best as a poet in All the King’s Men—even though he was writing a novel—the language is one of the most remarkable and notable elements of the novel, and Zaillian’s decision to use much of that language invests the film with a deep philosophical tone and character that I particularly liked.

Zaillian also preserved certain crucial dramatic moments from the novel—for instance, Jack Burden’s first meeting with Willie, Jack’s uncompleted tryst with Anne Stanton, the scream he hears from his mother on the evening of Judge Irwin’s suicide, and most of the details of the Mortimer Littlepaugh scandal. Although Zaillian preserves Sadie Burke’s speech to Stark about how he has been used by Tiny Duffy and others, and Willie’s subsequent dramatic speech to the people at the fair about how they are all hicks, he downplays these scenes. Willie does not seem to be drunk in Zaillian’ film, and the speech itself, though powerfully delivered by Sean Penn, lacks the drama of the speech in the novel and as delivered by Broderick Crawford in the Rossen film.

Finally, Zaillian makes clear that the novel he is adapting is set in the deep South. In fact, he goes further than Warren went by making the state in which events occur Louisiana. Warren keeps the identity of the state unnamed, and most of the cities he mentions—Mason City, Capital City, are generic. I don’t have a problem with Zaillian’s explicitness—we all knew what state Warren really had in mind to begin with, so what does it matter? Rossen removed his story from the South. Most of his characters did not speak with Southern accents, and there was little way to identify his story as a Southern story unless one had read the book on which it was based. Rossen’s concern was in telling a parable about the possibility of fascism in America. He used Warren’s novel and certain broad elements of its plot to address his own themes.

Zaillian started out with the quite different intention of adapting the novel and of retaining its basic tones, scenes, characters, and themes. And he decides to be explicit about the name of the state where the events occur. One pitfall of doing this is that one is more prone to connect Stark with Huey Long. To avoid the linkage Zaillian sets his novel in the 1950s, long after Huey Long was alive (and at the end of the Southern demagogue era). The novel All the King’s Men is a Depression narrative. It’s difficult to think of it in other terms, and in fact by appealing to the common farmer’s own economic problems and suffering, Stark is able to build much of his power-base. He rises to power, in part, by offering sympathy and rescue to those people most suffering from the Depression. Many of the people who listen to Stark’ speeches in the Zaillian remake look like they’re suffering from the Depression, but in fact this cannot be so. Maybe they’re simply suffering.

Setting the film in the 1950s perhaps allows Zaillian to make one more adjustment: many of the people who listen to Willie and are moved by his words are African American. In the 1930s black Southerners cannot vote, and probably would not be standing in the middle of a mostly white crowd at a political rally. In Zaillian’s version of the 1950s, black people attend political rallies and do, presumably, vote. This is not historically accurate. In the real 1950s of Louisiana and the rest of the Deep South, black people may have listened to and thought about political speeches, but they could not for the most part vote.

Clearly Zaillian made some questionable decisions in his making of the film. Primary among them are casting decisions. One can find fault in particular with the three main leads: Sean Penn as Willie Stark, Jude Law as Jack Burden, Kate Winslet as Anne Stanton. These are three fine actors, but they may not have been right for these roles. Some reviewers suggested that James Gandolfini (who plays Tiny Duffy in the film) would have worked better as Willie. I don’t think so. First of all, Gandolfini is too clearly entrenched in middle age. He is large and fleshy, and though Willie had undoubtedly attained those proportions to some extent by the time he ran for a second term as governor, Gandolfini could not have portrayed Willie as a younger man. Penn, not a fleshy person, appears in the film to be generic in age. He doesn’t look much older as governor that he does as a first-time political candidate in the film. He is also a better actor than Gandolfini, and thus potentially capable of portraying Willie Stark more effectively. Whatever one may think of Sean Penn or of the casting decision that placed him in this role, he offers a credible and reasonable interpretation of Willie Stark, an alternative perhaps to the one offered by Broderick Crawford, and perhaps even to the one given by Warren in the novel, but at least a reasonable interpretation. It worked for me, especially given the fact that Sean Penn’s Willie Stark was not intended to be the sole center of the film.

The film insisted on too many close-ups of Sean Penn while he is giving speeches. Penn presented an unusual and credible speaking style in which Willie Stark gestures with his entire body, not just with a raised arm or overturned hand. This is again not the Willy Stark I would have imagined, but it is ultimately one in which I was willing to believe. But more scenes shot from a distance, that showed Willie speaking to a crowd, that showed Willie and the crowd together and did not insist on the close-up shots which became distracting if not in some way narcissistic, would have contributed more effectively to the theme of power, democracy, and leadership in the film.

Once again, although Jude Law did not initially strike me as the right choice to play Jack Burden, he comported himself adequately. Burden’s character strikes me as older than Law, more bitter and hard-bitten, more sardonic and inclined towards satiric humor. Law came across as humorless and sometimes emotionless. We know he felt emotions mainly because he told us he did in the voiceovers. Yet it is Jude Law’s narration as Jack Burden that binds the film together and is the heart of the themes and interwoven plots that in fact are what the film is about. Ultimately, I thought Jude Law was effective as Jack Burden, in part because so much of Warren’s original language remained in his voiceover narration.

Finally, there is Kate Winslet. Her wig was false. She mainly had to look fetching, to give occasional bewitching or entrancing or mysterious or come hither glances. She was beautiful, as Anne Stanton was said to be, but she seemed wholly wrong for the part. Yet she is a fine actress, and she occupied the role in her own way and succeeded with it. As a character of primary importance to Jack, but who in the novel and film was really only a secondary character, Winslet’s role neither helped nor hindered the effort.

The film does have weaknesses, some of them significant. I noticed in the last third it began to drag and seemed to lose focus. Certain scenes seem “telegraphed,” as if the director assumed that the viewer had read the novel and therefore would recognize and register particular scenes so that full development was unnecessary. One of these was the scene involving the father of the girl who is seriously injured in the car crash with Willie’s son Tom. Another is Tom himself. The novel develops a subplot involving Tom and his difficult relationship with his father develops. Tom is brash and arrogant and, like most teenagers, considers himself immortal. When he is severely injured in a football game following the car accident—paralyzed, in fact, an injury from which he later dies—a series of events is triggered that leads Willie to relinquish his corrupt ways, to declare the hospital he is building off-limits to political deals, and which in turn leads Tiny Duffy to suggest to Sadie Burke who is mad about Willie’s affair with Anne Stanton to tell Adam that . . . and so on. But there is no need for Tom in the film. Zaillian’s script removes any reference to a chain of events set in motion by the car crash. Tom is there merely as a kind of acknowledgement of his place in the novel. He could have been omitted entirely, with no damage to the film. As it is in the film, what sets the chain of events in motion is Sadie Burke’s jealousy of Anne Stanton, a motivation that in and of itself seems inadequate.

Another weakness in the film is the absence of humor. The language of the novel is full of tough-guy sardonic humor, mostly utterances from Jack but also from other people in the story, especially Willy and his cronies. The humor of the novel is an expression of Jack’s personality, and also of his disillusionment. It is also an expression of the language itself. Although we encounter hints of that humor in the voiceover narration, for the most part the film is a somber, serious, sometimes lugubrious affair.

The film also engages in some oversimplifications of events. I’ve already mentioned one—events that lead to Willie’s assassination are elided and abridged, and Jack’s tangential involvement in them is missing entirely. The early rise of Willie Stark to political power is also simplified—when Willie in the film discovers that he has been played as the sap, he goes on the offensive and manages to win the gubernatorial election in a landslide, while in the novel Willie joins the Harrison campaign, lobbies for his election, and in another four years he runs again on his own, that time in a winning effort. That particular abridgement does not strike me as a serious lapse—it’s the kind of abbreviation that film adaptations by necessity engage in. A much more important sequence of scenes involving the scandal of Judge Irwin and Mortimer Littlepaugh are not for the most part abridged, and thus their crucial role in the narrative is retained. Another example of abbreviation is the early relationship of Jack Burden and Anne Stanton. In the novel, Jack’s early idealization of and love for Anne Stanton is at the center of his problem. His image of Anne diving off the float into the water and floating there in the water as the storm looms is partially alluded to in the film, but it lacks the importance it holds in the novel.

Of course, some scenes are missing entirely: I will mention two at this point. The film entirely omits the portion of the narrative that describes Jack’s life as a graduate student in history, his dissertation on his ancestor Cass Mastern, and his marriage to the lubricious Lois. The Mastern episode is a crucial episode in the novel. William Faulkner claimed it was the only part of the novel he liked. The Cass Mastern episode details the experiences of an ancestor of Jack’s who betrays his best friend and sleeps with his wife. The consequences include his friend’s suicide and the selling down the river by Annabelle Trice of the slave Phoebe, who is aware of the affair. Cass fells deep guilt for his involvement in his friend’s death and the selling of the slave, and for the rest of his life he takes steps to try to expiate the crimes he feels responsibility for. Cass is the person Jack could not bring himself to be. He is the example Jack could not live up to, and thus the presence of the episode in the novel sets up a parallelism between past and present, between Cass Mastern and Jack Burden, on which Warren weaves his spider web image and on which he bases further explorations of Jack’s character and the novel’s themes. I had hoped this episode would be in the film, but I did not expect it to be. As much as I like and appreciate the episode, and as much as it serves to illustrate and intensify the themes of the novel, those themes are already in the text. They remain there when the episode disappears. They’re not crucial to the investigations in which the novel and the film engage. I would say the same for the film’s omission of Jack’s father the scholarly attorney and for the virtuous character of Hugh Miller.,

The most serious flaw in the film is the absence of any narrative following Willie Stark’s death. In the novel, Willie hangs on for several days after the shooting before expiring. In both film adaptations, he dies right there on the floor of the capitol rotunda, next to Adam. In the 1949 adaptation this was a suitable ending, because that film was about Willie. But the 2006 film is about Willie and Jack, perhaps more about Jack than Willie. The film carefully builds the relationship and the parallels between Willie and Jack. It traces the development (albeit in abbreviated form) of the relationship of Jack with Adam and Anne, especially the latter, in their idyllic childhood days at Burden’s Landing. It shows how Jack becomes involved in the political world of Willie Stark and how to an extent he becomes part of that world—manipulative and corrupt. Finally, the film deftly traces how Willie is able to manipulate Jack into finding the dirt on the man whom Jack most admires and respects—Judge Irwin, the man who of course turns out to be his father.

What the film leaves out is Jack’s tenuous and unwitting involvement in the events that lead to the assassination. It also leaves out the after-story, that part of the novel in which Jack comes to realize his own complicity in the events. By this he is able, after a fashion, to recover from his guilt, to take responsibility for himself, and to have the possibility of a life with Anne Stanton, who at the end of the novel he has married.

As I say, at the end of the novel, Jack and Anne Stanton are married and are planning to leave Burden’s Landing and go out into the world of time and memory and whatever else the hell it is. The point here is that the events in which they’ve been involved have allowed them to learn how to live in the real world, a world of corruption and guilt and sin but also of virtues and ideals. This is also the post-World War II world. The entirety of the novel takes place and comes to an end prior to the beginning of the second world war. When Jack and Anne go out into the world it is the world of that second world war and all that it entails—death, horrific battles, nuclear bombs, the holocaust. That is the world they have learned to live in, that they have chosen to live in.

By omitting the after story and by moving the time of the film to the 1950s, Zaillian effectively removes this entire dimension of the narrative and also denies himself a way to conclude the story of Jack Burden. Willie dies and his story is over. But Jack’s story continues. And that continuation is a crucial point of the novel. Zaillian’s failure to complete the Jack Burden story, when he completed the Willie Stark story, means that he is unable to complete the story as a whole. After two hours and however many minutes, the film ends, yet it is not really finished.

My complaints about various episodes the film has omitted or abbreviated do not take into account the limitations that filmmakers face, and that novelists do not face. Most films have to end after two hours or at most two-and-a-half hours. The films that do not end within this span of time are more than likely going to fail commercially if not also artistically. Zaillian undertook the adaptation of a long novel and apparently set as one of his goals the preservation of important characters and scenes and tones from the novel. Trying to accomplish that goal within a two-hour span was simply an insurmountable task. This may explain in part why the film was delayed for a year after the initial announcement of its release in the second half of 2005. Zaillian apparently spent the next year editing and re-editing the film, trying to make it work. (Hurricane Katrina, which struck in August 2005 and devastated much of the state the film is about, may also have played a role in the delay.) Had funds been unlimited, or at least in greater abundance, and had I been asked, I would have advised Zaillian to allow the film to run another hour, which could have given him time to complete the Jack Burden plot, and perhaps to flesh out some of the other scenes. In particular, I would have reconceived and reshot the entire episode involving Willie’s discovery that he has been played for a sap and the speech in which he speaks to the hicks for the first time. The result might not have become a commercial success, but might have been more successful as an adaptation, and as a work of art.

Let me state for the record: I enjoyed this film and appreciated its attempt to make a fairly close adaptation of the novel. It preserved much of the novel’s structure and language, its complex array of themes, its primary metaphors and symbols. It was an intelligent if finally unwieldy and unsuccessful attempt. But it is also the sort of attempt that ought to be appreciated for what it sought to do as much as it merits criticism for the ways in which it failed.