The effects of censorship and criticism on the film adaptations of Richard Wright's 'Native Son'

Richard Wright's Native Son was made into a feature film twice, so it is an excellent text with which to work to answer questions regarding Hollywood's depiction of African Americans. Additional aspects of Native Son make it uniquely suitable for an investigation of the problems filmmakers confront when it comes to the portrayal of blacks on the silver screen: Native Son was an immediate bestseller; both film versions were adapted by black writers, and Native Son was almost written for the screen, for Wright conceived of his novel in cinematic terms. It would appear that a film adaptation of Native Son could not fail, yet both attempts were critical and box office disasters. Through an analysis of three key scenes missing from the two cinematic translations, this work explores the censorial and discursive practices that proved two different sets of filmmakers--who each believed that such a widely acclaimed literary classic as Native Son would produce an equally applauded film--wrong. Using a methodological approach informed by such multiple theoretical perspectives as Marxism, poststructuralism, and tropological revision, I survey film's ability both to create and to reflect reality in relation to past and present African American representation, examine how Hollywood's desire for financial profit led to a censorial apparatus that had deleterious effects on both films adaptations of Native Son, analyze the immediate critical response to Wright's novel to illustrate how criticism was used to circumvent its unprecedented threat to white America, present some of the obstacles that Wright encountered in attempting to bring an unexpurgated film version of his novel to the public, explicate the reasons for the significant absences in both cinematic translations of Native Son, and conclude that when it comes to the representation of African Americans in commercial Hollywood films, ideological considerations take precedence over economic concerns.