NATIVE SON (1951) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Pierre Chenal
Richard Wright, Jean Wallace, Nicholas Joy,
Gloria Madison, Charles Cane, George Rigaud,
Gene Michael, Willa Pearl Curtis, George D. Green
A young black man gets a job as a chauffeur to a wealthy white family, and only bad things happen from that point on. This is a rough piece of work in almost every way, from its uncompromising language to its unpolished performances to its low-down appraisal of ghetto life to its pessimistic conclusion. It's a story that deserves a better movie, but the in-your-face execution has an undeniable power. Richard Wright plays the protagonist of his own novel, kind of like Mickey Spillane did in "The Girl Hunters", and there's an odd sense of dislocation that goes with a film that's set in Chicago but was shot in Buenos Aires.
