21.   Faulkner in Film  

Southern viewers must naturally be interested in what Hollywood has done with America’s greatest 20th century writer, William Faulkner of Mississippi.


**Intruder in the Dust (1949).  Perhaps the most faithful of all Faulkner’s work on film, and a realistic portrayal of Southern life in the early 20th century.  An old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) and two boys, one white and one black, go to great lengths to save a cantankerous black man from a murder charge and lynching.


**The Reivers (1969).  A pretty good rendering of the disobedient Memphis escapades of a boy and his two feckless adult companions.  Realistic and a lesson in what happens when you disobey Grandfather’s instructions about the conduct of a gentleman.


**Tomorrow (1971).  In this bleak dramatisation of a Faulkner story, Robert Duvall makes one of his earliest and best performances. He is a poor farmer who takes in a dying woman and her baby and later faces the loss of the boy he has raised as his own son.


**William Faulkner’s “The Old Man” (1988).  A story from Faulkner’s book The Wild Palms.   “The Old Man” is the Mississippi River.  A convict is temporarily released to fight the raging floods in the 1920s.  In the process he finds love and redemption.


**Two Soldiers (2003).  A poor Mississippi farm boy goes to Memphis to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor. His little brother follows with the intention of joining the war. Based on a story about the little brother’s experiences and a testimony to Southern wartime patriotism.


(T) Today We Live (1933) is a big- star (Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Robert Young) film based on Faulkner’s story “Turnabout,” about England in World War I, but it rather misses the point–too much romance and not enough of  the tragedy of war. 


**The Road to Glory (1936) is not Southern in setting but is a truly epic treatment of French soldiers in World War I.  The screenplay is Faulkner’s work and thus part of Southern literature.


James Franco has recently (2013 and 2014) tried to put two of Faulkner’s most difficult works into film: (X) As I Lay Dying and (X) The Sound and The Fury.   For once I agree with the respectable critics in finding these attempts entirely unsatisfactory, for multiple reasons. You might call these two films at best comic book versions of Faulkner.  You would never know from them why these are great books or understand the depth of Faulkner’s vision.


I do not care for the 1950s Hollywood’s mangling of Faulkner in (X) The Sound and the Fury and (X) The Long Hot Summer.  The Hollywood renderings of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, I find mildly interesting but not very recommendable: (T) The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and (T ) Sanctuary (1961).


Faulkner, of course, spent a lot of his talent in Hollywood writing for the screen.  Like all Southerners, he needed the money. It is said that once when he had a block on a particular script, the studio head told him to go home and rest. So, he hitched up his horse trailer and headed back to Mississippi.  Were Hollywood able to deal honestly with itself, Faulkner’s portrayals of Southern California and Yankees in general would be a true learning experience.


Faulkner’s screenwriting made major contributions to the adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946) and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not (1944), a Humphrey Bogart vehicle. There are many other good films with Faulkner’s touch. During World War II Faulkner wrote the script for a biography of Charles de Gaulle, but production was forbidden by FDR.


WHAT COULD BE:  Imagine if we had a truly Southern film industry or even if Hollywood represented a true national culture (if the U.S. had a real culture). What could be done in transferring the stories of the great Southern writers to film!  Not to do so indicates an ignorance of the best part of genuine American culture.  Hollywood did alright with Tom Wolfe’s (T) The Right Stuff but made an unholy distorted mess out of his (X) Bonfire of the Vanities.   Some of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories have been made into half-hour TV dramas which I have not reviewed. The film attempt at her (X) Wise Blood 1979): skip the movie and just listen to O’Connor’s comments and reading in the Bonus material.


If there were an independent Southern movie industry, Faulkner’s War Between the States novel, The Unvanquished, would be a blockbuster rendering of Southern courage, sacrifice, and honour.  And his Go Down, Moses would be a marvelous exploration of a large segment of American life. How about George Garrett’s Elizabethan trilogy, Fred Chappell’s delightful I Am One of You Forever, Andrew Lytle’s Long Night, any of the works of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Caroline Gordon, Walker Percy? The list could go on almost forever.  This would put U.S. film into the world-class category.  Instead we have an endless trashy inventory of prequels, sequels, comic book characters, absurd fantasies, obscenity, violence, and stupid, vulgar dehumanizing comedy illustrating the trivial lack of decency and dignity that characterises so much of American life.  

As you know, the folks who dominate the American movie industry regard the South, when they think of us at all, as the weirdest and most dangerous part of that unknown territory between the JFK runways and L.A. International. Besides, Yankees since the 17th century have regularly projected their sins, nightmares and forbidden fantasies onto Dixie.


The South makes up such a large part of the American past and present that it can hardly be ignored. A great deal of what the movies have churned out about us is the usual propagandistic hate and misrepresentation that we are all too familiar with from “news” and “entertainment.” Southerners are most often presented as murderous and stupid hayseeds. So far as American media is concerned that is the nature of the beast. 


Being well past my allotted three score and ten, I realise that I have spent too much time watching movies.  I can only hope that come judgment a merciful Lord will forgive my frivolous wasted hours.  My excuse is that cinema has been, in my time, a powerful influence on the ideas, attitudes, values, and behaviour of a great many people.  In earlier days that role was filled by the Bible and the classics. The 19th century was largely dominated by the novel, and for most of the 20th century it was the movies.  My chief interest in my wasted hours of diversion has been the strange career of Hollywood in its treatment of the South, America’s Internal Other.


By default a citizen of the United States, I can only feel shame at the condition American mainstream film has reached in the 21st century—pornography, nihilistic violence, imitativeness, moral depravity, and just plain triviality—an entirely post-Christian product.  The compulsively filthy language of urban Northerners is now standard everywhere. American film is no longer literature unless comic books qualify as literature.  Today’s movie industry is only surpassed in evil influence by its bastard offspring, television. Television is the greatest instrument for lies ever invented.  It not only lies with words but also with pictures. And let us remember who is the Father of Lies.


The sense of shame is especially acute when I realize that other countries have maintained some literary and artistic standards in their cinema—Britain, France, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia, Australia, Japan, and even Iran, a country which our late-Empire  American megalomaniacs want to destroy. (Old men are irascible. I generalise too sweepingly about American movies. There are still good ones being produced by good people who have at least one foot out of the Hollywood mainstream.)


The hollow post-Christian post-Western “culture” reflected by Hollywood reflects the truth that there is no “American” culture, unless one counts a talent for gadgetry. If we define culture as creativity working in an authentic tradition, a combination of genius and folk culture, then we have to count “America” out. There are good reasons why every original American form of music has come from the South, as well as a preponderance of our greatest writers. Sorry, Minneapolis, but symphony orchestras with foreign conductors playing European music and museums full of European art bought by wealthy industrialists don’t make the grade. This, as Donald Davidson observed long ago, is “culture poured in from the top,” not the real thing.


We can be fairly certain that, accompanying a general decline of knowledge in the American public, most people now get their notions of the Old South and the Confederacy from the silly melodrama Roots and Ken Burns’s government-subsidised Radical Republican propaganda piece.  Americans are now obsessed with victimology, and “slavery” is now the main theme of our history. This feeds upon the all-too-common American self-righteousness that preens itself on condemning the sins, real or imagined, of others.

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As far as cinema is concerned, Southerners are going to have to rely on their own resources for truth-telling.  We have a number of advantages in this regard if they can be put to use—abundant  talent and the fact that our Confederate and other forebears are intrinsically attractive despite all that has been done of late to libel them.

19. Our Speech

The experts will tell you that there is more than one Southern accent.  This is true, but they all gather together as a marker of Southern that has been widely recognised for a long time—like barbecue.   For Hollywood a Southern accent usually is outre’, a sign of ignorance or villainy as discussed in preceding chapters. On the other hand, historically prominent Southerners (Washington, Jefferson, etc.) and other Southern characters viewed favourably always talk in the movies like they are from Chicago–they are honourary Yankees.  Only bad or inferior people talk Southern.  


Years ago I saw a docudrama about the James Monroe administration.  All of the characters except John Quincy Adams were Southern: Monroe, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun.  But the only one who had a Southern accent was the bad apple: Calhoun. This is the kind of thing that Northerners assume without even thinking about it. 


Hollywood is playing to long-standing Yankee prejudice.  Noah Webster with his Connecticut dictionary and generations of Yankee schoolmarms have established “proper” American speech as a sign of respectability, of social superiority over the masses. The result of this Puritan conformity and social ambition is to make standard “American” English the most boring and uncreative form that exists of the marvelous English language.  Southern English, alas diminishing every day, is a natural, living cultural expression, charming and creative.  Foreigners, without Yankee prejudice, tend to recognize this.


Hollywood and the American public would be shocked to learn that early settlers of Virginia talked like Southerners, as did Southern English people in the Shakespearean era.  The Oxford English now supposedly characteristic of the English is a much later development.  See Cleanth Brooks, The Language of the American South.

Yet, now and then, actors of knowledge and of professional dedication to authenticity do make an honest effort.  Interestingly, it is Brits and Australians who are the best at this.  They are more professional and more observant of reality than Hollywood celebrity types and do not suffer from an artificial assumption of Southern inferiority.  This might relate to the fact that Brits, and Southerners alone among Americans, are native English speakers from way back. 

The best I have seen is in the crime drama (T) Judas Kiss (hard to find and not to be confused with a sodomite film with the same title).  Brits Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman do a beautiful job of sounding naturally like New Orleans detectives.  Aussie Jack Thompson is on target in (X) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, an otherwise objectionable film. Aussie Russell Crowe in (T) A Beautiful Mind shows a brilliant man can have a Southern accent.  He also does it well in (T) A Body of Lies. Swiss-born Jim Caviezel plays a good Southerner with a perfect accent in (T) The Thin Red Line (1978 version). 

Matt Damon does good with our speech in **All the Pretty Horses as does the Scot Ewan McGregor in (T) Jane Got a Gun–as the villain, although there is no reason for the villain in this case to talk Southern. Another recent success is William Dafoe as the Louisiana cop and Matt Dillon as the criminal in (T) Bad Country.  Vincent D’Onofrio is very professional as a good guy in **The Whole Wide World and the bad guy in (X) Fire with Fire.

Sometimes a good job is aimed at but hard to sustain through a whole film and the accent becomes intermittent.  This is true with Henry Fonda, playing the Texan Admiral Nimitz in (T) Midway and (T) In Harm’s Way. (The new version of Midway does away completely with the Southern accent. It is certainly deceitful to eliminate Southerners from the heroic pilots.) Also true of Charlton Heston in **Three Violent People and Stacy Keach in (T) James A. Michener’s Texas.  In (T) Fort Dobbs Virginia Mayo struggles to talk with a Southern accent about half the time as do Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin in (T) Cat Ballou.


Some Northerners like John Wayne (some of the time)  and Walter Brennan, who did a lot of Southern characters,  and  Southerners like Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, speak in an authentic pre-Webster  American speech, which merges Southern and Western into a believable  natural character.  Certainly, Wayne and Brennan were justified in persisting in using their distinctive, immediately recognisable characteristic American speech on all occasions.


The moguls of Hollywood are ignorant of everything that is authentically American, but unwittingly they have made the signature Western speech Southwestern.  Often the characters in Westerns, even the good guys, talk like Southerners whether they are or not.  In the movie **Riders of the Purple Sage, Ed Harris, New Jersey born, gives the Western hero a definite Southern accent although the story is apparently set in Utah.  The same is true of the Australian star and other actors in the TV series (T) Longmire about a Wyoming sheriff. Owen Wister would be pleased.


Alas, in many recent movies, even if not objectionable in content, the Southern females talk like Valley girls (as do most American women in the films these days).   Hollywood does not understand that the voice of a cultivated Southern woman is the most beautiful sound on earth. Or perhaps they do know this and want to destroy it out of resentment.


A curiosity:  a recent French World War II film called Frozen Front.   In the English dubbed version, many of both the American and the French soldiers have Southern accents.


Why, in the recent (X) Factory, does a serial killer from Buffalo, New York, have a Southern accent?  Come to think of it, why do murderers and vicious gang leaders always have Southern accents in movies and television?  When they make movies about Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Bundy will they have Southern accents?  When they make a biopic glorifying Bill Clinton will he have his natural Southern accent?

20.  Hollywood Does Bush the Lesser

I forced myself to watch Oliver Stone’s takedown of George W. Bush called (X) “W”.   I have a morbid curiosity about cataloging trends among the fashionable pseudo-intelligentsia.  The film, like previous productions of the same auteur, is doubtlessly providing multiple thrills for the type in Europe and America.

I hold no brief for Bush Minor, a morally and intellectually defective man who has done irreparable damage to our country.  If anything, the film, while exposing his defects clearly, is actually too sympathetic.  Bush is portrayed as an almost tragic figure. But his career is not tragedy–it is a nasty farce.  Tragedy requires a fall from on high.  One gets the impression, no doubt intended, that George W. was inevitably doomed by being a Texan, a Christian, and from an ambitious family.  This impression is re-enforced by the background country music.  But, of course, Bush is no Texan and a man who calls Islam a religion of peace does not have much standing as a Christian.  The Bushes are museum quality specimens of Connecticut’s contribution to America.


There are natural limitations to docudrama, essentially a form of fraud which makes up acts and words from imagination and applies them, with a pre-conceived agenda, to actual events.  The purpose is usually propaganda rather than history.  Of course, some of our most celebrated historians these days do the same thing. Josh Brolin gives a good try at being W.  but it does not work.  He is more masculine than Bush and he lacks that slight hint of squeeze-faced New England ninniness that dominates Bush’s face.  (What, me worry?)  Brolin’s screen accent is more Southern than Bush’s, doubtless to make the point about the evil of being from Texas.


The portrayals of Cheney and Rumsfeld don’t convince me – neither Richard Dreyfus nor Scott Glenn show enough arrogance and force.  Colin Powell, as played by Jeffrey Wright, is not very convincing in addition to being portrayed as more noble and independent-minded than the real thing. Barbara Bush is played by Ellen Burstyn as feisty, but she misses the supercilious, arrogant Yankee flavor of Babs’ demeanour. Thandie Newton, however, does a great job of presenting the insipidness of Condi Rice. I am undecided about James Cromwell’s portrayal of Bush Major–perhaps because one has less feel for his private persona than the others.


My favourite moment is when candidate Bush avows that he will read the whole Constitution and even learn parts of it if necessary. Reminded me of freshman history students who have never read the Constitution and make no intellectual connection with it if they do.


There are some things that one won’t get from this highly doctored account of history.  For instance, some words never appear in the two hours: Douglas Feith, Office of  Special  Plans, and Project for the New American Century.