Franco does Faulkner ... again!

You be the judge from this short clip of The Sound and the Fury, but for me it doesn't look very promising. as Caddy (I presume) seems to be channeling Lauren Bacall, long before there were even talkies. The story was initially set in 1910 (as told by Quentin). Not that novels such as this one can't be re-imagined, but they usually don't turn out very well, like Baz Luhrmann's lurid interpretation of The Great Gatsby.

This isn't the first time James Franco has tackled Faulkner. Last year he gave us As I Lay Dying, another story that doesn't lend itself to an easy screen adaptation. It was a game effort and I guess this gave Franco the confidence to go after Faulkner's signature novel.

Martin Ritt had been the only one previously to take a shot at The Sound of the Fury, filming it in 1959, with Yul Brynner and Margaret Leighton as Jason and Caddy, with the interesting choice of Joanne Woodward as Quentin. It was a star-studded cast that also included Ethel Waters as Dilsey, along with a jarring jazz score by Alex North.

Franco surprisingly casts himself as Benjy, leading one to assume that he will give the woe begotten brother a larger role in the movie. The opening part of the novel is told through Benjy's eyes, set in 1928, which for first-time readers of Faulkner can be quite a challenge. In Ritt's version, Quentin is the narrator, taking the second part, set in 1910, as the jumping off point for his story. For me, it was Jason's perspective in the third part of the novel (forward again to 1928) that brought the story together, as I had struggled mightily with the first two parts to make any sense out of what was going on in this narrative.

So why Franco's interest in Faulkner? He grew up in the Silicon Valley. His mother is Jewish and his father of Portuguese and Swedish decent, according to IMDb. What's his connection with the South? In an interview with Michael Bibler of Salon, Franco said he felt he "really was in conversation with Faulkner, even though he wasn't alive, he was alive in his work," when he first read As I Lay Dying in high school. Of course you could say this of any good author, although most directors would be wary of taking on such an ambitious task where others had failed before.

I can't think of one Faulkner novel that has been successfully brought to the screen, largely because his novels were meant to be read, not seen. Pylon was probably the best screen effort. Faulkner was in Hollywood by this point and writing screenplays, which is what this novel set in the early days of aviation feels like. Even still, it was 22 years later that Douglas Sirk adapted the novel to the screen in The Tarnished Angels with Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone.

The Sound and the Fury will be interesting to see nonetheless, although I think Seth Rogen would have been the more likely choice as Benjy.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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