Reeling Backward: Native Son (1951)

The exceedingly rare film adaptation of a novel starring the author in the leading role. Unfortunately, it replicates all the pitfalls of Richard Wright's book.

I did not care for “Native Son” when I read it a few years ago, despite its status as a literary classic. I had higher hopes for the 1951 film adaptation, but unfortunately it seems to replicate the issues I had with the book.

Richard Wright’s story of a Black man who suffers at the hands of a systemically racist society was ahead of its time, but also a captive it. Wright’s tawdry book, an overnight best-seller that made him a major literary and civil rights figure, was the first serious attempt to show how African-Americans are kept subjugated through Jim Crow and other discriminatory structures that feed a slave mentality.

Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old petty criminal in Chicago, is given a chance at a good life with a job as chauffeur to the wealthy Dalton family through the relief programs they sponsor as left-leaning do-gooders. But when their playgirl daughter and her Communist sympathizer boyfriend try to ingratiate themselves with him, it leads to tragedy when Bigger is forced to carry the drunken woman up to her bedroom and ends up smothering her with a pillow to keep from being discovered in a white woman’s boudoir.

Up until this point, the book worked for me because it demonstrated Bigger’s fear of very real racial violence if he steps out of line, and how that animated his actions. “They’ll kill me! They’ll kill me!” he pleads with Mary Dalton (Jean Wallace), no doubt harkening back to his own father’s lynching in the South 12 years earlier.

From there, Bigger essentially surrenders to the stereotype whites have drawn out for him. He tries to pin the murder on Mary’s boyfriend, Jan (Gene Michael), and even attempts to extort $10,000 (about $100k today) from Mr. Dalton (Nicholas Joy) under the pretense of a cabal of Red kidnappers. In reality, he’d already stuffed Mary’s body in the basement boiler of the Dalton mansion.

Things really go south for Bigger, and my regard for “Native Son,” when he forcibly brings his girlfriend, budding singer Bessie Mears (Gloria Madison), along with him when he flees from the authorities. Ostensibly this is out of love for her and not wanting to be parted, but Bigger treats Bessie as somewhere between an accomplice and an actual kidnapping victim.

When he erroneously believes that Bessie has turned him in while on a shopping trip for booze — she’d actually been spotted by a slithery informant, Snippy, who’s coded as gay — Bigger unceremoniously strangles her and drops Bessie’s body down an elevator shaft of the abandoned tenement building where they’d been hiding.

(The book version is even worse: he rapes Bessie and then smashes her head in with a brick.)

Two problems with Wright’s story: obviously, it’s hard to muster a lot of sympathy for Bigger as a victim of white oppression when he commits so many utterly despicable deeds. More than that, Wright’s writing is very much in the “tell, don’t show” form, laying everything out for the reader rather than painting a portrait and letting them interpret it themselves.

No doubt the challenges to getting the film made contributed to its unevenness. A Broadway version had been mounted by Orson Welles years earlier starring Canada Lee, but he wasn’t available for the movie. American studios wanted nothing to do with it, so they wound up shooting it in Buenos Aires with funding from the Argentine government and French director Pierre Chenal at the helm, who partnered with Wright on the screenplay.

The script sticks pretty closely to the book, the changes to Bessie’s murder being the notable exception. It also moves the revelation of her fate to the third act, when Bigger has been captured by the police and is on trial for Mary’s murder.

This section essentially turns the story over to Panama (George D. Green), a friend of Biggers’, and Farley (George Rigaud), a cynical reporter who manages to stumble upon the resting places of both Mary and Bessie despite being drunk most of the time. Meanwhile, Bigger languishes in prison resigned to his fate while a firebrand lawyer hired by Jan tries to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Never a good thing to sideline your main character for the denouement.

Perhaps the biggest failing of the film is the casting of Wright himself in the role of Bigger despite zero acting experience. The few high-profile Black actors of the day wouldn’t touch the part, and they also had trouble casting white actresses who were willing to be seen onscreen talking to familiarly and even touching a Black man. Wright himself had been blacklisted for his membership in the Communist party, so acting was perhaps his only shot to get the film made.

His acting style is stilted and amateurish, to say the least. He makes the common novice thespian mistake of spitting out his dialogue either too quickly or trying to over-emphasize each word. There’s also the matter of being more than twice Bigger’s age, with the paunchy stomach and scanty hair to go with it, so he looks ridiculous next to teenagers cast as his younger siblings.

Wright is also rather short, which does not help during scenes where Bigger is supposed to be physically imposing, such as when he browbeats his friends into an attempted robbery of a drugstore. He looks positively shrimpy next to the brutish Britten (Charles Cane), the bull-like detective hired by the Daltons to look into Mary’s disappearance. He immediately suspects Bigger and physically manhandles him, not to mention liberally sprinkling the n-word into his speech.

(It seems to be a rule of American movies that overtly racist bullies are always red-faced and rotund. Are there no skinny KKK members or Proud Boys?)

“Native Son” may have noble goals but a misguided approach to achieving them. Wright loved film noir and incorporated a lot of elements into the book and movie — it was actually marketed as an exploitative crime flick filled with sex and violence. Like Bigger, Wright seems to think that by giving into the worst expectations he can subvert them and show how warped our standards are.

Instead, the movie seems to revel in the underbelly of Black Chicago, with familiar stereotypes of men in zoot suits, homemade guns, smoky lounges and their lascivious owners. It trades in moral ambiguity for self-serving indifference.

James Baldwin wrote an essay criticizing the novel and resulting film, calling it “protest fiction.” Still, he acknowledged that Wright tapped into a very real mindset that Black men have drilled into them at an early age about the dangers of white women and resulting white male rage.

“No American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull,” Baldwin said.

The movie was initially blocked from release in American theaters until an independent distributor picked it up and agreed to have 30 minutes edited out. Many states still outlawed it.

It’s now been restored to its full length with a new Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber. Struck from original 16mm and 35mm prints, it looks fantastic apart from a couple of very scratchy, short scenes where they relied on the best footage they had available.

It’s certainly worth a look, though for my money “Native Son” is more interesting as an artifact of its time than its qualities as a piece of filmmaking.