Document View

Faulkner therefore revised the novel for publication, but even then it became a succès de scandale - a circumstance which not only prompted his removal as leader of a Boy Scout troop but earned him the reputation of being a sordid Gothic writer that he still holds in the popular mind. When the film was released in the spring of 1933, film historian William K. Everson points out that it gained the dubious distinction of being one of the last straws that almost single-handedly precipitated the crackdown by the administration of the Motion Picture Code which resulted in the filming of all of those family classics of the later Thirties, such as David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice.\n Lee Remick's handling of Temple Drake's sexual obsession has all the intensity of a figure from Jacobean tragedy . . . .

If it is true that a novel somehow resists translation to the screen because of the inherent differences between the two media, Faulkner's fiction has resisted such adaptation as much as any writer's. One winces when recalling all but a few of the motion pictures based on his novels, notably Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949) and Mark Rydell's The Reivers (1970). Sanctuary has been filmed twice in two versions that both depart in different ways from Faulkner's original story but which, nonetheless, capture in their own terms the flavor of the original: The Story of Temple Drake (1932), directed by Stephen Roberts, and Sanctuary (1 961 ), directed by Tony Richardson.

Faulkner himself was never proud of his original novel, having initially written it in three weeks in 1929 "to make money," as he confides in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of 1932. He goes on to say that he "invented the most horrific tale" he could imagine, and that his publisher accordingly was afraid to print it. Faulkner therefore revised the novel for publication, but even then it became a succès de scandale - a circumstance which not only prompted his removal as leader of a Boy Scout troop but earned him the reputation of being a sordid Gothic writer that he still holds in the popular mind. Such an image of Faulkner can only be maintained by totally ignoring the serious moral and psychological dimensions of Sanctuary.

As Faulkner wrote it, it deals with an irresponsible and immature college girl named Temple Drake, who is taken after a dance to the Old Frenchman's Place, a ramshackle house in the country that serves as a hangout for bootleggers, by her drunken escort, Gowan Stevens. Gowan wrecks his car en route, but he and Temple make it to the house all the same. There Gowan sobers up and, ashamed of his conduct, returns to town without Temple. She is thus left stranded with the inhabitants of the Old Frenchman's Place: Lee Goodwin; his common-law wife Ruby and their infant; and Popeye, a vicious Memphis racketeer, among others.

Because Ruby fears what may happen to Temple during her sojourn, however brief, at the Place, she hides Temple in the barn, where the girl is safe until morning. She is guarded by the feeble-minded handy man. Tommy. Popeye, however, gains entrance through the overhead trap door to the corn crib where Temple is hiding. He shoots Tommy when the latter tries to interfere; and, because he is impotent, rapes Temple with a corn cob. Popeye then takes the unresisting Temple with him to the Memphis brothel where he hangs out when he is in town (the big city is always the citadel of sin in Faulkner). He provides Temple with a companion named Red so that he can enjoy watching them together. Temple stays on at the brothel because of her growing morbid fascination for Pppeye's perverted world. This curious menage à trois is destroyed, however, when Popeye discovers that Red has been seeing Temple privately, and summarily kills him.

Meanwhile Lee Goodwin is accused of Tommy's murder, and Horace Benbow, a well meaning but ineffectual lawyer, agrees to defend him. Goodwin, afraid of reprisals from the ruthless Popeye, will not even admit that the gangster was present at the Place when Tommy was killed. Horace tracks Temple down at the Memphis brothel, but she refuses to testify for the defense, fearing the scandal that will result from her implication in the case. Instead she testifies for the prosecution that it was Goodwin who killed Tommy and raped her. After Goodwin's conviction, he is burned to death by an angry mob, and the disillusioned Horace Benbow barely escapes with his life. Temple's father. Judge Drake, takes her on a trip to Europe to help her forget the unpleasant experiences that she has had. As for Popeye, he is eventually executed for a crime which he did not commit, after having gotten away with so many other crimes.

Sanctuary is, as I said above, a superficially sensational tale which nevertheless has some thought-provoking implications. As Faulkner himself put it. Sanctuary is "an exposition of the terror and injustice which man must face and which he must combat if he is to live with himself, in his soul; if he is to sleep in peace at night." The title of the book, he says, means that "everyone must have some safe, secure place to which he can hurry, run, from trouble.' 1 The irony of the title is, of course, obvious, and is further underlined by the heroine's Christian name, for she is a desecrated temple who finds her sanctuary in a brothel. Critic Dorothy Tuck comments that in a world where there is no true justice there cari be no true sanctuary.2

In 1931 Sanctuary was a best seller for all of the wrong reasons, since many critics and most readers overlooked the serious dimension of the story which we have just been considering. In the spring of 1932 Paramount Pictures purchased the screen rights and was subject to attacks in the trade press, which urged that the production be abandoned in view of the notoriety of the novel and the protests that were already being registered across the country.

When the film was released in the spring of 1933, film historian William K. Everson points out that it gained the dubious distinction of being one of the last straws that almost single-handedly precipitated the crackdown by the administration of the Motion Picture Code which resulted in the filming of all of those family classics of the later Thirties, such as David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice. This seems somewhat surprising today, not only because of the permissiveness of the contemporary screen, but also because the film was given the mild title of The Story of Temple Drake in order to dissociate it from the reputation of the novel, and because the sexual abnormalities on which that reputation was largely based were removed from the screenplay. Yet the film still stresses the melodrama and horror of the original and is therefore true to the novel. "Its major asset is the superbly atmospheric camerawork of Karl Struss," says Everson. "The overall effect is decidedly downbeat and intrinsically faithful to Faulkner."3

Oliver Garnett's script is a model of compression. In seventy minutes of screen time he has managed to tell the basic story of the novel and even manufacture an ending that would be acceptable to the Production Code. Garnett is particularly adept at giving thumbnail sketches of characters to establish their personalities. The opening scene depicts Stephen Benbow as a lawyer of integrity and courage - and thus provides the film with the kind of hero that Horace Benbow, his counterpart in the book, never becomes. In passing sentence at the end of a trial in which Stephen has acted as defense attorney, the judge remarks that Mr. Benbow should not be criticized for defending such a man as his client since he was called upon by the court to do so. Stephen (William Gargan) objects to this, ? saying that he took the case because he wanted to defend his client. After court is adjourned Stephen meets Judge Drake (Sir Guy Standing), who tells the young lawyer that he wishes that his granddaughter Temple would become interested in someone like him. Stephen replies that he has tried unsuccessfully to win Temple's affection. This scene provides love interest for the story, whereas in the novel Horace Benbow is an older married man who has no romantic aspirations for Temple. That Stephen Benbow does will be important in the final scenes of the film.

Judge Drake is Temple's grandfather instead of her father in the movie, presumably to make more credible the fact that he is so ineffectual in his efforts to cope with Temple's coquettish ways, something which becomes obvious in the next scene. We see a close-up of the Judge's grandfather's clock showing the late hour. Then the camera pans to the front door, slightly ajar, on the other side of which we hear Temple flirting with a beau. Her hand coyly curls around the inside doorknob, and finally she comes inside and closes the door. The judge confronts Temple on the stairs and warns her about her late hours, but she is able to charm him the same way that she had charmed the lad at the door a moment before. As Temple goes upstairs to bed, the camera stays behind and holds momentarily on the portrait of one of her female ancestors wearing a look of disapproval which almost seems to have been prompted by Temple's behavior.

That note of disapproval is elaborated in a series of short scenes in which various people who know Temple comment that her loose living will soon get her into trouble. The most notable of these is the one in which Judge Drake's Negro housekeeper examines a torn piece of Temple's lingerie and quips, "If Judge Drake did the laundry he'd know more about Miss Temple." This quick succession of scenes provides foreshadowing of the next sequence, in which Temple's penchant for flirting with trouble leads to disaster. It opens with a shot of Stephen reading a bawdy verse about Temple scrawled on a men's room wall before he erases it in disgust and disbelief: "Temple Drake is just a fake. She wants to eat and have her cake." This shot is ironically intercut with one in which Temple is leading on Toddy Gowan (the novel's Gowan Stevens) as they neck in his car.

Toddy suggests that they drive out to the Old Frenchman Place for some bootleg whiskey. After they crash into a tree stump. Trigger (Popeye in the novel) escorts Temple and Toddy to the house. The entire sequence of events at the Place develops just about as it does in the novel. Ruby (Florence Eldridge) puts Temple to bed and turns out the light, warning her that she should leave the house the first thing in the morning before anything happens to her. After Ruby leaves. Trigger (Jack La Rue) comes into the room smoking a cigarette and shuts the door. In the darkness only the pinpoint glow of the cigarette is needed to suggest what he is up to (there is no indication in the film that Trigger is impotent). As Everson remarks, cameraman Karl Struss "manages the ultimate in suggesting everything while showing nothing." Ruby bursts into the room, however, just in time to avert Trigger from his purpose, and takes Temple to the barn where Tommy can guard her.

The next morning Tommy is still playing sentinel and assures Temple that she has nothing to worry about. Behind him, in the background, the viewer can just make out the figure of Trigger climbing a ladder to the loft above. When he lets himself down in the stall where Temple is hiding. Tommy tries to bar his way and is shot by Trigger. As the latter advances toward the camera we hear Temple scream and the screen goes black. All in all this is a very effective staging of the film's key scene, with the camera once more "suggesting everything while showing nothing."

Trigger takes Temple with him to the Memphis brothel where she makes some half-hearted remarks about returning home. "I'm not keeping you," says Trigger, looking straight into the camera. "If you want to go back to that town and your grandfather, go ahead. You're crazy about me. You're going to stay." Here is an excellent use of the subjective camera, showing us in a looming close-up the way that Trigger has already come to mesmerize Temple.

There follows another series of short scenes indicating what the people of Jefferson think of the notice in the newspaper that Miss Temple Drake is visiting friends in Philadelphia, one of which constitutes an ingenious visual symbol: we hear the voice of a gossiping woman prattling on the telephone about Temple while all the time she strokes a cat which finally comments on the conversation with a shrill meow.

After failing to get Lee Goodwin to divulge the true facts about Tommy's murder. Ruby herself tells Stephen where Temple can be found so that Temple can exonerate Lee. This is a neat simplification of the circumstances in the book by which Benbow .comes to learn of Temple's whereabouts, which involve another man who has tracked his two sons to Miss Reba's and tells Benbow of Temple's presence there. Indeed, from this point onward the film wraps up the plot of the novel with surprising dispatch in an effort to condense the story as well as to satisfy the censor at one and the same time.

When Stephen visits Temple at Miss Reba's, she refuses to agree to testify for Lee Goodwin, not only because she fears for her own reputation but because she is afraid that the jealous Trigger will realize that Stephen is in love with her and kill him. Her concern for Stephen is the first glimmer we have that the film's Temple is going to turn out to be a better woman than the novel's Temple. After Stephen departs she tells Trigger that she is leaving him and they quarrel. Then she snatches his gun from the bed and fires. There is a close-up of his hand crushing out a cigarette in an ashtray and then going limp in death.

We now witness in the film the regeneration of Temple Drake that anticipates Faulkner's sequel to Sanctuary, Requiem for a Nun, of which I will say more shortly. Before Temple goes into court to testify, she begs Stephen not to make her tell the truth about what she has done, but to let her live it down instead. Stephen counters sympathetically but firmly, "Here's the chance for you to destroy that evil streak in you forever." In a supremely ironic moment the judge advises Stephen as Temple takes the stand, "It isn't necessary to establish the character of the witness. It hasn't been questioned and I assume that it won't be."

Stephen makes a desperate effort to inspire Temple to speak the truth willingly by recalling the traditions of her family: "Your father died serving his country in the World War. You are proud of your family - their courage, willingness to sacrifice, their love of truth. You're a Drake. Will you tell us where you were . . . ." Stephen's voice trails off into silence and he excuses the witness. Because of his love for Temple he cannot bring himself to put her through the ordeal that faces her. There is a suspenseful moment of hesitation after Temple leaves the stand, and then she blurts out that she wants to tell everything. And so she does. "I went to the city with Trigger and stayed with him until this week," she says at one point. "As a prisoner," the judge suggests. Temple does not answer, and there is a close-up of Judge Drake, who is sitting in the courtroom, averting his eyes in shame. After she admits killing Trigger, Temple faints, and Stephen carries her from the courtroom, saying to her grandfather, "Be proud of her. Judge. I am." Although a great effort was made to bring The Story of Temple Drake into line with the Motion Picture Production Code, while at the same time remaining faithful to the novel, reformers still complained that the film condoned murder, although "this one was as condonable a murder as ever was."4

As I mentioned above. The Story of Temple Drake ends with the redemption of Temple that Faulkner did not bring about until he wrote Requiem for a Nun in 1951. When Tony Richardson filmed Sanctuary a decade later, the plot of Sanctuary and its sequel were combined into a single story, allowing the regeneration of Temple to develop as Faulkner himself envisioned it.

Requiem for a Nun takes place eight years after the events chronicled in Sanctuary. Gowan Stevens has married Temple to make up for his earlier shabby conduct. Nancy Manningoe, a Black whom Temple has rescued from a life of prostitution and drug addiction, is Temple's housekeeper. As the story opens Nancy has smothered Temple's six-month-old daughter to death, and Temple has quite unaccountably asked Gowan's uncle, Gavin Stevens, to defend Nancy. The lawyer persuades Temple to drive with him to Jackson to see the governor about obtaining a pardon for Nancy on the grounds of evidence that Temple characteristically withheld at the trial. Unknown to Temple, Gavin Stevens has also arranged to have her husband overhear her story. Temple confesses that on the night of the death of her infant daughter she was preparing to run away with the brother of Red, the man whom Popeye had killed for having an affair with her in the Memphis brothel. Temple had planned to take her baby with her and to leave her four-year-old son with his father. But Nancy smothered the infant with a pillow to keep Temple from taking the infant with her and to save Temple herself from surrendering once more to evil.

The governor refuses to pardon Nancy, the "nun" of the title, who is prepared on her part to carry through her sacrifice to the end in order to expiate her own life of vice. As Faulkner himself has commented, "She was capable within her poor dim lights and reasons of an act which, whether it was right or wrong, was of complete, almost religious abnegation of the world for the sake of an innocent child. It was paradoxical, the use of the word nun for her, but to me that added something to her tragedy."5

In owning up before the governor to her responsibility for the things that have happened. Temple Drake for the first time has earned the right to be known as Mrs. Gowan Stevens, i.e., as a genuine wife and mother. She is no longer living a lie, and her penance will be to live out her days with a husband who now knows every detail of her sordid past.

In scripting the 1961 widescreen version of Sanctuary, James Poe melded the original plot of Sanctuary with that of the sequel Requiem for a Nun into a single narrative that elides incidents from the two books in a most inventive fashion. For one thing, the murder of Tommy drops out of the plot entirely and Poe consequently makes the trial of Nancy the focal point of the entire action of the combined stories. Hence the film opens with the sentencing of Nancy (Odetta) to be hanged and her muttered prayer, "Thy will be done. Thank you. Lord."

The Gavin Stevens character in the film is called Ira Stevens, presumably to avoid the confusion of his name with that of his nephew Gowan. Ira (Harry Townes) visits Temple (Lee Remick) after the trial and tells her that he knows that a man was with her on the night of the baby's death and that she can still help Nancy if she will tell the truth. After Ira leaves her home, she gazes on the empty crib in the nursery for a moment and then tells Gowan (Bradford Dillman) that she wants to save Nancy. To his amazement she goes with Ira to the home of the governor (Howard St. John), who happens to be Temple's father in the film (possibly to explain quickly and plausibly her easy access to a man in his position).

As Temple recalls over the sound track that fatal night eight years before when she was going to the dance with Gowan. we see a younger Temple standing in the doorway of the living room in which the older woman had just begun telling the story. She bids goodnight to her father and goes off to the dance with Gowan. They both get drunk and decide to pay a visit to the Old Frenchman's Place to get more liquor. After the auto accident, they are taken to the Place by one of the bootleggers (Strother Martin). Nancy replaces the Ruby character of the previous screen version of Sanctuary as the woman who seeks to shield Temple from the lecherous men who have designs on her. At this point the screenplay foreshadows Nancy's later killing of Temple's baby by having her make a reference to her own infant who is lying in a crib in the kitchen. "He's sick," she muses; "been sick all his life - ain't no place to raise a child up." Such an atmosphere of depravity, she feels, can only poison the development of an infant.

Popeye in this film is called Candy Man and, like his counterpart in Temple Drake, is not impotent, as is clear in the rape scene: Candy (Yves Montand) enters the barn where Temple is spending the night and easily overcomes her token resistance just as the scene shifts to the next morning. Candy informs Temple that he is taking her with him to the city in the car that she came in. In her room at Miss Reba's (where the ubiquitous Nancy works as a maid). Candy promises to protect her and care for her. "I was learning what it was like to be with a real man," Temple's voice comments over the sound track. "Next morning I woke to a different world: gin for breakfast, new clothes that Candy had bought for me. That dingy little room at Miss Reba's became my sanctuary of sin and pleasure." As she watches herself in the mirror take a swig of gin, she says to her reflection with undisguised glee, "Jazz Baby, you are low down."

Since the whole trial of Lee Goodwin for the murder of Tommy has disappeared totally from Richardson's film, there is no Horace Benbow to trace Temple to the brothel in the hope of her testifying in Goodwin's behalf. Hence in the present film she is discovered in another way. Candy takes Temple's car on a bootlegging expedition so that he will think of her while he is gone - or so he says. He is, however, pursued by the police in a chase that ends with Candy swerving off the road and crashing in a ditch. He is presumed dead, though his body is not found in the wreckage.

"That's how they found me," Temple adds (voice over), "by tracing the car. It was the return of the innocent from the ranks of the damned. Of course it was hushed up, because the injured party might lose her reputation. And she said to herself, 'Here we are, back home, and that's that.' But she was still screaming under her skin for her lost love." This last remark serves as preparation for a later event in the film that represents another interesting departure from Faulkner. As Temple finishes this narration we are back in the present where she says to her father, "I let you have your own way, even to marrying Gowan - he felt responsible; he knew the facts."

When Temple again takes up the narrative, we slip back into the past and see her hiring Nancy as a maid and nurse for her children. Nancy, after all, was her only link with the past, she explains: "Nancy was kind and understanding to me when I needed kindness and understanding." Or, as she puts it in Requiem for a Nun, "Nancy was the only person in Jefferson who spoke Temple Drake's language." Significantly, Faulkner has Temple refer to herself by her unmarried name, since, as I mentioned above, he wishes to imply that at this point in her narrative she had not yet earned the right to be known as a responsible wife and mother; she was still an adolescent girl underneath the veneer of respectability and maturity.

The importance of Temple's earlier aside that she still was in love with Candy becomes clear when he suddenly comes into her life once more. It seems that he escaped from the auto accident in which he was thought to have perished and has been lying low ever since. Thus it is the Popeye character himself, and not Red's brother, as in Requiem for a Nun, with whom Temple is going to run away in the Richardson film. This plot twist enables the script writer to avoid introducing an important new character so late in the film, and also helps to tie Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun more tightly together into a single narrative. With the exception of the substitution of Candy for Red's brother, however, the events in the film proceed as they do in Faulkner.

Nancy begs Temple to think of her child. "You can't take it with you when you run off, and you can't leave it here. The baby will wind up in a garbage can or an orphanage." When Temple still insists that she is taking her little girl with her, Nancy folds her hands and whispers, "I've tried everything I know; you can see that," and then goes into the nursery. Temple stands in the foreground of the frame as she tells Candy that she has him to protect her. In the background is the closed door of the nursery. A moment later Temple enters the nursery to get the baby, but the camera stays outside, as if it is recoiling from what has happened within. There is an instant of silence and then Temple's anguished scream.

"The rest you know," Temple concludes to her father and Ira. "Candy vanished and Nancy has been sentenced to hang, and all the time she has said nothing but 'Thank you, Lord.'" When the governor says that there is nothing that he can do for Nancy, Ira explains that Temple's painful admissions have not been in vain. "I brought you here to wipe the slate clean, to give you a chance to start again," he says. Then he goes off to see Gowan, who is not present to hear Temple's story as he is in Requiem. After relaying the facts to Gowan, Ira intercedes for Temple with Gowan: "Out of what happened tonight could come a new beginning. Free her by standing by her to face the past. Face your own weakness, youp-own evasions.'.' Gowan responds thoughtfully, "Sure - like the Good Book says. 'The Truth shall make you free.'"

The next scene is almost an illustration of that Scriptural text. The dialogue of the scene represents a neat distillation of Faulkner's dialogue in Requiem. Temple tells Nancy in her death cell that she has confessed everything, and Nancy replies, "I gave up this life when I raised my hand against that child. You had to suffer through the telling of it - that's the way we get salvation." "Salvation," repeats Temple. "We're all looking for some place to feel safe, a place to hide. We look for it in such strange places." "Salvation means more than hiding," Nancy continues. "It means facing up to life, for your children now and those to come. You've got to believe that you are forgiven as I know I am forgiven."

Temple emerges into the sunlight outside where she finds Gowan waiting for her. They walk down the street together as the camera pulls back to show Nancy, a serene expression on her face, gazing through her prison bars. Getting all three of them into the same shot marks the most notable use of the wide screen frame that Richardson makes in the entire picture. Happily the film is photographed in black and white, since the use of even the most muted color process would not be in keeping with the stark atmosphere of Faulkner's somber tale. Richard Whitehall wrote in Films and Filming at the time that the film was released,

Richardson found the right note for the work; this is not a realistic but a poetic film, one to which he brings a much wider dimension than realism. Lee Remick's handling of Temple Drake's sexual obsession has all the intensity of a figure from Jacobean tragedy . . . . The dark brooding presence of Bradford Dillman adds powerfully to the atmosphere.

In addition Yves Montand's French accent (explained in the film by having him come from New Orleans rather than from Memphis) gives him an exotic quality that helps the viewer better to understand Temple's abiding attraction for him.

Richardson migrated from Britain to Hollywood to make Sanctuary at Fox because he liked the script, especially its evocation of the Twenties and Thirties. After the film was completed, however, he felt that "it is impossible to make anything interesting or good under the conditions imposed by the major studios in America. It is a totally impossible creative setup; even after the film is made, so much mutilation goes on, and it becomes the product of many different people."6

Though Richardson was not happy with the film, and both the critical and popular response to the picture was lukewarm, it has as much of the flavor of Faulkner as The Story of Temple Drake did. Indeed, it may well be that the unpleasant events chronicled in both movies are too unpalatable for the average filmgoer when they are depicted on the screen. As British director Ken Russell once said to me about making his controversial film The Devils (1971), when one reads of gory events in a book, "one can sift them through one's imagination and filter out as much of the unpleasantness as one cares to; but you can't do that when you are looking at a film."

Yet Faulkner's tale has proved attractive to filmmakers over and over again, for it has been the basis, directly or indirectly, of no less than four motion pictures. It is matter of record that James Hadley Chase's lurid novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish was heavily indebted to Sanctuary for its plot line. The affinity of the two novels was underscored even further when Orchids was filmed in England in 1948 and Jack La Rue was cast once more in the role modeled after Popeye. In 1971 Chase's novel was filmed again by Robert Aldrich as The Grissom Gang. This time the setting was transplanted to the American Midwest, with Kim Darby as the poor little rich girl from Kansas City who falls in love with one of her kidnappers (Scott Wilson). In the end she is "rescued" by the police and returned to her father, who is tempted to disown her for what she has become.

Perhaps because a genuine work of art, conceived in one medium, to some extent resists being transferred successfully to another art form, no film so far has retold Faulkner's story of Temple Drake with quite the impact of the original. And at this point it seems safe to predict that none ever will.