Native Son (1986)

In the black ghetto of South-Side Chicago in the last years of the Depression, a 19-year-old black man named Bigger Thomas (Victor Love in his first movie role) lives with his mother (Oprah Winfrey) and young brother and sister in a rat-infested tenement.

His father was killed in a Mississippi race riot. His mother takes in washing. The family is going to be evicted if Bigger doesn’t get a job.

Bigger takes a job as a chauffeur and handyman for the rich white Dalton family.

The master of the house (John McMartin) is a soft-spoken liberal. The mistress (Carroll Baker) is blind and a do-gooder. The only child, Mary (Elizabeth McGovern) is an airhead dilettante radical who lusts after a young communist named Jan (Matt Dillon).

His first assignment is to drive the spoiled rich girl to an evening lecture. But, instead, she commands Bigger to pick up Jan and spend the evening with them. They sit up front with Bigger in the limousine and assure him they are all equals. They speak of how it will be “after the revolution.”

They insist that Bigger take them to where he eats. He does, embarrassed to be seen with them by other blacks and fearful that he’ll lose his job or that something worse will happen to him if her parents discover he took their precious daughter to a ghetto tavern.

By the time Bigger takes Mary home, she’s drunk in the back seat. He carries her, stealthily, to her bedroom and puts her in her bed.

She semi-consciously embraces him – just as her blind mother walks into the room.

In an acute moment of panic, Bigger silences Mary by mashing a pillow into her face, suffocating her.

To dispose of the corpse – in a solution so damned quick it’s horrific – he clumsily starts pushing the body into a blazing furnace.

Bigger then deliberately kills his black girlfriend, Bessie (Akosua Busia, who played Nettie in The Color Purple). But it is his first victim – the white victim – who becomes the focus of public attention.

John Karlen is Bigger’s defence attorney, Max.

Adapted by screenwriter Richard Wesley from the powerful and brutal 1940 novel by Richard Wright, the film stays close to the plot and mood of the book, muting the communist element as well as some of the gorier violence.

The film was made on a relatively small $2.4 million budget (The Color Purple, by comparison, cost upward of $15 million).

Bigger Thomas
Victor Love
Jan
Matt Dillon
Mary Dalton
Elizabeth McGovern
Peggy
Geraldine Page
Mrs Thomas
Oprah Winfrey
Bessie
Akosua Busia
Mrs Dalton
Carroll Baker
Mr Dalton
John McMartin
Doc
Art Evans
Max
John Karlen
Gus
Willard E. Pugh
Buckley
David Rasche
Jack
Ving Rhames
G.H.
Walter Rivers
Buddy
Shavar Ross
Britton
Lane Smith
Bartender
Richard Wesley
Vera
Adrienne Cook
Bessie’s Friend
Adriane Love
Judge
George D. Wallace
Assistant DA
Avers Wexler
Nuns
Edna Phillios
Sarah Silver
Reporters
John Otrin
Adam Gregor
William Boyett
Robert Alan Browne

Director
Jerrold Freedman