THE SOUND AND THE FURY: Blu-ray (2oth Century-Fox 1959) Twilight Time

Over the years I’ve come to realize that when a movie makes the claim to be ‘based on’ any novel it is a rhetorical homage to its source material at best, with any woolly resemblance between it and the finished film purely coincidental. I don’t have a problem affording any screenwriter his/her artistic license. After all, what works in novelized fiction (psychological melodrama, multiple points of view, inner turmoil and conflict, pathos of the soul, etc.) may not translate well – or even at all – into visual terms or (particularly during the classic studio era) may need to be sanitized for the sake of adhering to a star’s built-in public persona and/or the production code of ethics. Seriously, I’m not a stickler in this regard, so long as the screenwriter and the movie have captured the essence of their source material.

They may even embellish the author’s original intent – as David O. Selznick did on his opus magnum; Gone with the Wind (1939) – (giving Scarlett O’Hara her moment of redemption at the end, the novel merely concluding with Rhett Butler’s desertion of her) and still retain a certain amount of reverence for the work that inspired the movie. But when a movie so completely veers away or defies its inspiration; borrowing little more than the title and certain characters’ names, but then running buckshot over both for the sake of telling an entirely different story – that’s where I decidedly draw the proverbial line in the sand.

After all, why take a pre-sold title audiences know and then do something completely different with it? Well, the obvious answer is because it is a presold title. But in trading on a novel’s popularity, any movie that does not institute and/or play to the strengths of the original is not only insulting the readers who have made the book beloved in the first place – and have paid good money to see that story brought to the screen – it also betrays the authorship of an artist who, arguably, has toiled for months (occasionally years) on prose considered worthy enough to be published…just not as worthy to be seen through the shimmering light of a projector’s beam.

Case in point: Martin Ritt’s utterly miscalculated bastardization of The Sound and the Fury (1959); something of a literary classic by William Falkner, though not immediately thought of as such when it was first published in 1929. There’s no two ways of getting around the fact that this movie adaptation is a grand disappointment. It has the homogenized look of any number of vintage 2oth Century-Fox Cinemascope films circa the mid to late 50’s; Alex North’s syrupy score as easily plugged into The Long Hot Summer (1958), The Best of Everything (1959) or even Return to Peyton Place (1961). But it lacks authenticity and credibility – a genuine taste for the ripening flavor of the new south and real human aftershocks from its’ epic implosion, herein replaced by those cheap imitations – melodrama and teased hints of raw human sexuality never going beyond antiseptic inferences to tawdry sex and lukewarm kisses caught briefly in the glimmer of pallid moonlight.

Just as stories about the gallantry of the old south had served as popular film fodder during the 1930’s, at the end of WWII reflections on its then present day decay and continued decline became all the rage, fueled by playwright, Tennessee William’s astute observations on human perversity, often set against a backdrop of the old, derelict plantation house, long since fallen into disrepair. The south, no longer chivalrous or fine, still clinging to its bigotry and bitterness, quelled from an antebellum of sweet mint julep memories, could now be counted upon as the repository of our collective human weaknesses; its more intimate failings distanced – or perhaps, having no comparatively uncouth cousin north of the Mason/Dixon line.

The Sound and the Fury – both as a novel and a movie – feeds into our worst suspicions about humanity; critiquing its tenuous balance, often leading to more sorrows than joy and, at times, reveling in the indignations heaped upon this particular story’s fictional family – the Compsons: once the pride of Jefferson, Mississippi, reconstituted as surrogates for the South’s moral/social and financial blight. Late in the movie, Jason (played by Yul Brynner with dispassionate austerity and a disquietingly full shock of brown hair) asks Quentin (Joan Woodward) – his niece - if she knows a lost cause when she sees one. The Compsons are nearly that; this once proud clan long since made over as the corruptible social pariahs in their own tiny world; one uncle, Howard (John Beal) given over to excess drink; another – Benjamin (Benjy for short, and played by Jack Warden) forced into an asylum to spare the family their embarrassment over his diminished mental capacity; a fiery adolescent niece, Quentin, slinking into the pitfalls – ergo footsteps - of her wayward mother’s sordid past life: Caddy (Margaret Leighton) - the goodtime gal who prostituted her youth, now transformed under the inevitable reverse Cinderella spell of Father Time into a middle-aged tart, whose bloom, and thus her many eligible suitors – and modest source of income – are gone forever. Ah me, to quote Jason, “Girls. They’re not anything at all - and all of a sudden they’re everything!”

But once, in Jefferson, the Compsons were considered ‘old money’. Now they’re just poor white trash, rescued from total oblivion by eldest brother, Jason; the only one with a level head on his shoulders, a brain for business and staunchly protective of the family’s name and heritage perhaps best left to molder with the past: the true survivor of this slowly putrefying coterie. A pity Jason’s own economic foundation is perilously perched on the good graces of their late father’s business partner, Earl Snopes (Albert Dekker); a lascivious sort, not above picking apart the bones of this nearly buried family’s reputation.  Moonlight and magnolias have definitely been traded in for faded, moss-covered memories and wormwood.

Novels of a certain generation and ilk were unapologetically dense in their narrative structures; detailing an entire history before delving into what frequently became a very complex moralistic saga. In divesting itself of all but the skeletal remains of William Falkner’s careful craftsmanship, the cinematic equivalent to The Sound and the Fury is very much a tale told by an idiot – lacking both in ‘sound’ and ‘fury’, though regrettably, still very much signifying nothing. The movie lapses into a sort of ineffectual Cliff Notes parody of the acclaimed masterwork; Falkner’s epically tragic Compson clan becomes severely deprived of their ancestral lineage and thus, present-day motives; the ‘fury’ of the piece distilled into woefully substandard, wordy melodrama that occasionally threatens to devolve into grand guignol.

Falkner’s novel requires a more invested explanation than arguably the two hour format of any movie is capable of providing. If only the characters had been more richly drawn; only the story a little more finely nuanced without its heavy-handed proclivity towards dropping benign hints to all those sexual perversions supplementary expressed in the novel (but unable to be overtly shared on the movie screen). If only for more consistency within said plot – such as it is – to build a dramatic arc and elevate tensions. Instead, we have a grotesquely meandering, and utterly ineffectual humdrum.  This Sound and Fury might have as easily risen above its narrative turgidity in its own fidelity to Falkner’s plotted threads: fate, destiny, love lost, and wounded – though hardly fatalistic – human pride, and, finally, the triumph of that defiantly southern spirit – all of it conspiring to make for a great (even satisfying) 110 minutes of sitting in the dark.

Instead, this fairly lugubrious adaptation effectively anesthetizes both the mind and the fanny; just another melancholy mishmash about ethically flawed, morally conflicted southerners; the perennial favorite scapegoat for all our innate – and universal – human prejudices. The South never had a monopoly on salacious dogmatic behaviors, although novels and movies like The Sound and the Fury would like us to think that they did – the isolation and distancing of mankind’s more unflattering psychology making the rest of us feel a whole lot better about ourselves. 

The expectation ought never to be that any movie based on a popular novel will strictly adhere to its chronology and characterizations as a definitive visual representation of the literary text. But at some basic level, any movie attempted from a book should at least aspire to rekindle the many allegorical and thematic elements that made the story popular in the first place. Otherwise, what is the point of the exercise?  

The Sound and the Fury is about as far removed from Falkner’s preeminence as a wordsmith as it can be; a complete betrayal of his characters, their instincts, and that everlasting appeal we collectively harbor for truly flawed human beings; the emotional center of the piece eclipsed by producer, Jerry Wald’s usual zeal for uber-soap opera, and, buried under a mountain of gloss and schmaltz inserted in place of any realistic human drama. The movie might have worked on this level too with a more gentile and guiding hand – figuratively speaking – its creative fingers firmly affixed on the pulse of the novel.

But herein Falkner’s delicately balanced four act structure (with an appendix added by the author for the book’s reissue in 1945) – each act relying on a different character to invest us in a particular part of this familial saga – is expunged from Wald’s mawkish treacle; a pedestrian three act screenplay accredited to Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. Falkner’s genius, however, has been replaced with a star-voice-over narration to bookend this lengthy excursion into melodramatic tedium. The real problem is that our central protagonist – the one expected to carry us into, and eventually out of, this avaricious maelstrom of post-antebellum sin and corruption – is herself a deeply flawed adolescent; Woodward’s own asexuality (a quality I must confess to never quite understanding as translatable to rather dichotomous frosty, yet ‘come hither’ stares) seemingly at odds with the baby-doll vixen of Falkner’s novel. 

Worse for the film is Martin Ritt’s utterly lackluster direction; utilizing long takes in Cinemascope, but without the screen teeming in Falkner’s generational disintegration, instead merely giving us profoundly troubled people, chronic in their stern distaste and wicked contempt for each other. The complex nonlinearity of Falkner’s novel is really quite superb at deconstructing the Compson family; albeit, at times, confusing as hell. But the movie jettisons practically all the novel’s backstory to concentrate on the end of its third act and segue – with caveats prone to extensive artistic license - into the fourth: the tempestuous relationship between Jason and Quentin made utterly vague to downright cryptic for anyone who has not read the book.

We lose the compelling stream of consciousness from Benjy’s introduction (the character a mere token in the movie, played in total silence by Jack Warden). This used to illustrate the glowingly decadent past: Caddy’s naughty peccadillos effectively ostracizing her from the family; thrown out by her second husband, Herbert Head for conceiving another man’s baby out of wedlock; the child, eventually growing up as Quentin III (our movie’s heroine); named after Caddy’s beloved brother; a possessive and tragically flawed intellectual who eventually committed suicide. None of these machinations survive in the movie, but it perhaps affords the viewer the missed opportunity to reconsider them herein, if for no other reason, then to comprehend just how much more ‘meat’ there ought to have been on this bone rack of a plot, currently unraveling across the vast Cinemascope screen.

Finally, the movie all but ignores pivotal plot points expressed in Falkner’s appendix; Jason tricking Caddy into being declared Benjy’s legal guardian so he can have him castrated, and, Caddy’s exile to Europe during the occupation where she takes up with a German general. As a movie, The Sound and the Fury waffles through extensive conversations between the bitterly opposed Quentin and Jason; the former suspecting her uncle of stealing monies owed her from an inheritance sent at intervals by Caddy during her many years in absence from the household. In the novel, Jason has indeed pilfered these funds to stave off the family’s eviction from their moldering plantation house. But in the movie, Jason’s motives are rather altruistic, perhaps to accommodate the rising popularity of the star embodying the role – Yul Brynner. His Jason is merely safeguarding the inheritance under lock and key until such time as he deems Quentin mature enough to utilize the funds to procure a better life.

The relationship between Jason and Quentin in the movie is perplexedly defective; Quentin despising Jason outright for denying access to her wayward mother; her first fleeting glimpse of mama bittersweet indeed, as Caddy clumsily chases after the car Quentin is riding in, driven by a steely-eyed Jason who even refuses to catch even a glimpse of his distraught and screeching sister in his rearview as he guns the motor and speeds away. Ritt’s direction is at its most accomplished during this moment: also later, in portraying Caddy’s penultimate homecoming with Jason’s reluctant complicity; its knee-jerk teary-eyed reunion with both Howard and Benjy a dramatic high water mark in this otherwise tepid melodrama. But this groundswell of sentiment is diffused several scenes later after Quentin realizes her mother - whom she has somewhat naïvely deified as a martyr - one cruelly punished by an overbearing Jason – is now exposed to her as the hard-hearted and generally unfeeling middle-aged strumpet she so obviously is.

The understanding – or lack thereof - between Jason and Quentin is further muddled in the Ravetch/Franks’ screenplay, after Jason – Quentin’s uncle, remember? - rather incestuously takes her in his arms, planting a full-blooded kiss on her lips to prove any man can make her feel like a woman with mere overtures to sex.  Quentin’s burgeoning sexuality is at the crux of our story; her marred understanding of the difference between love and hot-blooded passion with Charlie Busch (Stuart Whitman) crystalized only after Jason informs the unscrupulous carny in her presence that he can either have Quentin or her money but not both; Charlie choosing the cash over the girl without so much as batting an eye, but ultimately denied each by Quentin, who proclaims she’s too much woman for even him.

Our story begins with the Compson’s caustic, though devoted house servant, Dilsey (Ethel Waters) bustling through the manor house at the crack of dawn only to discover its’ youngest member, Quentin, has yet to come home from another night of presumed carousing. In the novel, Dilsey is a rather important transitional figure linking the generations in the novel, having been a maid for the Compsons long enough to recall their heady glory days as a prominent southern family. Regrettably, in the movie Dilsey remains little more than the token non-Caucasian; a role that must have irked the oft’ outspoken Waters to no end.  After this initial, and rather elaborate introduction, Dilsey is relegated to a few choice scenes scattered throughout – mostly exercising her displeasure with various members of the household, but otherwise a non-entity inconsequential to our story. 

We meet the rest of the family in short order, Howard, still reclining in his red velvet armchair in the parlor, having once again drank himself into oblivion the night before; Benjy – lying in sweet repose in an upstairs bedroom with Luster (Stephen Perry) quietly watching over him, and Mrs. Caroline (Françoise Rosay); the cantankerous Creole who cannot abide the rest of the family, and quite frankly cannot understand why her son, Jason – educated as he is – would desire to remain buried in this backwater, sternly venting her displeasures ad nauseam. Jason, however, will not abide by her bitter protestations – or is it raving madness? We’re never quite sure; highly conscious, as he is of the family honor and what the family has presently done to dishonor themselves and their reputations in town.

As it turns out, Quentin has spent the entire night riding the bus back and forth from Memphis, just one of her larks to remain conspicuously absent from the troubles at home and away from Jason, whom she cannot tolerate and wishes was dead. Arriving back at the house – a decaying plantation nestled away from the main road – Quentin is confronted by Jason who demands to know where she’s been all night. He commands her to go back to school, threatening to strike her for her insolence. But Dilsey steps in to diffuse the situation. Determined that his niece should set a good example for others as well as for herself – something she defiantly refuses to do – Jason drives Quentin into town to Miss Blaine’s School for Young Ladies, before hurrying to his place of business as one of the partners of the locally owned and modestly operated department store overseen by Earl Snopes – a man who used to take his marching orders from the Compsons, but now calls the shots and, in fact, has given Jason the position he currently holds as mere charity.

In the meantime, the Pan-American travelling carnival has come to town, promising ‘games, thrills and freaks’; Quentin passing their parade down main street during her lunch break from school and meandering over to Mr. Selby’s (Emerson Treacy) pawnshop – a repository for relics and heirlooms from some of the once ‘best family’s’ in town and where she has previously hocked her text books for a few measly dollars. Exiting the shop and wandering amongst the gathering crowd, Quentin takes notice of men ogling a pretty girl and tries, rather embarrassingly, to mimic the qualities of this desirable female. In the meantime, two no-account children throw rocks at Benjy. To prevent him from attacking them, Luster promises to take Benjy for a carriage ride into town. The pair are spotted by the carnies who, recognizing Benjy’s impaired judgment and Luster’s naiveté, mount a placard around Benjy’s neck that reads ‘freaks’ – presumably to promote their show but equally embarrassing to Jason, who intercedes by removing the advertisement from the carriage, then threatening to kill Luster if he ever disobeys him again by taking Benjy off the estate.   

Quentin pleads with Jason to give her some money so that she can go out and buy herself some pretty clothes. He refuses and she bitterly admonishes him for ‘stealing’ money from her estranged mother’s inheritance. Making her way to the fairgrounds, Quentin is drawn to Charlie Busch, a shirtless carny presently repairing one of the rides, impressing her with his considerable skill and overt masculinity (in vintage Hollywood movies a bare-chested man frequently suggested loose morality and male virility – go figure). Charlie is aware of Quentin’s fascination in him, for she is fairly transparent about it, following him about the grounds until he manages to lure her back to his RV trailer. Charlie suggests a good time, but Quentin resists, citing respectability and her stubborn resolve not to become just another one of ‘those girls’ who toss their virtue into the air as freely as they allow their knickers to ride down below their knees. Charlie is amused by Quentin’s slum prudery.  After all, as far as he is concerned there is plenty of time to wear her down. And it wouldn’t take much. Quentin’s ripe for the picking.

Meanwhile, Caddy – Quentin’s mother arrives in town after an absence of some years – awaiting Jason at Snope’s department store. He very reluctantly agrees to allow Caddy to see her daughter for just a moment; then cruelly collects Quentin, briefly driving past Caddy so she can – literally – see her daughter only at a glance. Later, Caddy returns to the store to admonish Jason for his cruelty. But Jason is not without a heart, and proves it when he decides to allow Caddy to rejoin the family and thus, reenter her daughter’s life. Although Caddy is infinitely grateful to see her two brothers – Howard and Benjy, who reciprocate their gladness at seeing her – she is, as ever, unaccustomed to having, or perhaps even wanting, a daughter.

She bears no motherly instinct that would help Quentin mature into a woman of substance, and Quentin very quickly realizes the distinction between being a mother and merely becoming known as the woman who gave her life. It is a bitter realization, and one that draws Quentin closer to the unscrupulous Charlie in her desperate desire to be loved. Charlie attempts to seduce Quentin. But she finds his sexual overtures mildly worrisome, then thoroughly silly; her clichéd nervousness (Hollywood code for virginity) something of a turn off to Charlie, who takes to making fun of Benjy instead before being shoed away by Jason. Determined to make a lady of Quentin, Jason takes her to church and then a Sunday afternoon call on matron, Effie Mansfield (Adrienne Marden) whose spinster daughter, Maude (Esther Dale) is looking to land herself a husband. Quentin is mildly amused by these gentile machinations of polite courtship.

Afterward, Quentin and Jason begin to bond. He even treats her to an ice cream sundae. Each is uncharacteristically civil to the other; Quentin discovering a side to Jason she otherwise has neither known or perhaps even considered.  In another part of town, Caddy makes a play for Earl. It’s the most painfully over-wrought sequence in the movie, fraught with innocuous flirtations that can be interpreted as more forward byplay; Earl twisting the head of his wall-mounted fan to blow Caddy’s hat from her sweaty brow; Alex North’s score swelling to absurd minor chords that punctuate a sexual conquest about to occur. Afterward, Earl drives Caddy home, making a thinly veiled reference about her loose morals to Jason, who promptly defends her honor with a few well-placed body blows before sending Earl on his way.

Depending on one’s point of view, keeping a watchful eye on the Compson women has become either something of an overzealous hobby or a full-time responsibility. Discovering Quentin in a rather harmless pas deux with Charlie, Jason chases the cowardly carny off his property before showing Quentin what real passion is all about by planting a robust smooch on her. The moment is fraught with sexual friction, distorted by Jason’s admonishment of Quentin, telling her any man can make her feel like a woman. Wounded by his insinuation, that she has already begun to mimic her mother’s past behaviors, Quentin retreats to her bedroom; Caddy at long last standing up to the man who exiled her from the family home. “You’re alone in your room,” she tells Jason with tears streaming down her face, “You go into your room at night and you close the door – and if you died in there no one would care! I’ve reached out to people…a few wonderful times they’ve reached out to me. I’ve suffered for it and I’d suffer for it again before I’d change places with you!”

Quentin, however, has made up her mind – or thinks she has – running off to be with Charlie. But he sends her back home modestly broken-hearted. Confronted on the upstairs veranda upon her return by Benjy, who has been waiting up for her – the mood unexpectedly turns violent when Benjy lashes out at Quentin. Jason arrives in the nick of time, but he has decided Benjy must be ‘put away’ once and for all; a move that breaks both Luster and Dilsey’s heart. Quentin runs away with her inheritance, determined to make a fresh start with Charlie. But their chances for bliss are interrupted by Jason who informs the carny he can either have the girl or her money - not both. However, Charlie, having made the decision to take the money and run is denied by Quentin, recognizing his hollow promises to marry her would simply evaporate once the money has run out. 

Returning to the plantation separately, Jason and Quentin meet on the front lawn. He is still critical, though now his barbs are underpinned by a distinct note of tenderness, suggesting, perhaps, he will pursue her romantically. Quentin is receptive to the offer, her voice-over “You’re not done with me yet…not by a long shot,” hinting of so much more to this story we never get to see as the end titles flash across the screen.

The Sound and the Fury is frankly, a dud; too invested in its inoffensive trappings - the typical Hollywood melodrama of its ilk - to be taken at face value as even a modestly faithful interpretation of Falkner’s masterwork. Margaret Leighton’s performance is unquestioningly the standout. It’s full of that necessary spark of fire and music: qualities that ought to have permeated the entire cast and story, but only reach out to the audience when Leighton is on the screen; the careworn simpering and baited pleas of this scorned southern belle prematurely aged, resonating with the viewer more than anything or anyone else. Caddy has suffered the slings and arrows of this addlepated clan and her surreptitious brother, the latter catering to the narrow-minded small town gossips because he believes it will help preserve the invisible barrier between them and the Compson’s malignant and self-inflicting family honor. The tragedy is, of course, that Jason has sacrificed far too much of himself to keep this faith alive forever. He is a shell of a human being because of this warped sense of propriety; clinging to the bygone and long since dead dream that the Compson family name can again be great.

Yul Brynner is a very fine actor, much esteemed elsewhere. But he is entirely wrong for this part; too withdrawn, severe, ultra-conservative and demanding – in short, an arrogant prig, expecting the rest of the Compson clan to willingly fall into line and/or obey his edicts without question. He doesn’t see them for who they are; demoralized people without initiative, self-respect, or even, the desire to drag themselves from the mire. Jason is committed to making sacrifices. But life is never what he would wish it to be. Jason has yet to discover that the only variable over which he holds dominion to positively influence and change is within himself. When Caddy stands up to him, Jason comes to this understanding second best – the movie ending on a decidedly more optimistic note for a familial renaissance of the Compson clan that is thoroughly not in keeping with Falkner’s original story.   

In point of fact, apart from Margaret Leighton and maybe Joanne Woodward (who miserably fractures her dialect) none of the cast – including Yul Brynner – even attempt a southern drawl; an oversight from which the movie never recovers. This is, after all, the story of a once fine and upstanding southern family fallen on hard times; corn-fed and raised on the precepts of gallantry and hard liquor. While one might be willing to forgive Brynner his own accent – as Jason took the family name only after the Compson’s patriarch died of drink (he’s not a true Compson himself) – one can no more invest in Jack Warden’s taciturn Benjamin and John Beal’s slovenly Howard, as having sprung from the same womb, than to believe Woodward’s impish gadabout with pixie haircut is the product of Caddy’s ill-fated illicit love match with a man not her husband.

The cast is just clumsily put together – a lethal miscalculation submarining what little credence the movie might have had on its own terms, removed from the influences of Falkner’s title to help sell tickets at the box office.  And anyway, condensing Falkner’s sprawling saga – spanning many generations – into just a few brief days in the life of the Compsons is a gargantuan misfire to begin with; in essence reducing the familial scrapbook dedicated to their complicated lives into just one or two snapshots taken slightly out of time and most definitely out of focus. In the final analysis, The Sound and the Fury is all noise and mostly un-flustered; its’ familial discourse not adding up to much more than a hill of beans.

Twilight Time’s release via 2oth Century-Fox’s mastering efforts doesn’t fare much better. This is the first time The Sound and the Fury has been released in its original Cinemascope aspect ratio on home video, so I suppose we ought to be grateful; ditto for the overall saturation of color on this disc. It’s mostly rich, occasionally vibrant, and captures the essential qualities of Charles G. Clarke’s competent, but fairly uninspired, cinematography. Like other vintage Fox titles, color balancing seems to be the major issue herein. I cannot stress enough my displeasure with Fox for continuing to short shrift a goodly percentage of their Eastmancolor Cinemascope movies with lackluster transfers like this one.

The studio needs to take a more proactive stance on their ‘scope’ titles. Flesh is depressingly yellowish brown. A lot of what ought to be green foliage registers in rather muddy tones of greyish/bluish green. There’s also a slight ringing noticeable around trees, particularly when photographed against the bright robin egg blue sky.  Contrast is weaker than anticipated and there are some issues of instability around the 48 minute mark – the dinner scene. Add to this some built-in flicker and problematic gate weave (more noticeable on larger screens) and The Sound and the Fury’s hi-def transfer emerges as a marginal middle-of-the-road effort.  

Alex North’s lush, but decidedly un-southern score gets its due in full DTS lossless 2.0 audio. Dialogue has an artificial tonality indicative of many Fox releases from the period, rather obvious in its overdubs. Generally speaking, the fidelity is good enough, but it won’t win any awards. Last, but certainly not least, is Twilight Time’s blessing of an isolated track, North’s original music cues remastered for our listening enjoyment. The score is undeniably a sumptuous feast for the ear. It doesn’t really relate to the story’s setting, but it is of that impeccable breed, richly rewarding unto itself and perhaps even more enjoyable once removed from the movie. Julie Kirgo’s liner notes get a much deserved nod yet again. Is there anything she doesn’t know about movies? Probably not. Bottom line: The Sound and the Fury isn’t a great movie. Disappointing as that is, Twilight Time’s release gives us the first – and likely only – competent reissue in anamorphic widescreen on home video. If you’re a fan of this movie – and I know you’re out there - then you’ll want to snatch this one up. All others can pass.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

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