Writer Carson McCullers was born and spent her youth in Columbus, Georgia, coming of age during the Great Depression and absorbing all the rich milieu of character, traditions, sights, sounds, and textures of life in the South that would elevate the Southern Gothic genre to the heights of literary excellence in the hands of William Faulkner and others, including her own. After graduating from Columbus High School in 1934, Carson (whose birth name was Lula) caught a ship to New York City in search of a writing career. A whirlwind of talent, she saw her first novel published at the age of 23. Also by age 23 she had suffered her first stroke. She would go on to write more novels, live life on her own terms as she dealt with early onset rheumatism, and die at the young age of 50.
Those unfamiliar with the name Carson McCullers may have heard of her novels, four of which later became films:
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (her first novel),
Reflections in a Golden Eye,
The Ballad of the Sad Café, and
The Member of the Wedding. Of these, the most personal was
The Member of the Wedding, a semi-autobiographical work based on her Georgia childhood that she filled with her demons, dreamy aspirations, and fictional constructs to create an extraordinary layered story of troubled 12-year old tomboy Frankie Addams, her family, and the loneliness and alienation of an intelligent but awkward girl on the verge of puberty.
McCullers herself adapted
The Member of the Wedding into a successful Broadway play that ran for over 500 performances for two years. Hollywood came calling and made the correct decision to cast the play's three leads as the stars of the 1952 film version: Julie Harris as 12-year old Frankie, Ethel Waters as housekeeper Bernice, and second-grader Brandon De Wilde as little cousin John Henry. Watching this film 65 years later, I am thankful to producer Stanley Kramer for his keeping the play's cast together, and for bringing on board Fred Zinnemann (
From Here to Eternity,
High Noon,
The Day of the Jackal) to direct what I consider to be some of the most phenomenal 93 minutes of acting ever captured on celluloid.
Like its source novel,
The Member of the Wedding is told from the perspective of Frankie. Taking place over a few days in August, the story revolves around Frankie's anxiety over what appears to be her permanent lot in life - to be forever a 12-year old tomboy freakishly tall for her age, socially awkward, filled with self-loathing over her appearance, wanting more out of her existence than to be stuck in a small Southern town over summer break with no prospects of change and no recognition of the fact she is a child and the world is waiting for her to grow up. Her mother has recently died and her father doesn't understand her or know how to relate to her; that is, when he is home from the long hours he spends at the jewelry shop he owns. Her best friend moved away earlier in the summer, leaving as her only companions her seven year old cousin John Henry, who lives next door, and Bernice, a one-eyed African-American housekeeper who is her caretaker and her conscience. She pines for acceptance from the older teenage girls in the neighborhood, but is too young and angry for them to want to include her in their girl's club.
Into the emotionally combustible kindling of Frankie's young psyche, fate flicks a match. Her older brother comes home on leave from nearby Fort Benning with his fiance for their wedding. They are to be married in a few days at Frankie's home and Frankie suddenly projects her dreams and source of salvation onto her brother and his bride-to-be. What results is a series of darkly comic and sad events, all too real and relatable. Frankie so desperately wants to be a woman of the world, and it is up to Bernice to navigate the troubled youngster through the storms and darkness of childhood alienation.
Julie Harris owns the role of Frankie. A 26 year old playing a 12 year old seems absurd at first glance, but it works here. Harris is small and youthful looking, freckled, her hair cut into a shag bob as physical evidence of Frankie's self-loathing and determination to careen down a path of self-destruction. Harris gives a fierce performance, bringing a complex character to life as a ball of explosive energy. She supplies Frankie with all the sturm and drang and pathos that makes the other characters in the story - and the audience - witness with futility the girl's emotional backflips from semi-psychotic ravings to sympathetic paens of desperately wanting to be loved.
Ethel Waters is amazing as Bernice. She is a strong central character to the drama, its emotional anchor, and near the end of the film we begin to understand that this is her story as much as it is Frankie's. Her life is also filled with failures, disappointments, and a desperate search for love to replace that which she once had and lost.
Little Brandon De Wilde is stellar also. A child prodigy, his Broadway debut at the age of seven as John Henry was hailed as a national phenomenon before he translated the character to the film version. John Henry represents the other side of Frankie, the childhood she so desperately seeks to leave behind and yet cannot completely divorce from within herself. It was this role that led to the casting of Brandon the next year in what would be his most memorable role, that of Joey Starrett in one of the greatest American films ever made....George Steven's
Shane.
To characterize
The Member of the Wedding as a coming-of-age story is to simplify it beyond recognition and not do it justice. It is so much more than that. Ultimately it is about searching for acceptance and finding one's place in the world. It is a drama of amazing grit, beauty, and detail. A tour de force of acting, it will leave the viewer stunned at the powerful performances, the terrifically well-written dialogue, and the timeless and universal themes of the story. It is not an expansive film; in fact, with most of the scenes taking place in the kitchen and backyard of Frankie's home and rarely venturing out into the streets and town itself, it is almost claustrophobic in how it wraps the viewer into the world of the small and the intimate, forcing us to focus on the characters themselves. Many of the scenes take place at night or at sunset with growing darkness, where the play of shadows and light accentuate Frankie's increasing alienation and loneliness.
The gorgeous black and white cinematography by Hal Mohr (
Woman on the Run,
Destry Rides Again) makes us aware of all the textures we are seeing onscreen with such clarity and detail of purpose that the viewer can feel the heat of a Georgia August in the beads of sweat that constantly envelope the characters day and night, smell the cornbread fresh out of the oven that Bernice sets on the table, contemplate the fluttering of moths against the window screens as they seek the light within, and lounge in the haunting notes from a trumpet played under a shade tree in the humid air. To that must be added mention of the highly listenable music score by Alex North, a languid jazzy montage that underscores the visuals with dreamy melodies and currents of background sound that feels as right at home in the South as crickets on a still summer night.
All photos above are taken from the internet. The PQ on the disc is a gorgeous transfer from Sony.
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