The Sound and the Fury (20th Century-Fox) is the most interesting operation Hollywood has ever performed on a William Faulkner book. Scriptwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., in their shrewd but ruthless resection of the story, have revised almost every episode out of all resemblance to the novel, and have tidied up almost every character so as not to offend the mass public. Nevertheless, the result of all this figuring and jiggering is a picture that is both merchantable and unexpectedly moving.
The story, as the film tells it, is a sort of magnolia-strewn Jane Eyre. The hero (Yul Brynner) is a gloomy and passionate young man. The heroine (Joanne Woodward) is his ward, a gay young sprig on a rotten family tree. The Compsons have been drunk for a couple of generations, and have long since sold their birthright for a mess of corn liquor. The only thing left is the peeling old plantation house, and there the last of the Compsons live on the charity of the hero, who has become a Compson by adoption and is determined to redeem the family name.
The principal object of his salvage operation is the heroine. But he is so worried about the bad in her that he fails to appreciate the good, and she hates him for it. Sick of his tyranny, desperate for affection, she goes off on pathetic tangents of rebelliousness—threatens to undress in public, pawns her schoolbooks to pay for a permanent wave, takes clandestine bus trips to Memphis. "I gotta get chances in this life," she rages, and before long she gets one with a roustabout (Stuart Whitman) in a traveling carnival. He is not a bad young fellow, but he is not good either, and before he is through he almost takes the girl for everything she has—including $3,000 her guardian has been hoarding. Just in time for a happy ending, the heroine realizes that her guardian has been cruel only to be kind, and that what she feels for him is not really hate.
It is a conventional destination, but the film makes some fascinating stops along the way. There are some barracking good family quarrels and a couple of memorably steamy scenes of decadence. The direction, by Martin (The Long, Hot Summer) Ritt, is sure and vigorous. The acting is excellent. Actor Brynner, once the mind stops boggling at his henna-rinsed toupee, tugs powerfully at the sympathies. Actress Woodward, despite her tendency to develop mannerisms instead of a style, gives a winning and intelligent impression of an ugly duckling at the moment when she becomes a swan.