Back in the early 1980s as an eager undergraduate English major interested in the works of William Shakespeare, I often found myself defending the practice, and the value, of analyzing and discussing films based on Shakespeare’s plays to my skeptical peers and some wary literature professors. After all, as I had come to understand it, every performance of Shakespeare was an interpretation, each performance of a play (including a filmed version) offered many different interpretations, and this multiplicity was an important part of the beauty and timelessness of Shakespeare. I was fascinated by Roman Polanski’s brutal Macbeth (1971); Laurence Olivier’s Freudian Hamlet (1948) and his colorful, “meta” and patriotic Henry V (1944); and Franco Zeffirelli’s sensitive, lyrical Romeo and Juliet (1968)—all the while recognizing how each altered, added, or eliminated elements of Shakespeare’s originals. Also, I believed that some of my fellow students and professors were being overly conservative. Did they not realize there is no agreement about the “authentic” versions of Shakespeare’s plays? Had these people not heard of the “death of the author”? Or Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism, and the emphasis on context instead of originating “genius”? Because of my love for film and what I was learning in certain classrooms, I was less prone than some to privilege the written word over the cinematic text, a combination that gave rise to what became the principle fascination of my academic life: the richness of the relationship between literature and film.
My high-minded ideals were soon tested, however, when I started graduate school and was drawn to the study of another canonical author, William Faulkner. It took me a long time to figure out that I could pursue my interests in Faulkner and film simultaneously. My initial exploration of the overlap was less than promising. The only films I had seen connected to Faulkner were a couple of those he helped Howard Hawks write while working in Hollywood: To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). Faulkner criticism at that time was of little help. The only sustained academic works on Faulkner and adaptation were Bruce F. Kawin’s Faulkner and Film (1977) and Gene D. Phillips’s Fiction, Film, and Faulkner (1988), and most of the films they discussed were not available on VHS. (Some of the films remain unavailable on DVD.1) What little criticism there was on adaptations of Faulkner’s works was often dismissive of film versions of Faulkner’s novels and short stories, particularly the canonical ones.
When I finally managed to catch a late-night showing of Martin Ritt’s 1959 color, CinemaScope version of The Sound and the Fury, all of my prior open-mindedness about film versions interpreting a literary text went out the window. I hated it. I saw no value in the film and could not imagine suggesting we watch the film in the Faulkner seminar I was then taking. I cannot blame this reaction entirely on Kawin and Phillips, though they did not help matters any. Kawin, a film scholar by training, was one of the first critics to make note of the cinematic elements of Faulkner’s literary output, and to suggest that film was fully capable of capturing the “spirit” of Faulkner’s work. His assessment of the Jerry Wald–produced The Sound and the Fury holds the film accountable for falling short of that potential:
It is one thing to feel, like Hawks, that a film ought to tell a story clearly and in chronological order, and another to have the talent to do that job well. In the case of Jerry Wald, such conservatism could become obnoxious (as well as pretentious and low-brow) when coupled with what was at times an extraordinary lack of artistic and commercial intelligence. . . . The husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. [the screenwriters]—apparently had some kind of respect for Faulkner’s work. . . . But they shared with Wald his initial assumption that the only part of The Sound and the Fury that could be brought or was worth bringing to the screen was its plot. And they did a poor job in even that department. (21)
Phillips is a bit more understated and measured, but it is clear that he also regarded the film as insufficient: “Though some film reviewers found the positive outcome of the film [its happy ending] touching, it is no match for the Faulkner original” (161). Other than some tepid newspaper reviews, this was about all of the critical work on the film then available. No one was writing about it from a film-studies perspective—it was several years more before people began to see director Martin Ritt as worthy of sustained analysis. The Sound and the Fury was essentially a film lost to both Faulkner criticism and to film criticism.
At age twenty-five I lamented, much like Kawin, the failure of artistic ambition to try to replicate or to approximate the intricate narrative structure, psychological complexity, and fragmentation found in Faulkner’s 1929 modernist masterpiece. My training in literary narrative theory and modernism made such an oversight seem fatal. Point-of-view, focalization, unreliable narration, mythical and literary allusions—all felt inadequately addressed. Despite my interest in film, the “commercial” versus “artistic” chasm seemed unbridgeable when it came to the adaptation of The Sound and the Fury. As Martin Halliwell notes, “William Faulkner offers a classic illustration of the stand-off between the US film industry and literary modernism,” in large part because Faulkner’s more experimental works are seemingly incompatible with “the dominant tenets of classical Hollywood film—seamless worlds, linear narratives, a stable hierarchy of characters, humanist ideology, and tidy resolutions” (91).
Lacking much knowledge of classical Hollywood cinema and studio-era history, particularly of the 1950s, I also had relatively little knowledge of stars Joanne Woodward, Margaret Leighton, and Ethel Waters. I knew Yul Brynner as Pharaoh Rameses, a gunfighter in black, or the king of Siam, characters that did not seem compatible with Jason Compson. My favorite character from the novel, Quentin, was missing, and his “equivalent”—an alcoholic, middle-aged Uncle Howard (played by John Beal)—was for a young viewer no substitute for the novel’s tortured, suicidal college student. Finally, the machinations necessary to provide a “satisfying” resolution by suggesting a future romantic relationship between the film’s Quentin (Woodward, playing Caddy’s daughter) and Jason (who in the film is not related to Quentin by blood) seemed ludicrous. Just as my attitude toward Shakespeare adaptations reflected the dual training I received as an undergraduate (with a literature major and a film studies minor), my graduate school training in Faulkner criticism and narrative theory shaped my somewhat cynical, skeptical response to film adaptations of Faulkner’s works. It was not until I started intensive film work focused on cultural studies and adaptation studies that I began to see value in putting the literary and filmic Faulkner in dialogue.
Nearly thirty years after my undergraduate experiences, I have noticed that the vast majority of students in my university courses have no idea who Faulkner even is, or why they should be studying him. Sometimes, a description of “A Rose for Emily” will ring a bell, and maybe one or two will have read one of the other oft-anthologized short stories, such as “Barn Burning,” “Dry September,” or “Spotted Horses.” If my students have had experience with a Faulkner novel, it is typically one they found particularly inaccessible—usually As I Lay Dying (1930) or The Sound and the Fury (1929). This experience ensured no further exploration would occur. I have long thought that the initial challenge when it comes to teaching Faulkner is to give students a point of entry, a context that allows them to see the accessibility of a notoriously difficult author. That notoriety offered a starting point for me that I can no longer take for granted.
The momentary blip of Oprah Winfrey’s 2005 “Summer of Faulkner” aside, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Faulkner’s work has rarely made it into the mainstream of American culture. An attitude of fear, and perhaps avoidance, toward Faulkner’s texts remains. As high school and college teachers clamor to show the latest Hollywoodizations of Jane Austen and Shakespeare—and even other “tough” authors such as Henry James and fellow modernists Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald—in order to get their students to “engage,” few educators seem interested in doing the same for Faulkner. The possible reasons for this are numerous: canonical dead white male; southerner; conflicted attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality; and expanding curricula that is less “elitist” about including popular culture in the classroom. The assumption there is that Faulkner has had little to do with popular culture, and is squarely located in the “Literature” with a capital “L” camp. As such, his works have often been crowded out of the pedagogical marketplace by more contemporary, “accessible,” or multicultural alternatives. Yet such logic ignores Faulkner’s own engagement with popular-culture forms, and the beauty and complexity of his literary and film output—factors that make him particularly worth teaching in the current climate.
Developments on the media horizon may offer exciting new opportunities for popular engagement with Faulkner’s works. In November of 2011, a deal between HBO, the William Faulkner Literary Estate, and Deadwood and NYPD Blue showrunner David Milch was announced, an arrangement that includes the television rights to nineteen Faulkner novels and 125 short stories.2 Less than a year later, in August of 2012, it was announced that James Franco would be producing and directing, on location in Mississippi, a Hollywood adaptation of William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying.
The prospect of a new intersection of Faulkner and popular culture can beckon us to explore other facets of a career that was rich in such intersections. Faulkner worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood intermittently throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, his career in film fading just as his literary reputation was being cemented. His last screen credit was on the Howard Hawks epic Land of the Pharaohs (1955), which disappointed at the box office; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and Pulitzer Prizes for A Fable in 1954 and The Reivers in 1962.
Thus, for a period of the 1950s, Faulkner was arguably the hot Hollywood film and television property (perhaps rivaled only by Tennessee Williams), not as a screenwriter, but as a source of material to be adapted. Despite his lionization as a literary great, during the 1950s, Faulkner was arguably most familiar to the general public through the Hollywood and television adaptations being made of his novels and short stories. Several weekly television drama series, including Lux Video Theatre, Camera Three, Playwrights ’56, and Climax!, regularly aired hour-long programs (“telefilms”) based on literary works. According to Internet Movie Database, television programs based on Faulkner properties that aired between 1952 and 1956 as part of these series included adaptations of “Honor,” “Smoke,” “Barn Burning,” “An Error in Chemistry,” “Knight’s Gambit,” The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, “The Brooch,” and “Shall Not Perish.” (Like so many programs from the early years of television, these are nearly all lost.)
In addition to Faulkner’s television presence, during the late 1950s, three major studio Hollywood adaptations of Faulkner works were released in quick succession—The Tarnished Angels (1957), The Long, Hot Summer (1958), and the previously mentioned The Sound and the Fury (1959). The reputation of all three films is mixed, particularly as far as Faulkner scholars, film scholars, and more casual fans are concerned. Yet later discussions of adaptation, authorship, and intertextuality can help to illuminate the value of putting these adaptations in conversation with each other and with their literary source texts—respectively: Pylon (1935); The Hamlet (1940), “Barn Burning” (1939) and “Spotted Horses” (1931); and The Sound and the Fury (1929). Thinking through cinematic equivalents to literary techniques can help students come to a greater understanding of the literature as well as the challenges and opportunities offered by commercial film. This essay focuses on a few of these Hollywood adaptations as demonstrative of the value of studying Faulkner’s literature through film, focusing on the 1950s rather than later releases, such as the 1997 Hallmark Hall of Fame version of Old Man and the 1985 two-part NBC version of The Long Hot Summer.3
As early as 1961, there was within Faulkner criticism a somewhat belated attempt to take Faulkner’s film career seriously, but it rested on the argument, subsequently much-discussed, of what the author gained and/or lost during his time writing screenplays in Hollywood.4 Much less attention has been paid to the Hollywood films based on Faulkner’s works that he had no substantive part in. More than any other author, adaptations (or proposed adaptations) of Faulkner’s works have been met with intense skepticism, usually based on three factors. The first factor is the general failure of most adaptations to remain “faithful” to the original. The second factor is the difficulty of adapting Faulkner’s complicated language to film. In a typical example, one respondent to Anthony Taormina’s Screen Rant blog entry announcing Franco’s plan to take on As I Lay Dying comments: “I love Faulkner’s novels and As I Lay Dying in particular, but frankly I don’t see how it is shot as a movie that modern audiences will appreciate without massive changes. The subtlety of Faulkner’s writing has always presented enormous challenges to anyone contemplating adapting it for the screen or stage.” The third factor: “Why do it?” James Poniewozik for Time magazine wrote: “I’m not exactly sure that Faulkner’s stories—dependent as they are on the language on the page to create their worlds—need to be translated for the screen.”
Franco for one has been aware of these issues, in particular the implied anxiety about remaining “faithful” to Faulkner’s original vision. In a Los Angeles Times article by Carolyn Kellogg on As I Lay Dying, he is quoted as saying: “‘I want to be loyal to the book—my approach is to always be loyal in a lot of ways—but in order to be loyal I will have to change some things for the movie. . . . You want to capture the tone, but you can’t work in exactly the same way. . . . Movies just work differently than books.’” Franco knows that Faulkner devotees will be very sensitive to “fidelity” to the source text. Films based on Faulkner’s works are particularly prone to attack from an overly formalistic, fidelity-model brand of adaptation studies. Students and educators should seek to complicate such approaches, to suggest that the anxieties surrounding film adaptations of Faulkner’s works are misplaced, and to argue that putting film and novel/story in dialogue can reap great benefits.
The fidelity model, which has dominated discussion of Hollywood adaptations of literature in particular, operates on the assumption that adaptation runs only one way—from source text (literature) to screenplay to movie—and measures success solely on how close the film hews to the “essence” of the original. Typically, in this conception of adaptation each subsequent version is viewed as moving further from the “authentic” text and is thus devalued. Because of Faulkner’s canonical status and his literary reputation, this condemnation of works adapted from his writing is widespread, even though Faulkner wrote for the movies on and off for three decades; wrote for several mainstream, middlebrow magazines (including the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner’s); and at least one novel, Sanctuary (1932), was considered particularly lurid and sensationalist when it was published.
There are several “Faulkners” that can be investigated—modernist with poetic aspirations, southerner, regionalist, screenwriter, short-story writer, novelist, troubled alcoholic, and hack interested in making money. In the main, Faulkner criticism has chosen a select few of these identities and has ignored the rest. Until the twenty-first century, this was particularly true of Faulkner the screenwriter, and the film adaptations based on his works have rarely been studied or taught. The ever-diminishing gap between high and low culture in academic discourse and curricula necessitates a dialogue between literature and film (and not just replacing one with the other). The Faulkner I want to put forward is not a static and unchanging one, or even “one” for that matter. Popular culture is characterized by the process of re-consumption—it keeps changing, keeps re-imagining itself. This is how I encourage students to approach the study of any text. Faulkner’s reputation as a difficult, complex, sometimes inaccessible modernist is well-earned. This is precisely why Faulkner should be taught—the difficulties offered by Faulkner’s works, as well as his engagement with questions of race, gender, and class. His works also offer a rich testing ground for reductive approaches to the questions raised by literature-to-film adaptations.
Although there has been, particularly in the twenty-first century decade, an increasing interest in film and popular culture within Faulkner studies, many of the concepts that can be taken from adaptation studies have yet to be fully considered.5 In “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Robert Stam speaks to the analytic limitations of expecting a film adaptation to “match” or remain “faithful” to its literary source; for students just coming to adaptation and film studies, these are important issues to raise. First, the disappointment (or outrage) viewers often feel:
The notion of fidelity gains its persuasive force from our sense that some adaptations fail to “realize” or substantiate that which we most appreciated in the source novels. Words such as infidelity or betrayal in this sense translate our feeling, when we have loved a book, that an adaptation has not been worthy of that love. We read a novel through our introjected desires, hopes, and utopias, and as we read we fashion our own imaginary mise-en-scène of the novel on the private stages of our minds. (54)
Mise-en-scène, a French term that translates into English as literally “putting on stage,” is generally used in film studies to indicate what appears in front of the camera—acting, props, costumes, lighting, set design, blocking, etc. What Stam is referring to is how viewers use their imaginations to “picture” moments in the novel, and the unavoidable disappointment felt when a film version does it differently. Stam points out that even if strict fidelity to the source text were desirable (a point this essay will return to), it is questionable that it is even possible:
The words of a novel, as countless commentators have pointed out, have a virtual, symbolic meaning; we as readers, or as directors, have to fill in their paradigmatic indeterminances. A novelist’s portrayal of a character as “beautiful” induces us to imagine the person’s features in our minds. Flaubert never even tells us the exact color of Emma Bovary’s eyes, but we color them nonetheless. A film, by contrast, must choose a specific performer. Instead of a virtual, verbally constructed Madame Bovary open to our imaginative reconstruction, we are faced with a specific actress, encumbered with nationality and accent, a Jennifer Jones or an Isabelle Huppert. (55)
Stam calls this relationship between literature and film “automatic difference,” and suggests that even if filmmakers set out to create a straightforward, “faithful” adaptation of even a single scene, the realities of film (visual, multitrack, including sound and music) make the issue of fidelity to a single track medium (literature) illusory. No matter how descriptive an author may be, the reader’s imagination can never find a perfect match in the realities presented to the viewer.
Most viewers, of course, rarely attend to such minutiae (unless, perhaps, they think a character has been badly miscast—the Russian Brynner, with a wig, cast as southerner Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, for example). When people speak of a “faithful adaptation,” what they typically mean is that to their minds, the plot and themes remain the same, allowing for unavoidable compression or deletion of some material. For the most part, for example, it appears most fans of Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games (2008) were content when the 2012 film version was released, satisfied with its faithfulness to the original. Stam, however, questions such assessments, noting that such analyses are essentialist: “It [the notion of fidelity] assumes that a novel ‘contains’ an extractable ‘essence,’ a kind of ‘heart of the artichoke’ hidden ‘underneath’ the surface details of style. . . . A single novelistic text comprises a series of verbal signals that can generate a plethora of possible readings” (57).
The most important takeaway from Stam and adaptation theorists like him is that literary and film texts cannot be compared in a “faithful or not” way because they are ever-changing, since readers do not exist in a vacuum. Contexts change, and thus how one reads texts is never fully determined simply by what the words say, or what is seen on the screen. What I did not realize when I felt that initial disappointment upon watching The Sound and the Fury was that my reaction was complicated by being a better reader of novels than I was of film. I had been trained to understand a modernist novel, and because I wanted the film to replicate what I thought I knew of Faulkner’s work, I failed to engage with the film as a film, a provocative and productive interaction between the source material and the genre it was being translated into. At that stage in my life I had little to no appreciation or understanding of the Hollywood melodrama, particularly the “family melodrama,” and the ways that subgenre arguably rivals Faulkner’s works in providing a complex examination of American society and culture. Despite the seeming “un-Faulkner-like” naïveté, exaggerated emotional content, and predictable happy endings of the melodrama, it is no accident that the decade that featured the most Hollywood Faulkner adaptations was the 1950s.
At first, one might be hard-pressed to see direct thematic or formal connections to Faulkner’s preoccupations in Thomas Schatz’s description of the basic Hollywood melodrama, popular in the earliest days of the cinema: “Generally speaking, ‘melodrama’ was applied to popular romances that depicted a virtuous individual (usually a woman) or couple (usually lovers) victimized by repressive and inequitable social circumstances, particularly those involving marriage, occupation, and the nuclear family” (Hollywood Genres 222). On the surface these films often appear to confirm the value of the patriarchal, traditional family structure, and have often been dismissed as “women’s pictures” and “weepies.” But it was in the mid-to-late 1950s, Schatz argues, that the “family melodrama,” which came to dominate America’s movie screens, evolved to present—to a largely unsuspecting public—subtle, complex critiques of American life:
Because of a variety of industry-based factors, as well as external cultural phenomena, the melodrama reached its equilibrium at the same time that certain filmmakers were beginning to subvert and counter the superficial prosocial thematics and clichéd romantic narratives that had previously identified the genre. No other genre films, not even the “anti-Westerns” of the same period, projected so complex and paradoxical a view of America, at once celebrating and severely questioning the basic values and attitudes of the mass audience. (223)
These films include classics such as Magnificent Obsession (directed by Douglas Sirk, 1954), East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1956), All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1956), Giant (George Stevens, 1956), Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1957), Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957), Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959), Some Came Running (Minnelli, 1959), and Home from the Hill (Minnelli, 1960). By the early 1960s, Schatz argues, it was over: “the melodrama had been co-opted by commercial television” (224),6 and perhaps not coincidentally, the heyday of Faulkner adaptations was at an end.
The 1950s also brought to American screens the most sustained cinematic exploration of the American South in film history, and the majority of these films are family melodramas. They include A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Baby Doll (1956), Raintree County (1957), God’s Little Acre (1958), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Schatz argues that the family melodrama, particularly the subset he calls “the family aristocracy variation,” finds a natural fit in the South and its continued reliance on the dream of the landed gentry:
These melodramas trace the behavioral and attitudinal traits of succeeding generations. The dramatic conflict is based on a contradictory view of marriage: it is a means of liberation from unreasonable familial demands and also the only way of perpetuating the family aristocracy. . . . The constellation of characters in this variation revolves around an aging patriarch (sometimes close to death), whose wife is either dead or else functions only as a peripheral character who has produced inadequate male heirs and sexually frustrated daughters. (Hollywood Genres 235–237)
Two of the three 1950s Faulkner-inspired Hollywood melodramas fit squarely into this “family aristocracy” category: the rise of the Varners in The Long, Hot Summer and the fall of the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury are “ideological givens” tied to “the socioeconomic climate that is around them” (236). Anxieties about lineage and family obligation abound. In each, the character most clearly faced with these questions of love, marriage, and continuing the family line is played by Woodward—Clara Varner in The Long, Hot Summer and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury. The viewer’s ability to see this connection, among many between the two films (made one year apart), should not be surprising: in addition to Woodward, they share the same studio, producer, director, screenwriters, composer, art directors, costume designer, makeup team, and sound team. A comparison of these films, and the critical reaction to them, opens up further questions about different expectations due to the source materials.
It is clear that the canonical status of the novel The Sound and the Fury and its reputation as one of the key texts of American modernism are part of the continued critical backlash or dismissal of Ritt’s The Sound and the Fury, which continues to suffer almost hyperbolic censure: “While doing pre-production for The Sound and the Fury, Ritt said, ‘We’ve now made it a conventional story but preserved the basic quality.’ Unfortunately, Ritt, the Ravetches, and producer Wald did not apparently understand what this ‘basic quality’ is, for their adaptation of Faulkner’s masterpiece is one of the most ineffective movies based on a serious literary work” (Adams 145–46). However, when compared to other family melodramas from the 1950s, it certainly does not seem nearly as egregious or as “hopeless” as this criticism suggests. Nor, for that matter, does The Long, Hot Summer seem far superior to it. Perhaps, as Phillips argues, part of the reason The Long, Hot Summer is considered the superior film (or is at least not as derided as The Sound and the Fury) may be down to the less ambitious formal nature of its source texts:
Oddly enough, it was probably the novel’s episodic narrative structure, which literary critics had decried when it came out, that made The Hamlet easily adapted for film. Several incidents in the novel, some of which had been published separately as short stories before their inclusion in The Hamlet, constitute self-contained units. The screenwriters therefore were able to simply pick the episodes they judged noteworthy and drop the rest. (136)
It is not simply The Hamlet’s episodic narrative structure that explains The Long, Hot Summer’s relatively good reputation. Many critics, and readers, consider the novel less challenging, more “folksy,” and more humorous than Faulkner’s more modernist, experimental works. Researching the production of these films also suggests that The Long, Hot Summer is to some a more satisfying film because it was shot on location in Louisiana, while The Sound and the Fury was shot in Hollywood as a cost-saving measure. Adding to The Long, Hot Summer’s appeal is without doubt the relationship between stars Paul Newman and Woodward, who were married immediately after production wrapped. Not only is their chemistry onscreen fairly palpable, but the publicity and gossip surrounding the production had an effect on audience response. The Sound and the Fury, with only an ambiguous hint of a burgeoning relationship between Brynner’s Jason and Woodward’s Quentin, does not offer the same pleasures.
Attention to these “extratextual” matters—publicity, marketing, gossip, and the Hollywood studio system (producer-driven, genre-focused, based on contract workers working within studios), can help students better understand the pressures and opportunities of turning a literary property into a Hollywood film. Genre and audience expectations; the star system; and the Production Code, which dictated what could and could not be included in a film’s script, are all relevant factors not just for understanding film, but for turning viewers back to Faulkner’s literary output. What equivalents might there be for the family melodrama in fiction? What, if any, overlap was there between audiences who were seeking the pleasures offered by the melodrama and those who sought something from Faulkner’s works? If one of the conventions of the family melodrama is the “happy ending” (albeit sometimes ambiguous, even “false” happy endings), how do adaptations provide endings far different from those offered by Faulkner? How can this be compared to Faulkner’s fiction, prone as it is to return to stories and characters, and which was working under no such obligations to provide happy endings?
The outlier is arguably The Tarnished Angels, the first 1950s melodrama based on a Faulkner work, but one which does not fit the family melodrama formula. As such, this critically respected film provides an example of how attending to Faulkner adaptations can open up both literature and film in ways that might prove difficult, or impossible, through any other lens. As noted, the family melodrama has become an important focus in film studies, largely because of the ways it both reaffirms and critiques traditional notions of marriage, the home, family, and gender roles within 1950s society. Despite this interest, and the critical consensus that the questioning and/or subversion of traditional values and beliefs was also of interest to Faulkner, there has been little critical work done on either The Long, Hot Summer or The Sound and the Fury. This is not true of The Tarnished Angels, but almost all of the critical work has come from film studies. The easy answer for the film’s much greater critical reputation is its director, Sirk, who became a darling for auteur critics starting in the 1970s.
The Long, Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury, despite all of the changes made from literature to film, still feel somewhat “Faulknerian” in their southern setting, retention of recognizable plot points, and interest in family dynamics. The Tarnished Angels seems less connected to Faulkner unless one digs a bit deeper into his reputation at the time. Despite the respectability that comes with a Nobel Prize, during the 1950s, Faulkner was still considered somewhat “daring” and “shocking” in his explorations of the darker side of human existence. It is not terribly surprising, then, that studios might be eager to cash in on Faulkner’s name recognition and this surge in interest in the South. The first of the Faulkner adaptations since the serious, racially charged “message picture” Intruder in the Dust (1949) was The Tarnished Angels. German émigré director Sirk reportedly admired Faulkner’s 1936 novel Pylon and had wanted to adapt it in the 1930s while working at UFA, Germany’s prestige film studio (Halliday 170), but did not receive his opportunity until the 1950s. An understanding of the restrictions and opportunities that come with directing a studio-era Hollywood film based on a slightly controversial, relatively unpopular novel from a major literary figure not only complicates the standard “the book was better” assumptions, but also gives insight into a Faulkner whom students might find approachable.
The film’s solid reputation is largely because Sirk was the director, but the reason the film was made in the first place was producer Albert Zugsmith, who brought the idea to Universal-International and helped negotiate the $50,000 deal Faulkner received for the rights to Pylon.7 Zugsmith, generally known as a producer of low-budget exploitation films, is more accurately described by Schatz as “the most flexible and least genre-bound of Universal’s unit producers,” responsible for science-fiction, film noir, and melodrama masterpieces (Genius 469).8 The novel was of interest to Zugsmith not just because of Faulkner’s modernist reputation—equally important was the “exploitative” nature of the source text, along with its scandalous reputation.
The recurring copy on the advertising materials for the film, including posters and lobby cards, proclaims in bold letters “The Book They Said Could Never Be Filmed,” and “The Boldest Author of Our Time,” which does double duty. It refers to both the perceived difficulty of the novelist’s style as well as the novel’s “saucy” content (which includes a ménage à trios situation, a sex scene in the cockpit of an airplane, and frequent instances of obscene language). For students first coming to Faulkner, this scandalous (and popular) reputation is worth knowing. The situation for Universal in the 1950s is also relevant. Unlike the modern film industry, during the Hollywood studio era (roughly the 1920s through the 1960s) each studio had its own distinctive style, look, stable of actors and directors, and emphasis on specific genres. Unlike many of its peers, the somewhat weak Universal was throughout the late 1940s and 1950s preparing for the coming dominance of television, creating “a dual agenda of low-cost formula pictures and A-class productions via outside independents” (Schatz, Genius 463). The studio that distributed the Academy Award–winning version of Hamlet (1948) made most of its money from Abbott and Costello vehicles. This A-list/exploitation duality is one that perfectly fits so many Faulkner texts.
As the above list of southern films suggests, Universal was not particularly interested in the southern film per se, and like A Streetcar Named Desire, also set in New Orleans, The Tarnished Angels feels much less “southern” than the two adaptations to follow. What Universal was interested in was finding a way to cash in on audience recognition very much separated from Faulkner. According to Phillips, Zugsmith was able to convince Universal to make the film only by bringing together again the key players from the successful 1956 family melodrama Written on the Wind—director Sirk, screenwriter Zuckerman, and actors Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, and Dorothy Malone (122). However, as suggested earlier, The Tarnished Angels does not quite fit the family melodrama genre, as Written on the Wind does, and the social critique Sirk had in mind is quite specific to Faulkner’s original novel. Whereas Sirk’s melodramas are usually discussed in terms of his examination of social conflict and the contradictions of middle-class American life, The Tarnished Angels offers an interesting variant on the melodrama—an emphasis on consumerism and the threat of the crowd that likely had its roots in antifascism, but which shifted to suit the needs of 1950s culture.
One might not automatically associate the Hollywood melodrama with the “Literature” produced by William Faulkner, but as many critics have noted, there are in almost all of Faulkner’s corpus melodramatic elements.9 Pylon was published after the more highly regarded Light in August (1932), and it is one of the few Faulkner novels not set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner wrote Pylon while taking a break from a novel very much about a declining family aristocracy—Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Pylon takes place in his fictionalized version of New Orleans, New Valois, and revolves around an unnamed newspaper reporter and his encounter with a very unusual “family” connected to a visiting air show. This novel was not particularly popular upon release, has been rarely taught, and has received relatively little critical attention. This could in part be because of its non-Yoknapatawpha setting; its somewhat threadbare, at times lurid plot; or its relative lack of interest in questions of race.
Some critics, however, seem to find the novel lacking because of its perceived melodramatic characteristics, and within Faulkner studies, melodrama has traditionally been ignored or castigated, often because of a conflation of melodrama and “sentimentality” within literary studies. Phillips claims that it “rarely rises about the level of routine melodrama” (120). Lurie argues that, despite including one section titled “Lovesong of J. A. Prufrock,” it is not quite modernist enough: “Set almost completely in unified space . . . and following a series of events that take place over a circumscribed period of time, Pylon makes use of few of the narrative and temporal ruptures that characterize high-modernist experimentation” (16). Edmund Wilson provides a good early example of the attempt to “rescue” Faulkner from the “stain” of melodrama: “The truth is that, from Pylon, at any rate, one of the most striking features of his work, and one that sets if off from that of many of his contemporaries, has been a kind of romantic morality that allows you the thrills of melodrama without making you ashamed, as a rule, of the values which have been exploited to produce them” (347–48).
The novel’s perceived lack of artistic ambition may in part explain the film adaptation’s relatively good reputation, but is that why Sirk might have been drawn to it in the 1930s while working in Germany? Michael Zeitlin’s work on Pylon suggests an alternative—the novel’s “antifascist, analytical power” (97). Zeitlin discusses the specific 1930s anxieties about fascism, both abroad and at home (particularly in the South). His reading of the novel opens up The Tarnished Angels to several promising questions, and may indeed make Pylon a more interesting text for students. Does the overtly political nature of the novel explain why The Tarnished Angels does not quite fit with Sirk’s other melodramas? Does this help to explain why The Tarnished Angels was Sirk’s personal favorite of his films? How are antifascist elements in the novel connected to the film’s melodramatic elements? How does Sirk transform the political elements of the source text into a critique of advertising and consumer society? How does the attempt by Faulkner critics to “rescue” him from commercial impulses relate to the way Sirk critics reject the value of melodrama per se in favor of what they perceive as Sirk’s subversion of the genre?10 Future work on the relationship between Faulkner and these 1950s films should take seriously the subversive potentials and the pleasures of melodrama in source text and adaptation.
The field of Faulkner studies has come to embrace the importance of intertextuality as a way of thinking about the interrelatedness of texts, highlighting medium, means of production, dissemination, genre, and the mixing of high and low and visual and literary culture. This sort of approach is particularly appropriate for studying Faulkner. Analyzing film and literature in dialogue allows us to lessen the burden of having to approach Faulkner only as literary icon and “Great American Modernist,” and it lets students, who at times feel more comfortable talking about visual culture, able to make Faulkner more relevant to their own lives—and more intellectually stimulating in the bargain.