North Carolina Literature into Film
N C L R ONLINE
7
“Carolina, the all-talkie . . . is The House of Connelly fallen upon evil days.”—Philip K. Scheuer, “Janet Gaynor Invades South: Carolina Typical Screen Version of Play,” Los Angeles Times 9 Feb. 1934: 12. On February 7, 1934, the Raleigh News and Observer ran an excerpt of Green’s essay under the title “Dimes vs. Art.”3 This home state paper begins with section III of the full text that appears here, thus leaving out Green’s recollection of watching D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) when he was a young man. Perhaps the paper’s editors did not want to remind readers that this movie, with its white supremacy agenda, was based on a novel by a North Carolinian, Thomas Dixon. But Paul Green was not reticent about mentioning the notorious film. Talking with such interviewers as James R. Spence, Green discussed The Birth of a Nation even more extensively than he does in this essay. He explains to Spence that although much of the impact of Griffith’s film is derived from its music, “[t]he effect of The Birth of a Nation was doubly strong in that it was a darned good dramatic story. It was well done. It had pathos, heartache, fervor, antagonism, even hate in it. The power of the drama was such that the spillover effect was not spiritually healthy.” Green’s testament to the “power” of this particular film may be disturbing but attests all the more to the power he attributes to the film medium in general. He recalled to Spence that he had “never seen art used with more fervent result than that picture.” Griffith “had a great picture, unfortunately,” Green said, explaining candidly the “unfortunately”: “After you had gone through the experience of seeing this thing and appreciating it, there was this hangover of antagonism. There’s no question about it that . . . when you came out from it and [saw] a black man, you didn’t feel more like embracing him[; rather,] you felt more like pushing him away.”4 Such a statement coming from Paul Green, a man who protested capital punishment in North Carolina because of the disparate ratio of black and white convicts on death row, supports Green’s assessment of the power of Griffith’s film. 1
To learn more about the Paul Green Foundation, see Laurence G. Avery’s essay on Paul Green in NCLR 18 (2009). NCLR thanks the Paul Green Foundation for providing funding for the movie photographs featured here, as well as for providing the Paul Green photographs.
2
Paul Green, “A Playwright’s Notes on Drama and the Screen,” New York Times 4 Feb. 1934: sec. 10, 1–2.
3
“Dimes vs. Art,” News & Observer [Raleigh] 7 Feb. 1934, morning ed.: 4.
4
Green’s remarks to James R. Spence, recorded in the 1970s, are quoted from Spence’s Watering the Sahara: Recollections of Paul Green from 1894 to 1937, ed. Margaret D. Bauer (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2008) 158.