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I96 THE CINEMA
and the minute dissection of experience is a third, less successful, didactic element. Towards the end of the book Chick's uncle delivers a long speech which summarizes Faulkner's view of the Southern problem. This, though it is uneasily assimilated into the narrative, is perhaps the element which made the novel attractive to M.G.M.
These three levels on which Faulkner's novel operates are worth separating because they are rendered in the film with varying success. Ben Maddow's script sticks closely to the novel's plot. Even minute passages of description are in many instances followed to the letter.
Without haste or fumbling, almost deliberate in fact,^the old man with his one hand unbuttoned two buttons on the front of his shirt and thrust the hand inside, hunching his hip slightly around to meet the hand and drew from inside the shirt a heavy nickel-plated pistol and still with no haste but no pause either thrust the pistol into his left armpit, clamping it butt-forward against his body by the stub of the arm while his one hand buttoned the shirt, then took the pistol once more into his single hand not pointing it at anything, just holding it.
This scene is played by Porter Hall with minute precision while as in the book the action is temporarily suspended. Clarence Brown's direction is, indeed, extremely successful in translating Faulkner's minute descriptive detail to the screen. There are even moments when the use of his medium allows him to achieve effects which strengthen (without distorting) Faulkner's intentions. Lucas's first appearance when he helps Chick's rescue from the stream appears in the book in part as follows :
... up the bank until he [Chick] saw two feet in gum boots which were neither Edmond's boy's nor Alec Sander's and then the legs, the overalls rising out of them and he climbed and stood up and saw a Negro man with an axe on his shoulder, in a heavy sheep-lined coat and a broad pale felt hat such as his grandfather used to wear, looking at him and that was when he saw