82
PAIHISAN
R~VIEW
The picture, then, is at its best when not required to convey parti–
cularized or personal emotion. But energy without mind, even in so un–
ratiocinative a medium as the
film,
must lead to a muddle. Broderick
Crawford plays Stark with a sweaty sensual gusto, but his masculine
force is no substitute for a clear conception of the ratio of guile to sin–
cerity, or of the composition of their blend, in a demagogue like Stark.
As for the other players, they are either stock or corrupted by the
Holly–
wood cum Hemingway
tone, Mercedes MacCambridge acting a tough
girl with a soft soft heart as if she were Katherine Hepburn suffering
from an hallucinatory identification with a H emingway character.
What was alarming about the novel
Intruder in the Dust
was its
suggestion that Faulkner might at last have arrived at the ordinary
kind of sanity from which we all suffer, a condition which, as a writer,
he is not particularly equipped to cope with. There seemed the possi–
bility that he had exhausted the world of Yoknapatawpha and had re–
turned to the same South other Southerners inhabit. Having lost touch
with his mythic world and not caring to produce naturalistic novels,
Faulkner wrote
Intruder in the Dust
as an interregnum novel, part melo–
dramatic fable and part whodunit entertainment. The novel, I think,
can be most profitably read as a modern version of the Huck Finn–
Nigger
Jim
story, the conscience-stricken white boy Charles Mallison
and the "intractable" Negro Lucas Beauchamp reenacting Twain's sym–
bolic tale in the strained terms of the present.
T ransferred to the screen,
Intruder in the Dust
could be effective
only if handled with a certain non-whimsical but folklorish extravagance,
a conscious attention to symbolic contours. In the novel that extrava–
gance is furnished by Faulkner's rhetoric, but in the film there is only the
camera, alternately neutral and arty. For once, it might have been ef–
fective, though very risky, to use a narrator with a script contrapuntal
to the action, and thereby to pull the spectator's attention away from
the minor problem of credibility to the major one of meaning. But direc–
tor Clarence Brown has staked everything on a literalist treatment of
the story and on arty photography, with the result that Faulkner's fable
is almost obliterated and the whodunit, inherently a bit preposterous any–
way, is greatly exaggerated. When the camera does not stop for a "lovely"
shot, the characters stop to "explain" what is actually quite clear. Some
of the photography is arresting: winding shots of country roads, gray
looks into Negro cabins at night, flat brassy stares at a Mississippi town
damaged by modernity but without its benefits. While such shots create
the story's visual context, Brown has allowed his photographer to in-
