Anytown, Alabama

The release of a movie based on Carson McCullers’ first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, should evoke both nostalgia and curiosity among the many people for whom the book was so important when they first discovered it. The Heart was originally published in 1940, and by the time my friends and I read it during college in the early nineteen fifties, Mrs. McCullers had gone on to write two other unique and powerful novels and a number of dazzling stories, but it was still that earliest of her works that seemed to speak especially to our own lives and feelings, I would guess that it was one of the contemporary novels most significant for my collegiate generation, along with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness.

My own introduction to the book and its author came when I was an undergraduate at Columbia and was told by a friend that Carson McCullers was coming to give a lecture on the campus. At the time, I knew her name but not her work, and I went to the lecture mainly out of an interest in hearing any real-live writer talk about writing. As it turned out, quite happily, Mrs. McCullers didn’t really “lecture” at all. She had come with a prepared text on some solemn-sounding literary subject, but after nervously stumbling through a couple of pages, she closed her eyes and said, “I think I’ll say a poem.” She recited one of her poems called “The Ransomed Heart,” a poem that cxpressed the sense of quiet terror and loneliness that is in all her work, the feeling of “malignant winter afternoons and empty clocks,” and when she finished there was no applause, but a hush like the reverent silence that follows a prayer. Then, still shy but more relaxed, she simply talked — not literary talk but storytellers’ talk, entrancing and funny and warm and alive,

At one point she spoke about writing her first novel, and explained that after initially getting the characters down on paper she was “stuck,” and couldn’t get on with the writing. Then one day after trying to work she went out to the living room and began to hop from one check to another on a checkered rug. She explained that when she hopped to one particular check she suddenly saw what to do. “I knew my main character wasn’t named ‘Jones’ or whatever name I had given him at all. His name was Singer. And he was deaf. And that’s why all those people were talkin’ to him.”Then she wrote the novel.

When Mrs. McCullers referred to her realization that Singer was deaf and that s why all those people were talkin to him,” she was in a sense describing most of what there is to the plot of the story. The deafmute takes a room alone in a boardinghouse in a Southern town, and slowly, as they see and sense his kindness and consideration, the people no longer think of him as “a dummy but as a wise and understanding man to whom they can tell their most unsettling fears and feelings, and in whose silent presence they find peace.

It is obvious that a novel so interior in its nature, built around a central character who is a deafmute, is going to be incredibly difficult to bring off as a movie.

The irony of the production, however, is that the seemingly most difficult problem — that of a deafmute hero — is the single great triumph of the film. Alan Arkin plays Singer with a sureness and exactness that capture the character in spirit and detail. Immaculately dressed in his plain, light suit, he has the strong and courteous dignity of the man whose calling card explains politely, “Please Do Not Shout.” He makes his brisk, neat gestures of communication not only with his agile conjurer’s hands but also with his thin, alert mouth that utters not a single word but conveys whole paragraphs in the nuance of a corner turned up or down; and in the keen, sympathetic eyes that seem to read much more than the mere words formed by the lips of the anxious talkers.

The rest of the cast, largely composed of newcomers, are overshadowed by Arkin’s performance, not only because of its brilliance but because the important roles of the assorted regular visitors to Singer’s room are all made less interesting, in ways that the actors could hardly have had much to say about. Jake Blount, the tortured itinerant radical of the novel, is depoliticized in the movie script and reduced to an ordinary drifter who drinks too much and has nothing more interesting to say than the average drunken dropout. Mick Kelly, the thirteen-yearold girl with a passion for classical music, was a kind of female precursor of Holden Caulfield in the novel, but comes off in the movie as a poor white Southern version of Our Town’s Emily. This surely can’t all be the fault of the twenty-oneyear-old actress Sondra Locke, who is given such stock drama-school scenes as stuffing a pair of socks into her party dress to try to improve her adolescent figure (comedy), and sitting on the fire escape of a theater listening to a symphony orchestra perform inside while she sways her head to the music and stares into space with an expression that looks as if she’d just had a vision of Paul McCartney (ecstasy).

The movie program blurb says that this is a “timeless story,” and indeed the original setting of the novel in 1939 has been partly updated and partly de-timed altogether. The movie takes place in a sort of calendarless present that is suggested by the clothes, the prices of food and rent, the music at a teen party, all of which is vaguely contemporary. The most fascinating — and clumsy — attempt at updating occurs in the handling of the Negro characters. The Negro Dr. Copeland of the novel was a man of great dignity and controlled rage who dreamed of a thousand Negroes staging a “March on Washington” (a rather revolutionary concept when the novel was written), but was feared and misunderstood by his own people, even his own children. Mrs. McCullers’ insight into the feelings of the Negro of that era was uncanny, and foreshadowed the nature of the racial conflicts and passions that have since come into the open.

The movie tries to inject a little Black Power militance into things, and gives the doctor an angry daughter who taunts him for being too “white” in his attitudes. The doctor of the movie seems both behind and ahead of his times; he is fearful of going to a courthouse, where he is mildly taunted by a deputy sheriff, but has no compunctions about refusing to treat an injured man because he is white and explaining that reason to whites. For veracity, the moviemakers might have had a black doctor attempt such a refusal in real life in the town where they were shooting the movie, which happened to be Selma, Alabama.

The magic of modern technicolor — the same magic that managed to make some of Manhattan’s crowded Puerto Rican blocks look like a freshly painted set for a Broadway musical in the movie of West Side Story — manages to transform Selma into a bright, glossy dollhouse settlement that looks like it might be called “Anytown, U.S.A.”The over-rich colors, combined and underscored by that kind of big. soupy string sound known as “mellow,”succeed in taking the sting out of the loneliness and tragedy that lie at the heart of the story. The novel itself was drenched in the hot, slow mood of sullen tension of a Southern town, and of its shades and sounds, but none of these are conveyed on the wide color screen.

There is enough of the novel’s magic in Arkin’s performance to arouse an interest in the book among those viewers who have never read it, and to send those who read it in the past back again to its pages. Neither group will be disappointed.