Gothic literature had a predisposition with death, horror, and romance, often conflating all three into hotbeds of eccentric characters and disturbed psyches. Southern Gothic adheres to these and adds in decaying plantation mansions or ancestral family homes, grotesque situations, characters experiencing poverty, alienation, racism, violence, suppressed sexuality (usually queer coded but not always), and regional religions like the conflict between hoodoo/voodoo and traditional Christianity. Often these various themes and tropes are deployed to examine multiple facets of southern cultures and their lifestyles, like how Harper Lee’s beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird explores racism from a child’s point-of-view.
The term was not viewed positively when first deployed in a 1935 essay by writer Ellen Glasgow who dubbed the works filled with “aimless violence” and “fantastic nightmares.” I suppose it could look that way when you are using your writings to pull back the curtain on social stigmas or reframing narratives where people who would otherwise be the hero are revealed as the villain. Of course, any movement that includes the likes of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty was primed for a reevaluation later, but that is not what this is about.
Carson McCullers, born Lula Carson Smither in 1917, started writing as a teenager when her father gave her a typewriter for her fifteenth birthday. Her writing was a bit of an accident as she intended to attend the Julliard School of Music having been playing the piano since she was ten, but fate intervened. She lost the money for Julliard on the subway and decided to instead work, take night classes, and write. Her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940 when she was 23.
From there her life takes on the contours of one of her novels. She divorced her husband in 1941 and pursued lesbian relationships for the rest of her life, a hint of this can be found in her novella The Member of the Wedding as the main character expresses ideas and wishes that would scan as nonbinary and queer today. Then there was the myriad of health complications, including a series of strokes which began in her early 20s, heart damage, alcoholism, and the eventual brain hemorrhage which killed her. Her frail health and nervous constitution can be found in the neurotic major’s wife in Reflections of a Golden Eye.
Not everything she wrote was autobiographical, but many great writers stick a kernel of truth, either in personality, events, or overall narratives that echo their own lives. (I often think of Kurt Vonnegut’s quote, “Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe.”) These warped mirror reflections of McCullers’ life are rendered in prose that requests deep empathy from the reader as these eccentrics are looking for tender moments of reprieve from the unending battery of alienation and loneliness. It is easy to be distracted by the more outlandish plot elements, but that is merely a surface reading of what is going on in these texts. One must look deeper and harder.
This is why I was so curious to see the major film adaptations of her work as the novels themselves do not scream out as a begging for the filmic treatment. Their plots are insular, their narrators often withholding from the outside world and interior in their wants and needs. The Member of the Wedding has the most adaptations, but I will not be looking at either the 1982 or 1997 television adaptations. I will be focusing on 1952’s The Member of the Wedding, 1967’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1968’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and 1991’s The Ballad of the Sad Café. Many of the adaptations of her work occurred after the publication of her final novel in 1961, Clock Without Hands, which is odd as many of her contemporaries, most notably Williams, had films made of their works during their creative zenith.
1952’s The Member of the Wedding is more closely indebted to the Broadway stage adaptation, itself written by McCullers, then directly to the novella. In essence, this is an adaptation of an adaptation with the three major players recreating their stage roles for the film. And the film never quite overcomes the limitations of its stage origins.
The novella and the film adaptation are both deeply strange things. Not quite “coming of age” stories, but rather snapshots of a trouble adolescence in transition. Frankie (Julie Harris) does not mature into adulthood so much as move out of childhood and into her teenage years by the end. Whereas the novella presented a heroine desperately looking for acceptance and raising thoughts/concerns that scan to modern readers as gender queer or questioning, the film jettisons some of this but leaves behind her penchant for rambling embellishment. Your patience for her in the film will depend entirely on how you react to Harris’ performance.
Repeating her stage triumph, Harris is a bit too old to convincingly play a twelve-year-old girl at the age of twenty-six. What can be faked through the distance of the stage and the suspense of disbelief in live theater cannot necessarily repeat to the movie camera. Her acting style is also a bit too mannered for the movies, too fussy at times and too broad, but when she manages to shrink the performance’s emotional volatility down for the camera she is a sensation. Strange that this, her film debut, was her lone Oscar nomination when she was better utilized in later films like East of Eden, The Haunting, and Reflections in a Golden Eye.
A then fourteen Margaret O’Brien was apparently in talks for the role and would have probably been better suited to the part and looked more believable next to an incredibly young Brandon de Wilde. But I wonder if O’Brien would have managed to make the tender scene where Ethel Waters cradles both Harris and de Wilde while the trio sing “His Eye is on the Sparrow” as alternately touching and haunting as it is in the final film. While Harris is a bit too manic, Waters and de Wilde deliver performances that are attuned to the sensitivities of the camera.
The other major problem is that there is no real effort to “open up” the play for the cinema. A majority of the action takes place in one location that probably looked identical on the stage and remains largely static. Is this the same Fred Zinnemann who made the likes of High Noon and From Here to Eternity in the same period? Instead of merging or returning to the novel, the entire endeavor feels too slavish to its stage adaptation. Sure, the 1950s were a period where seemingly ever single stage triumph got a film adaptation in short order to borrow their prestige, but plenty of them did things to alter the material to its new medium.
Still, The Member of the Wedding is worth seeing once if just to glimpse a major actress’ lone Oscar nominated performance. No matter how awkward it is, it is still worth something of artistic appraisal and historical curiosity. Just stick with it and you’ll be treated to Waters’ singing and her final closeup as she processes conflicting emotions and thoughts alone in a room as the film ends.
1967’s Reflections in a Golden Eye is another example of director John Huston’s penchant for adapting obtuse, difficult literary works for the screen with varying results. For all his successes (The Dead, Prizzi’s Honor, The Maltese Falcon) there are films like this one where the results are a mixed bag but fascinating in their failures. Where else will you get the chance to see Elizabeth Taylor, in the fullest state of her indulgent movie star queenliness, whip Marlon Brando across the face with a riding crop?
All the narrative beats are here but something has gotten lost in the translation. What on the page was imbued with McCullers brutal poetry and quavering vulnerability is merely a gallery of grotesqueries acting out grandiose melodrama. Given a painterly gauche of sepia, Reflections tells the story of a repressed homosexual army man (Brando), his unfulfilled carnal wife (Elizabeth Taylor), the colonel she’s not even trying to hide her affair with (Brian Keith), and his wife who’s constantly on the precipice of falling into her emotionally fragile and disturbed nature (Julie Harris, again). Into this foursome comes Robert Forster as the man assigned to take care of Taylor’s prized horse, he also happens to have a penchant for being naked in woods and riding horses.
Quicker than you can start running through the symbolic heft of a rippling Adonis sunbathing in the nude or gently touching a stallion, Reflections pivots back to the hothouse torments and petty arguments its various characters engage in. There is a certain something that is lost in this adaptation that is nearly unquantifiable to pinpoint.
No matter, at least Huston assembled a stellar ensemble to act out these situations. Marlon Brando was nearing the precipice of his disregard for acting craft and technique. In fact, this performance seems to split critics and audiences into two distinct camps: those that see it as the first in his long, slow decline; those that see it as one of the minor glimpses of brilliance he still possessed. I am in the latter camp as I find he captured the character’s self-loathing and the ways that his repressed sexuality is manifesting as an inarticulateness that carries over into every facet of his life. Of course, he is going to mumble and grumble – what else would his inner (and outer) dialog sound like?
And Taylor as the emasculating wife is a real treat. Although her nude scene is purposefully left cold, without any kind of erotic heat or pervy voyeurism to titillate Brando, and the audience by extension. It is a defiantly, aggressively sexual striptease in front of the husband who does not love or lust for her. It is a detached, clinical display of her taunting him with her luscious form. This is the kind of role that Taylor truly excelled at. The 60s were a perplexing time for Taylor as a star as it saw some of her grandest highs (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and her public persona eating away at her creative prowess. This was not helped by performances that teetered on self-indulgent, bloated with excess, often intoxicated, or just downright absurd like Secret Ceremony and Boom!
While Brian Keith and Julie Harris are tasked with playing opposite the mythic leads. Harris, in particular, is quite affecting as she essays another of her 60s sexual neurotics who dances upon the edge of sanity and madness. While Keith has the tough task of playing the “sane” one among all the psychosexual hysterics and he does an admirable job anchoring the entire thing with something resembling naturalism. Little is asked of Robert Forster as the largely silent, often nude Private Williams, but he projects a tenderness and masculinity that pulls a believe sway on those orbiting him. No wonder Brando’s repressed daddy went crazy for this hunky private.
I respect the effort to try something new made here, most notably in the golden hue painted over the entire film, but it does not add up to much. It is never less than a fascinating must see, though. If this does not prove that star ratings are often arbitrary and inconsequential, then I do not know what else would. I mean, you get to watch four magnetic screen presences engage in sordid behavior and deliver some purple prose in a big budget arthouse film. It may not all work, but it strives for something more and it makes it worth at least one cursory viewing.
1968’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a serviceable if also mildly forgettable adaptation of McCullers’ debut novel. The film does not seem to capture the elusive qualities of her prose but rather sentimentalizes the whole affair. Themes of outsider connection and race are treated with kid gloves, bashfully and simplistically reduced to their easiest shapes and parts.
Chuck McCann’s Spiros Antonapoulos opens the film rolling a hula-hoop and destroying property. He is the best friend, seemingly the only friend, of Alan Arkin’s John Singer. Whereas in the novel Spiros was a flinty presence, a deaf-mute Greek who exhibited a bitterness about his lot in life, the film presents him as mentally impaired. He is an overgrown child that only John Singer knows how to sooth and communicate with. What was complex, even poetic in her prose becomes reductive and easy symbolism in the film.
The film presses hard on the “sensitivity,” but not really tapping into the emotive state but rather manipulating the viewer into it. What this film needed was a director with a stronger sense of emotional intelligence, one who knew when to merely sit back and let the events play out and the reverberations to follow. What the film needed was a John Huston, Michael Curtiz, or a Raoul Walsh. They would have led us to a rending climax that felt more justifiably earned and thought out then the bludgeoned forcefulness we encounter here.
Neither do the episodic character studies cohere into a stronger wider viewpoint. The alcoholic drifter (Stacy Keach), the doctor dying of cancer (Percy Rodriguez), and the searching teenager (Sondra Locke) are each fascinating and engaging on their own, but they threaten to overpower Singer. The film is not told from his perspective but rather refracted through theirs. He is technically the main character, but we have no access to his inner life, so he functions as a blank screen for the various players to project their thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears upon.
While this may underscore something ephemeral about McCullers’ creation, it does not exactly make for compelling drama to watch. His main friendship is mystifying, and small scenes of poignant grace are few and far between. Arkin and Locke meeting over music and her watching as he continues to conduct the silence after the record ends is a poetic miniature surrounded by too much chaff. The frailty of the novel’s thesis and story cannot entirely survive the movie camera’s searing, omniscient eye. Perhaps if the movie had not muzzled Arkin’s sourness, a quality that I love him for in other parts and this film could have used a shot of, the whole thing would work out better.
While The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is mawkish on numerous occasions, the actors bring a heft and intelligence that makes the whole thing worth sticking through. Arkin is actually quite good, while Rodriguez, Keach, and Locke are all masterful. Locke, in particular, really impressed with a naivety and yearning that felt authentically real and angsty. Also look for Cicely Tyson in a featured role, already capable of bringing a gravitas to even the most minor of parts and just a few years prior to her immaculate, towering work in the likes of Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
1991’s The Ballad of the Sad Café is another dual adaptation borrowing from both McCullers’ original novella and Edward Albee’s stage version to create this one. On the one hand, it jettisons a lot of the stage material (onstage narrator, unnecessary bits of dialog), but on the other, it never feels like a fully realized cinematic world. The entire enterprise feels and looks like a set populated by actors playing out a Depression-era melodrama with qualities of magic realism.
The problem is one that plagues all of these McCullers adaptations: the poetry and near mythic qualities of her prose got lost in translation. The novella details the unlikely, ill-fated relationship between two outcasts and the grandiose inevitability of its tragedy. The film introduces the disrupting agent as an entitled fragile male and much of the poignancy is lost.
The grotesquerie of her prose is intoxicating and somehow hard to swallow when acted out at times. It is the same problem that plagues the likes of William Faulkner, another brilliant member of the Southern Gothic movement whose film adaptations are more headscratchers than towering achievements. But where else will you get to watch Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine fist fight in a barn surrounded by onlookers? That accounts for quite a bit of entertainment value in some perverse way.
This is worth seeing for Redgrave, though. One of the greatest screen actresses of her generation, Redgrave makes for a fine, proud, deeply strange creation as if knowing that this story has little use for realism and holds the sway of folklore and opera. She deserves a better, more impressionistic film in which to place this performance than the one around it. She manages to weave a minor miracle that makes the rest of the film’s televisual qualities shrink in comparison.
Matching her nicely is Keith Carradine as her estranged husband. This is a character that needed to thread a line between charming devil and injured child but instead is nothing but a punk. Oh well, at least Carradine manages to infuse this part with his oft-kilter sensuality and menace. He is a dream casting decision, actually, if only the script had managed to properly contextualize his character and motivations. It seems like Carradine had a better grasp of what he was playing than the writer and director did.
And so, we come to the end of the Carson McCullers film adaptations. What a strange journey it has been. The acting in each of them makes engaging with them passable, at times even pleasurable, but the overall tone of her prose and florid style seems lost under the guiding hands of cinematic directors who were not grand stylists. I am not sure who would have been better suited to guide these stories to the screen, though. Hers is a tricky act to pull off.
Many of these films have been regulated to curios and obscurities for the people involved. They have not aged the same way that say, Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote’s adaptations such as A Streetcar Named Desire and In Cold Blood are now largely enshrined. It takes some patience and work to dig them up, and I am still undecided if the casual viewer would find it worth their time.
Then again, if you wanted to watch a young nude Robert Forster tame a horse or Vanessa Redgrave get drunk with a hunchbacked man in the rain, you now know where to look.
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