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I98 THE CINEMA
Faulkner talks of the potential lynchers as ' the men who were in every little Southern town, who never really led mobs nor even instigated them but were always the nucleus of them because of their mass availability', the adaptor is faced with the necessity of conveying the point in action. Ben Maddow's script does this in the first sequence. A group of white men in a barber's shop who are lazily, with no particular emotion, discussing Lucas's arrest, suddenly stir themselves into frantic activity as they hear the arrival of the sheriff's car. Faulkner's precise effect is fittingly captured.
The direction is not everywhere so successful. It fails, for i instance, in the rendering of the crowd. Faulkner sees the \ crowd of potential lynchers through Chick's eyes as
not faces but a Face : not even ravening nor uninsatiate but just in motion, insensate, vacant of thought or even passion: an Expression significantless and without past ... without dignity and not even evocative of horror....
He sees it, through the sensibility of one of his characters a device which in the cinema is one of the most difficult to achieve without over-emphasis. Clarence Brown employs long travelling shots which reveal rows of faces intent, revengeful, thoughtful all still. Yet though the crowd scenes are not realized with the impersonal hysteria which one finds in, say, Ace in the Hole or The Sound of Fury, the effect is nevertheless different from Faulkner's. The effect of the still, gazing faces is menacing: their potential mass hostility rather than their individual uncertainty comes across. The change from the novel's subjective response to the film's objective view, brings with it, in this case, a serious distortion. It is at this level that the real problem of adaptation arises. In spite of the accuracy of the script and direction, many of the novel's subtleties remain finally elusive. Faulkner's attitude to his theme arises out of his detailed analysis of the characters' emotions. His stand-point is not stated (except