The cinema : 1952 (1952)

194 THE CINEMA The Breaking Point attempts none of this. Curtiz has directed it with impersonal efficiency and the film proceeds with the pace of a thriller. The plot, itself somewhat diluted, is presented neat : divorced from the style which gave it validity it looks hollow and somehow pointless. Similarly, Hemingway's dialogue has been torn from the emotional climate of the novel and survives, in places, to sound more than a little ridiculous. The whole adaptation, attempting neither to render the spirit of the novel, nor to impose a fresh approach, ends up with its style and content badly out of step. ill Ben Maddow's script of William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust shows a more profound respect for its original. Reaching this country close on the heels of Pinky, Lost Boundaries, and Home of the Brave, Clarence Brown's film was treated by critics as the tail-end of what had up till then been an indifferent cycle of films, and it was consequently underrated. This seems a pity, not only because Intruder in the Dust is a film of great interest but also because it showed, by example, what had been lacking in the previous 'problem' films. Faulkner's novel provides as would, one imagines, most of his others difficult but extremely promising film material. Its characters especially the Negro, Lucas, and Chick, the boy who rescues him from lynching ~ are, one feels, at the centre of Faulkner's conception, and the plot which contains a good deal of melodrama arises out of the characterizations. This, surely one of the first essentials of a serious literary conception, is worth noting because it was absent in the other films with which Intruder in the Dust has been bracketed. In Pinky, the characters are neatly (though unconvincingly) tailored to represent the various points of view in a discussion of the Negro problem. Home of the Brave