STATE OF THE CINEMA

...among the ramshackle wooden structures of Southern villages or the evacuated brick apartments of Northern cities...

...At the end of the film, we see Moss, miraculously cured of his guilt and his feeling of responsibility, planning jointly with a white comrade to start a bar and restaurant...

...Of the four, Intruder in the Dust comes closest to the surprise and inevitability of a true work of art, but hardly close enough, and certainly far less close than the novel which itself depends, for its full impact, on the whole body of Faulkner's writing...

...In a series of Walpurgisnacht scenes, the camera portrays Harlem as a world of shadows, violence, and brutality, which is as distorted and mythical an image as the earlier one of boogie-woogie jazz and smoky night clubs...

...What the film does catch, and at times powerfully, is the warmth of camaraderie engendered in the intimate dependence of warfare...

...Both Intruder in the Dust and Home of the Brave take dark Negro types as their subjects and deal with situations of overt color differences...

...He has also written reviews for Commentary, The Nation, The New York Times, and The New Leader...

...Secondly, the film was produced by Louis de Rochement in "documentary" style, shot in real streets and real homes of New England, often using non-professional native actors...

...Faulkner's symbolic tribute to the black race is Lucas Beauchamp, the elderly Negro whose lordly self-possession dominates both the novel and the film...

...at his typical occupation, as small-scale farmer or industrial worker...

...The discovery of this fact by the children while in their middle teens creates a situation of enormous emotional intensity, which the film handles melodramatically in the case of the boy but with great delicacy and care and honesty in the acting of the daughter...

...All four films are motivated by a desire to improve the Negro's status, even when, in symbol and theme, they support conventional stereotypes...

...The film thus achieves an interesting reversal of its patent intention...

...While anti-Semitism has no important roots in American political or cultural traditions, the Negro's underprivileged status has the sanction of 200 years of chattel slavery in the South prior to the Civil War and 85 years of segregation and discrimination since...

...For the film sees the Negro's salvation to lie in escape from his communal roots and in his adoption of the behavior patterns of white gentility: a vision simultaneously benevolent (offering the outsider what the insider prizes most) and "culture-bound...

...Not his own efforts save him but the obligations of a white boy who has never been able to repay the debt of a meal he was served in Lucas' home, of an old white woman who as an infant had fed at the black breast of Lucas' mother-in-law (a recurrent theme in Faulkner's novels), and of « white lawyer who orates in a fancy and fluent rhetoric Faulkner's own views on the situation of the Negro and the South...

...or as a human being with personal problems as troubling and varied as those of white heroes and heroines...

...The camera work is done in s style of understatement, with casual overtones of the poetry of things and places...

...By reassuring the Negro, Moss, that he is as brave and human as the white man, Home of the Brave circuit-ously gives similar reassurance to the whites, at the same time that it makes amends for the earlier stereotype propagated by Hollywood...

...While Pinky tells the light Negro to work for the advance of his own people (as if his lightness guarantees his leadership), Losr Boundaries tells him that if he is light enough and respectable enough, he can be accepted into the white community...

...In both instances, the virtues of "whiteness" are assumed...

...The midnight scene in which the white boy, hi...

...The scenes of the Sunday populace gathered grimly and patiently before the jail in apathetic anticipation of a lynching are perhaps the best of their kind to appear in an American movie...

...Pinky and Losr Boundaries, on the other hand, center around the rarer instances of Negroes of mixed heritage whose color of skin is "pink" enough to allow them to "pass" for pure white...

...For several reasons, the problem of characterizing the Negro in movies is more difficult and subtle than that of presenting the Jew...

...It attributes the traditional movie concept of the Negro as a coward to the Negro's own mistaken sense of inferiority...

...But imaginative art is not contained in messages, however admirable...

...One never saw on the American screen, The Quiet One excepted, the Negro in his typical milieu, NATHAN GLICK, a film and book critic, has contributed periodic reports on the movies to The Progressive during recent years...

...The psychiatrist at the military base then proceeds to cure his patient by reopening early psychological sores, and by demonstrating (rather didactically) that in their fundamental response to crises, such as the threat of death, all men are alike...

...II Lost Boundaries suffers from Pinky's tendency to stifle its protagonists with innocuous and colorless virtue, but it is redeemed by a double discipline of realism...

...young Negro confederate (given frightened, rolling eyes in the movie, while in the novel he personifies quiet cour* age and good sense), and the*oil oman go graver-robbing to prove Lucas' innocence is eerily reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, even as the relation between the boy and Lucas suggests that between Huck and Jim...

...The Birth of A Nation, D. W. Griffith's early film masterpiece, released in 1915, took the first step in this direction by its unregenerate Southern view of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed...

...The Quiet One is the only movie I know which treats Negro characters from the inside, not as Negroes but as human beings...

...Here it goes beyond its didactic intention, showing with blunt physical poig-nacy the brotherhood of men in extreme situations...

...As a result, it achieves a physical, textural authenticity, recalling at times the nostalgia and overtones of childhood scenes revisited...

...This change of identity explains the comparative weakness, psychologically, of the film, for the fine grada--tions of prejudice it records are more meaningful and accurate in their original setting...

...There is, however, an unconscious revelation of the film s ideology in the single sequence that takes place in New York's Harlem...

...The most serious and scrupulous of these is Intruder in the Dust, based on William Faulkner's perplexingly brilliant novel and shot in his home town of Oxford, Miss...

...But the shadowy terror of Losr Boundaries' Harlem better serves the logic of the film and the unverbalized beliefs of its makers...

...The doctor's son, reacting rebellious-ly to the knowledge of his Negro background, travels to Harlem to see what "his people" are really like...

...Pinky is soap opera with only a few technical virtues, such as shrewd cutting and some somber night-time camera shots...

...Moss believes himself responsible and falls into a state of hysterical paralysis...

...Another film which attempts to achieve catharsis through violence is Home of the Brave...

...Thus, when Hollywood last year had advanced to the point of recasting its mythical image of the Negro, it bore a staggering burden of guilt, which it tried to discharge through a series of violent, traumatic films...

...Lucas comes to life in the masterful performance of Juano Hernandez as a dignified, dispassionate, coldly heroic individual who, imprisoned and in danger of being lynched for allegedly having killed a white man, still refuses to be a "nigger...

...And it has worked against the free play of imagination...

...In reality, Harlem is a distilled recapitulation of any crowded urban community, with its diversity of cultural and economic layers, its openness to commercialism, its encouragement of marginal occupations, and its loss of the home as a communal center...

...It is significant that in the original Broadway play the protagonist was a Jew instead of a Negro...

...Moss, a young Negro soldier, participates in a reconnaissance mission on a small South Pacific island along with four white soldiers, each of whom feels differently about working with a Negro...

...And where the Jew simply did not exist in film, except in occasional humorous or sentimental spots, the movie Negro fell into a constantly repeated stereotype of 30 years standing which helped sustain the myth of Negro inferiority...

...When one of the men, an old high school friend, is killed...

...Having opened the breach with an attack on anti-Semitism {Crossfire, Gentleman's Agreement), Hollywood has proceeded to elucidate with even greater ardor, and from more points of view, the situation of the American Negro...

...Unfortunately this very technique has contributed to the dullness and smugness of a number of scenes, by emphasizing the non-dramatic in facial expressions and body movements...

...In content, it represents the most timid and conservative Hollywood gesture of goodwill toward the Negro...

...In the first place, it is based upon the actual experiences of a New England doctor and his family, who "passed" for white not only with their neighbors, but also with their two children...

...Following Griffith, and despite the growth of a considerable Negro middle-class of professionals and business men, Hollywood showed the Negro in films principally as a house servant, sometimes shuffling and lethargic, sometimes bustling and impertinent, but invariably happy in his subservient relation to the white man...

...After this episode, the spectator settles down with immense relief to the final acceptance of the family by their white neighbors...