Southern Discomfort

Sanctuary (20th Century-Fox) is Hollywood's second attempt to make a movie of Author William Faulkner's woolhat horror story of murder, impotence and rape in Mississippi. As in The Story of Temple Drake (1933), most of the hairier moments of the original novel (which Faulkner frankly wrote "to make money") have been clipped, and the film dissolves into just another jugful of Hollywood's standard Southern Discomfort.

The picture combines, condenses and reshapes the main story elements of Sanctuary (1931) and its sequel, Requiem for a Nun (1951). Abandoned by her drunken date (Bradford Dillman) at a backwoods distillery, the 17-year-old daughter (Lee Remick) of the governor is raped by the resident bootlegger (Yves Montand) and dragged off to a sporting house in New Orleans, where he keeps her for his private pleasure--which also turns out to be hers. After some weeks he is reported killed and the girl goes sadly home to Papa, who soothes what he assumes to be her injured innocence and marries her off to the reformed drunk.

After six years they have two children and nothing in common. Running across a Negro maid (Odetta) who worked in the brothel, the heroine hires her to look after the children and to remind her of the "sanctuary" of sin and pleasure that she loved so well. Then, without warning, the bootlegger reappears. The lovers get down to brass beds again, and she agrees to run away with him. The Negro maid begs her to think of the children and stay home. When she refuses, the maid smothers the younger child.

Why? The maid mumbles something about saving the heroine from herself, but her principal function is obviously to rescue Faulkner from the moiling unmotivated mess of his plot. Actresses Remick and Odetta sometimes polarize the disorder with a powerful, paradoxical image of salvation: the black earth-mother hanged on a flimsy white flibbertigibbet. But on the whole, Producer Richard (son of Darryl) Zanuck's attempt to clean up Faulkner for the family seems a bit like trying to smear the whole of Yoknapatawpha County with underarm deodorant. It might just possibly be done, but it sure does seem a peculiar thing to try.

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