Fred Zinnemann (1952)

Carson McCullers’ novel, The Member of the Wedding, set in a small town in the American South during 1944, is a brilliant, poetic exploration of the mystery and horror of the coming of self-awareness.  The protagonist, Frances ‘Frankie’ Addams, in her thirteenth year, is thrown by the unshakeable apprehension that she is she and will be until she dies.  Frankie’s sense of difference – she’s unusually tall for her age and still growing apace – and isolation is acute.  Her mother died giving birth to her; her father spends more time at his jeweller’s shop in the town than at home; now Frankie has become aware of her inexorable separation from the childhood routines that have represented security – conversations in the kitchen of the family home with the Addams’ black maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and Frankie’s younger cousin, John Henry West.  Frankie, alone as never before, is increasingly fascinated by the possibility of connection with other people – at one point she tells Berenice that she wants to know everyone in the world.  She has an elder brother, Jarvis, who is serving in the military and about to be married.  The realisation comes to Frankie that Jarvis and his bride-to-be, Janice (although Frankie has met her only once, and recently), ‘are the we of me’.  Frankie decides that, when Jarvis and Janice get married, she will leave with them and the happy couple will become a threesome.

Although it describes an event in the poet’s life that occurred just before her seventh birthday in 1918, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’, written in 1976, is strongly reminiscent of what the somewhat older Frankie Addams is experiencing:

‘… I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
…

I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
…
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
…

held us all together
or made us all just one?’

A stronger link exists with the work of Sylvia Plath, who much admired Carson McCullers. Rereading The Member of the Wedding this week brought to mind Plath’s almost explicitly autobiographical Ocean 1212-W (1962), in which the birth of her younger brother terminates the pelagic egocentric unity of the narrator’s childhood:

‘… I lay in a watery cradle … [then] one day the textures of the beach burned themselves on the lens of my eye forever. … I who … had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones …’

There’s a chasm between Frankie Addams’ previous summers and the one she is now living through.  McCullers’ novel begins as follows:

‘It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.  This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.  She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.  Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.’

These words chime (in my mind) with the memorable closing sentence of Plath’s short story, Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit (1955), even though its season is winter:

‘That was the year the war began, and the real world, and the difference.’

In the early morning of Frankie’s brother’s wedding day, his sister perceives that:

‘… the sky was the dim silver of a mirror, and beneath it the grey town looked, not a real town, but like an exact reflection of itself …’

Later in the novel, Frankie prepares, after the failure of her attempts to accompany the newlyweds on honeymoon, to leave town alone – she stares at train tracks that ‘gleamed silver and exact’.   Plath obviously used these words and images for the opening of the poem ‘Mirror’.

Carson McCullers herself adapted The Member of the Wedding for the stage and the play, which opened in 1950, enjoyed great success:  it ran for 501 performances.   I had never before seen Fred Zinnemann’s film, released at the very end of 1952, in which the three principals from the Broadway production – Ethel Waters, Julie Harris and Brandon deWilde – reprised their roles.  The film, intelligent and absorbing but limited in comparison with the novel, was not a hit with audiences and it’s not difficult to see why.  If you know the book, the movie’s successes and failures in expressing its qualities are of real interest; if you don’t, the story that Zinnemann, working from a screenplay by Edna and Edward Anhalt, tells is liable to be, to say the least, puzzling.   It’s inherently difficult for film to recapture something like the repetitive routine of the kitchen chats in The Member of the Wedding; McCullers, on the printed page, manages to convey this even though she’s relating, for the most part, the conversations of one particular day.  Something Zinnemann might have done was use the soundtrack of a radio – in the novel this provides a nearly continuous background in the kitchen (and when the radio is switched off the silence is eloquent).  Alex North’s score, although good enough in other respects, is no substitute for this.

The film also exhibits a familiar nervousness about adapting ‘talky’ material for the screen.  The tactful movement of Zinnemann’s camera guards against the scenes in the kitchen becoming static but he and the Anhalts succumb to the temptation to dramatise events as they occur and the effect is counterproductive.  The impact of the arrest and imprisonment of Berenice’s brother, Honey, and of John Henry’s death from meningitis is much greater in the novel, in which they are described retrospectively.  (That allows you to understand how Frankie has – and hasn’t – succeeded in assimilating her experience of these happenings.)  The crime in which Honey is involved and the news of John Henry’s grave illness are diluted in the film by being inserted as linear plot developments. The screenplay re-orders Frankie’s experiences outside her home and thus reduces the sense of her venturing into another world before the wedding; instead, you’re given the impression that her encounter with a soldier in the town is, like her short-lived attempt to run away from home, merely a reaction to her not getting her own way about joining Jarvis and Janice on their honeymoon.  Nevertheless, the Anhalts do retain plenty of Carson McCullers’ beautiful, witty dialogue and narrative – and (if they’re not simply repeating what McCullers had written for the stage adaptation) they do a creditable job of turning some of the narrative into dialogue.

Ethel Waters is a noble, splendid presence but that presence is wrong for the role of Berenice.  In the novel, Berenice, although she’s hefty, is short of stature, and not without reason; the lack of height is a physical expression of gangly Frankie’s feeling of unstoppable separation from the woman who has been the most stable, reassuring presence of the girl’s childhood.  (It’s her growing spurt that has also caused Frankie’s father to tell his daughter that she’s too big to continue to sleep in his bed, which she’s always done until now.)  Ethel Waters is monumentally maternal.  When Berenice, with Frankie and John Henry cuddling up to her, leads them in singing the famous spiritual ‘His Eye Is On the Sparrow’, the power of Waters’ voice reinforces her comforting massiveness – the two children look to be nestling in the everlasting arms.  (The song seems a wrong choice anyway:  its lyric confirms the powerful sense of security radiated by Ethel Waters, when the atmosphere in the kitchen on this particular afternoon should be fraught with a sense of something ending, of uncontrollable uncertainty.)  Ethel Waters is also more benign than the persistently (though lovingly) contrary Berenice of the book:  Waters’ Berenice, although exasperated by Frankie’s flights of fancy and melodramatic volatility, is not a natural scold.   Waters is superb, though, in the very last scene of the film, in which Berenice – who knows, as the family prepare to move house, that Frankie will leave her behind – appears to have shrunk physically.  The effect may be thanks in part to how cleverly Fred Zinnemann photographs Waters but I think it’s also thanks to her own physical acting skills.

Although it was her first film, Julie Harris was coming up twenty-seven when The Member of the Wedding was made.  It’s naturally difficult to avoid judging her portrait of a pre-pubertal child as quite-remarkable-considering, but here goes.  It may well not have been a problem on stage but there are times, as the camera comes in close, when Harris’s face is unmistakeably that of a young woman pretending to express a child’s artlessness.  But there are also times when, magically, her face really is that of a twelve-year-old.  Harris convinces with the raw voice she gives to Frankie, and with the gestures – dynamic, expansive but still angrily frustrated.  She also succeeds in making the tomboyish child androgynous to such an extent that, according to Pauline Kael, some viewers of the film on its original release were confused into thinking Frankie was a boy.  Casting an adult in the role of an unusually tall child doesn’t pay dividends as much as it might have:  Fred Zinnemann tends to shoot Harris to make her look smaller – as if that will also make her seem younger.   There is, though, at least one moment that’s enhanced by Harris’s actual height.  The film begins to suffer a loss of narrative rhythm once it moves outside the kitchen but the scene in which Frankie has to be dragged from the newlyweds’ car and stumbles to the ground, screaming and weeping, is really upsetting.  Because she’s played by a grown woman, Frankie here is an unignorable physical presence – this makes it impossible to minimise the incident, to dismiss Frankie’s despair as ‘merely’ childish.  Julie Harris’s performance is the most dependent on familiarity with the novel:  the character of Frankie is bound to be reduced without Carson McCullers’ description of all that’s going on inside her head.  But if you know the book then Harris’s interpretation of Frankie works extremely well.

As John Henry, Brandon deWilde is more physically robust than you might expect (this is a ten year old playing a six year old) but he gets the boy’s eccentricity very well – and he’s funny mincing around the kitchen in Berenice’s hat and shoes.  It’s hardly surprising, given the sexually ambiguous aspects of both children, that The Member of the Wedding has attracted critical interest as ‘queer’ literature; and the theme runs deeper than Frankie’s crew cut and John Henry’s infant transvestism.  When the three conversationalists discuss how they’d like to change the world, Berenice recommends that everyone should have the same (light brown) skin colour, Frankie that boys should be able to change into girls and vice versa, and John Henry that people should be half-male, half-female.   The playing of the minor characters is adequate but no more than that:  the film’s supporting cast includes William Hansen (Mr Addams), Arthur Franz (Jarvis), Nancy Gates (Janice), James Edwards (Honey), Harry Bolden (T T Williams, Berenice’s current beau) and Dickie Moore (the soldier).

2 November 2014