Uncensored ‘Native Son’ reveals a flawed yet powerful film
It took a Frenchman to figure out that Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son” was film noir waiting to happen.
Pierre Chenal’s 1951 adaptation of Wright’s hard, naturalist work has the high-contrast lighting, the urban location shooting and the dubiously executed murder that noir fans fiend for. With a new print of the uncensored film now available to watch via Kino Marquee and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Virtual Screening Room (visit kinomarquee.com or mfah.org/films/virtual-cinema ), it’s clear that this version of the story is superior to others, including the 2019 HBO movie.
Which still doesn’t mean it’s great. Wright’s violent 1940 tale of fate, death and systemic racism is one of those novels that stubbornly resists visual interpretation. Its rawness and pitchblack soul cause filmmakers to cut corners and pull up short or simply muddle Wright’s uncompromising tone.
From the first scene of novel and film it’s clear that Bigger Thomas, as a Black man in the first half of the 20th century, has limited options. A rat is terrorizing his family, and when Bigger gets his chance he whales on the furry beast like his life depended on it. This is the world he lives in; these are the victories he is afforded.
When Bigger lands a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy couple and their spoiled communist daughter ( Jean Wallace), you soon sense his doom will be sealed. Chenal shot the film in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but you never question that you might be looking at the story’s setting in Chicago’s Black Belt, circa 1940. As Lauryn Hill once sang, any ghetto, any city. (Yet the awkward opening narration still feels the need to tell us where we are.)
Something is a little off from
those early scenes on, and it’s a pretty big something. Playing the role of Bigger, 20 years old in the novel, is none other than his creator, Wright, in his 40s when the film was shot. Bigger was many things: angry, tormented, stuck. But he was not a middleage existentialist author, and Wright was not an actor.
He doesn’t embarrass himself, but he never seems very comfortable in Bigger’s shoes. His eyes say he understands the part — how could he not? — but there’s nothing about his performance that suggests the youth, hunger and desperation that mark every page of “Native Son.”
While we’re on the subject of the book: It remains among the most authentically disturbing works in world literature. When Bigger kills — on purpose, by accident, undetermined — he is falling into the only identity that life has given him. Murder is his self-actualization. In this sense, “Native Son” has always reminded me of another deeply troubling tale, “Taxi Driver.” Without killing, Travis Bickle is a cipher in a hostile world. The difference, of course, is that he’s white, which also means he can get away with it.
For all its shortcomings, Chenal’s “Native Son” has moments that do justice to the book and to noir style. (Spoiler alert, if you need one for an 80-year-old story): For the scene when Bigger disposes of Mary’s body in the incinerator, Chenal conjures a fires-of-hell feel and makes the most of the restraint demanded by the industry. (Not even a B-movie like this could show a Black man burning a white woman’s body; Chenal lets the viewer’s imagination carry much of the load here.) Chenal also brings out the beast in the film’s hollowed-out Argentinean housing, particularly the house where Bigger holes up with his girlfriend, Bessie (Gloria Madison).
Even if it’s not a great film, this “Native Son” is of historical and cultural significance. The frank depiction and discussion of communism as it related to the Black experience was extremely rare at the movies, as was the dramatization of a lynch mob coming for Bigger (among the sequences restored to this uncensored version).
If you’ve read the book, this restored version qualifies as a must-see. Even if you’ve never met Bigger before, it’s a fascinating chapter for a jolting landmark of American literature.