The Member of the Wedding (1952)

Directed by Fred Zinnemann

When you love a novel, you’ll typically go to the theater expecting to enjoy your favorite scenes and characters, and sometimes they haven’t even made it to the cutting room floor, because the screenplay writer and the director have had to be merciless. Tommy Traddles, where are you in David Copperfield (1935)? Mrs. Bagnet, you Old Girl whom everybody loves, where are you in Bleak House (2005), even though the writers had 14 episodes to work with? Come to think of it, where’s the whole great heart of the novel, on what a good and human household looks like?

But I don’t have that reaction when I watch The Member of the Wedding, a film that starred the three actors who had been playing their roles together on the Broadway stage, as the winsome little boy John Henry (Brandon de Wilde), the gawky misfit teenage girl Frankie (Julie Harris), and the quietly loving cook Berenice (Ethel Waters), who is the moral and spiritual center of the work. Somehow, somebody must have gotten to the author, Carson McCullers, and persuaded her that there was more to life than grim fatalism, because she did work on that play too, and the film was adapted from the play. Maybe it was Ethel Waters. It was she who put her big foot down and insisted that they include the song, “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” in the film — one of the two or three most touching instances of the Gospel song in American film that I know of (see also “Go Down, Moses,” in Sullivan’s Travels). Berenice’s faith and love shine out in a world otherwise haunted by bigotry, hardness of heart, folly, and tragedy.

There isn’t much by way of plot in the film, and it’s well that it’s so. Frankie, the teenage girl, is out of place everywhere. The other girls don’t like her. She acts like a tomboy, on purpose to get back at them, it seems. Her older brother is getting married, and she wants to be a “member of the wedding,” though it’s clear that she doesn’t know what married people do, and why her brother and his newlywed wife won’t want her company as they go on their honeymoon. Frankie has no place in the world. Berenice has a place in the world, but nobody around her understands what it is. For them, she is but a menial, a cook. She herself isn’t conscious of anything more. But she is like a moral polestar, an immovable rock of faithfulness, charity, and hope against hope. You believe her when she speaks; and you are hushed into silence when she sings. John Henry is just a small boy whom nobody but Berenice and Frankie pay much attention to, though he comes from a respectable family. He is drawn to them, he’s sometimes mischievous, but we sense that it’s with them that he feels loved.

The film is better than the novel, because the vision is better, and nobility and love shine out above everything else around these small-town people of the American south. Watch it for the interactions among those three — for the things they say, and the things they feel but don’t say. As for the director, Fred Zinnemann, he won awards for two masterpieces of human drama wherein the misfit figures prominently: think of the elderly Thomas More, broken in body but not in spirit, sitting alone before his judges in A Man for All Seasons (1966), or the bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, playing taps on behalf of a murdered friend, for an Army he loves more than it ever loved him, in From Here to Eternity (1953). Berenice is in their company.

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