He does not believe in education, aristocratic blood, or class. Wright’s Bigger Thomas is quite related to the all-American lower-class rebel who sees material resources and homespun smarts as the answer to everything. That fluctuating difference is what makes him a tragic urban character, not an urban legend. They amount to imbecilic lames as far as he is concerned, and he is as often right as he is wrong.

He does this by bullying his girlfriend, by leading a small, petty criminal gang, by taunting for his own enjoyment his sister’s fear of a dead rat by shaking one in her face, by submitting to white people he feels smarter than even if they are economically above him, whether left-wing liberals, condescending white men of the press, or authority figures from the police to the justice system. Richard Wright plays Bigger Thomas as a knucklehead who measures himself in a variety of ways. Even though the dream machine recognized No Way Out with Academy Award nominations, Native Son, which distributors butchered according to the rules of the cinematic game of the time, was little noted.Įven so, Native Son handles itself quite well as a very good film for a number of reasons. The presence and rhythm of the actors in the lower-class black community and the upper-class white community come forward as much more real than contrived. From Griffith, we learned a grim fact about modern times: aesthetic genius can be interwoven so powerfully with a surrealistic big lie that a stereotypic factoid is actually seen as a fact. From the moment it becomes profitable, mass media will submit to and accept its buffoonish conventions-in this case, racist stereotypes that remained in place until at least 1950.

Despite its epic impact and unprecedented expansion of cinema’s vocabulary in the silent era, certain things are no less true just because of the discomfort that accompanies them.

Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, wonderful things can be messed up by propaganda. In our electronically layered modern age we have sometimes been forced to conclude that, in a mottled masterpiece like D.W. These truths about race in America have usually been most melodramatically delivered since then, with self-righteous overstatement rather than high cinematic quality. To accurately discuss Pierre Chenal’s uncut 1950 film version of the novel Native Son, made in Argentina and starring its author, Richard Wright, we need to think about the context in which this film, like 1947’s Crossfire, and 1950’s No Way Out, faced up to certain truths that were not being addressed at the time. By Stanley Crouch in the September-October 2012 Issue

Native son written by richard wright