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But if I'm in it, you're in it with me
It will sound like either a euphemistic warning or damnation with faint praise if I describe The Well (1951) as the least typical drama about race relations I have seen from its era, but its no-frills, no-stars, resourcefully no-budget B-filmmaking doesn't just hold a candle to some of its more prestigious contemporaries, it leaves them looking like cautious antiquities when it bluntly eschews white saviors, saintly victims, and most importantly bothsidesism in its depiction of a small town brought to the brink of a race riot. The spark to the tinder of this placidly representative, integrated community is a mistaken case of interracial stranger danger, but it almost doesn't matter. It could have been a whistle, a zoot suit, the economy. It's America; that coal seam is always burning somewhere.
Co-written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, co-produced by Greene and Leo C. Popkin, and co-directed by Popkin and Rouse, The Well may not be revolutionary cinema, but it's doing its best to be real. Because the audience knows from the start that five-year-old Carolyn Crawford (Gwendolyn Laster) was not kidnapped, molested, or murdered by the unknown white man who was seen buying her a bunch of violets and holding her hand—like the echo of Kathy Fiscus, she's at the bottom of an abandoned well in the field of wildflowers she was dawdling through on her way to school—the alacrity with which the underlying tensions of a bucolic everyburg flash over into rumor-milled vigilantism risks resembling an obvious parable of monsters on Maple Street, but the film is scrupulous in its illustration of the stages by which the racial amity of the town understandably and upsettingly breaks down. Affronted by the suggestion of calling in the state militia, one white member of the citizens' committee protests, "Negroes and whites have been living together in complete harmony for years!" That the sentiment is more than Caucasian back-patting is supported by the casual mingling of Black and white residents at school, on the job, even in the meeting in the mayor's office. Nevertheless and without pieties, the audience is tipped to sympathize with the Black perspective on the contingent nature of such harmony. To a man, the town's law enforcement is white. Why wouldn't Martha and Ralph Crawford (Maidie Norman and Ernest Anderson) worry that their dark-skinned darling won't be as much of an amber alert as an equally flower-loving little white girl, especially once the involvement of a white man hits the grapevine? Why wouldn't it sharpen rather than allay their fears when the man is identified as Claude Packard (Harry Morgan), the visiting nephew of local leading citizen Sam Packard (Barry Kelley)? White women cluck over the shock of a child-murdering maniac in their midst, but Black men are laying odds on his release within half an hour of his arrest. The communal suspicion that Packard will pull whatever strings it takes to keep his nephew out of jail is not ill-founded when we can watch the businessman throwing his weight around, threatening the sheriff's office with legal action and trying to browbeat his nephew into perjuring himself in the meantime. As Black mistrust and white defensiveness polarize around the Packards, despite the lawful scruples of Sheriff Ben Kellogg (Richard Rober) we are given ever less reason to doubt the claim that rises out of the choral voices of the town, "You can get away with murder as long as you're the right color." Just by not sugarcoating its history, the film can look horribly prescient. "This is a unique situation," a Black student (Elzie Emanuel) observes at a point in the day when he and his friends can still hang out at the library with white patrons coming and going in the stacks behind them. "A white man's accused of a crime against a Negro child. This time, the shoe's on the other foot." He doesn't need to elaborate on the hysteria of miscegenation contained in that other shoe. The town's white population has been on edge ever since the telephone of gossip transformed a desperate jostle during a confrontation with Packard into a savage beating of the helpless white man, but the actual trigger for fighting in the streets is a white woman's self-serving claim to have been "insulted" just so her boyfriend can prove his chivalrous bona fides by bashing the first Black man he and his four buddies catch sight of. The N-word flies thicker and faster in this picture than in any other non-news media I have encountered of its time, but it isn't for shock value. Before the town begins to boil, its white characters use the politer terms of the day, "Negro" or "colored." The emergence of the slur marks a decisive shift toward the kind of mass violence described by Dr. Billings (Bill Walker) with such devastating candor that it carries the day for calling the governor for help:
"Has any of you ever seen a race riot? I have. I saw a whole town go mad, a town very much like this. I saw my own father's body tied to a car and dragged through the streets and the driver of that car was a man my father had known for twenty years. I saw a white child beaten to death by my own people. She was just about the age of your daughter, Mr. Lobel. Oh, you can't believe it unless you've seen it with your own eyes . . . It's something you can never forget as long as you live."
It should not feel like such a coup for an all-white writer-director-producer team that even though The Well doesn't get very far inside its Black characters—it doesn't get that far inside its white characters, to be fair—it takes care to present them both as individuals and as a community, an interrelated ensemble rather than select dramatic exceptions. We can believe in their families, their neighborhoods, their work friendships. "Tell him what kind of a break we'd catch if it was one of us," one deliveryman calls sardonically to another as their white coworker starts to argue devil's advocate. Most valuably for its subject matter, it never flattens its Black characters into virtuous objects or condemns them as equal aggressors as the violence engulfing their town spirals to scarier, wilder levels than most of post-war Hollywood would admit. Drivers are dragged from their cars, pedestrians narrowly dodge deliberate ramming. Black-owned businesses get bricks through the window, white-owned cars are trashed, impromptu gangs clash half-armed in the streets. The sheriff's orders to get Claude out of town for his own protection just get him roughed up at a roadblock and Bill Gaines (Alfred Grant) is mobbed by roving white men while somberly searching a nearby creek for traces of his still-missing niece. The production idealizes a tad from the real-life tendencies of race riots when it figures the police under Ben's leadership as a struggling force for peace and order, but it maintains its cold eye for inequalities: a Black teenager with a battered arm is booked as a grown man while his white assailants who evaded arrest are excused as "just kids." When one of Packard's warehouses is torched, the wealthy contractor rabble-rouses the town's disordered flares of white violence into a unified mob, cocked and aimed for a Tulsa-style massacre. "This is my town," he barks at the dogged sheriff, the rule of law eroding before our eyes in the rifles that bristle around Ben, point him out of Packard's office like an overstayed errand boy. "I'd rather destroy it than let those dirty black devils take it over . . . I'm going to drive them out even if I have to kill every mother's son of them." Thus when we witness the Black men of the town gathering with small arms of their own, as much as we can't cheer the furious heartbreak of Carolyn's father, uncle, and grandfather that sanctions their mobilization, neither can we dismiss the self-defense of their militancy. "Now listen, men. There's hundreds of them up there. But this time we're not running. This time we'll be waiting for them. For every one of us, there's going to be two dead ofays. Two," Gaines repeats in his deep earth of a voice, "for one." They are facing an existential threat, not the racist fantasy of one. It should not escape the audience that even as he works frantically to deputize as many citizens of whatever color as can be trusted to carry riot guns, Ben isn't stressing about Black revolution, he's snapping at the Mayor (Tom Powers), "Just tell me how I can stop Packard and that wild mob with a handful of deputies!"
Notably, the film does not point the finger at the press for inflaming the situation. Reporters are conspicuously absent from the churn of half-truths and anxieties around the disappearance of Carolyn Crawford; it is taken as read that ordinary citizens can be trusted to work up the necessary head of steam to turn on their neighbors all on their own. Instead, parallel scenes of news mutating through Black and white chains of transmission demonstrate the involvement of the town as a whole in creating the conditions for the conflagration, neatly sidestepping in the process another popular failure mode of stories about racism, the deflection of blame onto individual bigots instead of the systems which enable them. Packard sets the match, but the powder is all the white men and women who accepted and amplified an assumption of Black violence. The misinformation that spreads through the Black community is more a kind of stopped clock in reverse, a misconstruing of the available details that might as easily have been the truth. It matches the characterization, which insofar as it exists is never clear-cut. We know for a fact that Claude Packard is innocent, but he makes a bad showing as a suspect, his horror at the crime of which he's accused and his fear of being railroaded for it coming out in blurts of unconvincing belligerence, too easily boxed into losing his cool with the ever more bare-knuckled interrogations of the police—if we'd come in five minutes late, we might not believe him, either. Mid-century Morgan could play heavies and oddballs, a loyally murderous factotum in The Big Clock (1948), a half-daft deaf-mute in Moonrise (1948), a sleazetastic picture snatcher in Scandal Sheet (1952); a wry-faced, nerve-racked, transient miner doesn't cut the most prepossessing figure no matter his connections. His realization that his uncle doesn't believe him and doesn't care is one of the script's casually dispensed gut-punches: "Oh, I see. It doesn't matter whether I'm innocent or not. It doesn't matter what happened to that kid. Just protect the name of Sam Packard from any disgrace, that's all that matters!" Then again, we are encouraged to admire Ben Kellogg for his low-key, rugged integrity, the unimpaired efficiency with which he organized a search for a missing child of any color and persisted in the face of privileged obstruction and marginalized non-cooperation and was ready to put himself on the front lines of a race war to keep half his town from tearing the other half apart, and he doesn't give Claude a second thought of doubt even when the man stands off his powerful uncle and then folds up like yesterday's news. Rough around the edges as it is, The Well is confident enough in its audience's grasp of nuance to let characters we like be wrong. We are not intended to mistake Ralph Crawford for a bad father just because he's reluctant to be called away from the garage for the latest apparent instance of his little dreamer playing hooky: "It was hard enough to get a good job in this town and I don't want to lose it." Neither he nor his brother-in-law is trying to knock Packard down in the parking lot outside City Hall, but the combination of their urgency for news of Carolyn and his distaste to get away from their dark, hurt, scandalous faces is not fatal, not even bruising, but in the incendiary atmosphere after the arrest, a disaster. Everything happens too messily and too fast for anyone to see the real shape of it, sharp as blood coming up under a slap. It is part of what sells the turn of the film which might otherwise slew out of pure wish-fulfillment with the news that Carolyn has been discovered in the dry well, still alive.
The idea of a racially torn community on the verge of irrevocable violence forgetting all their grievances in the collective rush to save the life of an innocent child is so facile and saccharine, The Well would drop dead at the forty-five-minute mark if that were actually what it was doing. Its rationale for the town's reunion is riskier, less feel-good, and dramatically and emotionally more compelling: all that adrenaline has to go somewhere. Everyone from the cops to the rioters to the mother waiting with friends in a frozen daze is strained to such a breaking point, the revelation of Carolyn's real fate crashes them into one another with the relief of a common enemy, a hard throw toward hope of the destructive energies that might allow them to share the streets in the morning, if they succeed. The stakes are high enough at the life of a five-year-old trapped sixty feet underground, the childish clew of her voice scratching up the static of the radio line like a little ghost already. As the film rejoins its divided populace in a massive set piece of night-lit engineering in which Black and white hands and faces are intermingled even more closely than in the original, informal daily life of the town, it strengthens the impression that if this interracial rescue effort fails, so too does any salvage of the community—figuratively or literally, the town will not survive if Carolyn is brought up dead. She was found by a classmate wandering the sunset field with his dog, not the police whose searches were interrupted and curtailed by the turmoil building in town. "Kid? What kid?" Packard asked blankly when brought the news, the catalyst for the day's racial strife having slipped his mind in the heat of organizing a good share of it. Perhaps some belated sense of contrition prompts his contribution of the industrial machinery needed to sink a parallel shaft and tunnel to the child in the time that the headlight-ringed crowd is praying for and not even a doctor can say if she's got left; a vivid sense of ill-treatment spurs a jail-sprung Claude to turn his back on the town and its dilemma, abandoning almost to the point of failure the little girl he bought flowers and escorted across the street as naturally as one of his own children. It is, of course, a charged moment when he comes up out of the shaft at last, a muddy, disheveled white man with a Black child's blanket-wrapped body in his arms, the image and obverse of all her parents' fears. The sheriff's announcement that "she's going to be all right" goes across the field like a shockwave, a detonation of shared rejoicing rather than bloodshed: not only does it reverse the Fiscus tragedy of which the extra-diegetic audience would have been well aware, it's eucatastrophe with the burnish of myth, Kalligeneia in northern California. The rescue of Carolyn Crawford won't fix the problem of race in America or even in her hometown, however it stands as proof of the teamwork of its Black and white citizens. Her parents hold tight to one another amidst the celebration, luminous with tears. Something precious has been brought out of the dark all the same.
Although it won neither, it's a point in the Academy's favor that this independent production was nominated for two Oscars, one for Best Story and Screenplay—it lost to An American in Paris, which especially since its competitors included Ace in the Hole and Go for Broke! is mind-croggling—and the other for Best Film Editing, which it would have deserved just for the rescue sequences in which Chester Schaeffer's cutting timed to the most discordant, clangorous variations on the movie's otherwise overworked theme by Dimitri Tiomkin makes a gripping short documentary of earth-moving, full of sliding pistons and welding sparks. The town itself was composited from location shooting in Marysville and Grass Valley and the use of local extras plus the clarity of the cinematography by Ernest Laszlo accentuates the effect of catching a breaking story, not a scripted one. It doesn't hurt the suspense that the latter stages of the rescue function as much like radio drama as film. All of that admitted, The Well is a really unvarnished picture and it does strike some false notes. Would any Black teens in the budding civil rights era really have debated the influence of "race prejudice" on the American legal system? It is not inherently stupid of the script to assign Ben a love interest in the form of pert diner proprietor Casey (Christine Larson), but it's embarrassing that it can't think of a way to communicate her anti-racism except by the comedy of over-peppering one bigot's combination salad and clouting another with a skillet when a mob comes for her short-order cook. The mix of professional and non-professional actors can be uneven; there are people in this film who can make two or three lines riveting and people who have trouble remembering their messenger speech. The two halves of the film hinge thematically together, but a montage does the heavy lifting of smoothing the seam. On the other hand, I love its threading of walk-ons through the sprawl of the narrative, like the unnamed student who recurs sometimes in the foreground of the audience's attention, sometimes part of the surrounding action, exactly as real people move through a world they share, and it knows when to isolate unexpected moments like the cat-eyed killer stare a young Black woman turns on the white truck that almost plowed her down. This movie is full of people who aren't protagonists and we're never in doubt that they're alive. It may be funny that Greene and Rouse are most famous for D.O.A. (1949) when, despite its oft-copied gimmick, it's the most conventional of their films of my experience to date. I got this one from YouTube and didn't foresee almost anything about it. It can't have done much business in the South. This harmony brought to you by my unique backers at Patreon.
Co-written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, co-produced by Greene and Leo C. Popkin, and co-directed by Popkin and Rouse, The Well may not be revolutionary cinema, but it's doing its best to be real. Because the audience knows from the start that five-year-old Carolyn Crawford (Gwendolyn Laster) was not kidnapped, molested, or murdered by the unknown white man who was seen buying her a bunch of violets and holding her hand—like the echo of Kathy Fiscus, she's at the bottom of an abandoned well in the field of wildflowers she was dawdling through on her way to school—the alacrity with which the underlying tensions of a bucolic everyburg flash over into rumor-milled vigilantism risks resembling an obvious parable of monsters on Maple Street, but the film is scrupulous in its illustration of the stages by which the racial amity of the town understandably and upsettingly breaks down. Affronted by the suggestion of calling in the state militia, one white member of the citizens' committee protests, "Negroes and whites have been living together in complete harmony for years!" That the sentiment is more than Caucasian back-patting is supported by the casual mingling of Black and white residents at school, on the job, even in the meeting in the mayor's office. Nevertheless and without pieties, the audience is tipped to sympathize with the Black perspective on the contingent nature of such harmony. To a man, the town's law enforcement is white. Why wouldn't Martha and Ralph Crawford (Maidie Norman and Ernest Anderson) worry that their dark-skinned darling won't be as much of an amber alert as an equally flower-loving little white girl, especially once the involvement of a white man hits the grapevine? Why wouldn't it sharpen rather than allay their fears when the man is identified as Claude Packard (Harry Morgan), the visiting nephew of local leading citizen Sam Packard (Barry Kelley)? White women cluck over the shock of a child-murdering maniac in their midst, but Black men are laying odds on his release within half an hour of his arrest. The communal suspicion that Packard will pull whatever strings it takes to keep his nephew out of jail is not ill-founded when we can watch the businessman throwing his weight around, threatening the sheriff's office with legal action and trying to browbeat his nephew into perjuring himself in the meantime. As Black mistrust and white defensiveness polarize around the Packards, despite the lawful scruples of Sheriff Ben Kellogg (Richard Rober) we are given ever less reason to doubt the claim that rises out of the choral voices of the town, "You can get away with murder as long as you're the right color." Just by not sugarcoating its history, the film can look horribly prescient. "This is a unique situation," a Black student (Elzie Emanuel) observes at a point in the day when he and his friends can still hang out at the library with white patrons coming and going in the stacks behind them. "A white man's accused of a crime against a Negro child. This time, the shoe's on the other foot." He doesn't need to elaborate on the hysteria of miscegenation contained in that other shoe. The town's white population has been on edge ever since the telephone of gossip transformed a desperate jostle during a confrontation with Packard into a savage beating of the helpless white man, but the actual trigger for fighting in the streets is a white woman's self-serving claim to have been "insulted" just so her boyfriend can prove his chivalrous bona fides by bashing the first Black man he and his four buddies catch sight of. The N-word flies thicker and faster in this picture than in any other non-news media I have encountered of its time, but it isn't for shock value. Before the town begins to boil, its white characters use the politer terms of the day, "Negro" or "colored." The emergence of the slur marks a decisive shift toward the kind of mass violence described by Dr. Billings (Bill Walker) with such devastating candor that it carries the day for calling the governor for help:
"Has any of you ever seen a race riot? I have. I saw a whole town go mad, a town very much like this. I saw my own father's body tied to a car and dragged through the streets and the driver of that car was a man my father had known for twenty years. I saw a white child beaten to death by my own people. She was just about the age of your daughter, Mr. Lobel. Oh, you can't believe it unless you've seen it with your own eyes . . . It's something you can never forget as long as you live."
It should not feel like such a coup for an all-white writer-director-producer team that even though The Well doesn't get very far inside its Black characters—it doesn't get that far inside its white characters, to be fair—it takes care to present them both as individuals and as a community, an interrelated ensemble rather than select dramatic exceptions. We can believe in their families, their neighborhoods, their work friendships. "Tell him what kind of a break we'd catch if it was one of us," one deliveryman calls sardonically to another as their white coworker starts to argue devil's advocate. Most valuably for its subject matter, it never flattens its Black characters into virtuous objects or condemns them as equal aggressors as the violence engulfing their town spirals to scarier, wilder levels than most of post-war Hollywood would admit. Drivers are dragged from their cars, pedestrians narrowly dodge deliberate ramming. Black-owned businesses get bricks through the window, white-owned cars are trashed, impromptu gangs clash half-armed in the streets. The sheriff's orders to get Claude out of town for his own protection just get him roughed up at a roadblock and Bill Gaines (Alfred Grant) is mobbed by roving white men while somberly searching a nearby creek for traces of his still-missing niece. The production idealizes a tad from the real-life tendencies of race riots when it figures the police under Ben's leadership as a struggling force for peace and order, but it maintains its cold eye for inequalities: a Black teenager with a battered arm is booked as a grown man while his white assailants who evaded arrest are excused as "just kids." When one of Packard's warehouses is torched, the wealthy contractor rabble-rouses the town's disordered flares of white violence into a unified mob, cocked and aimed for a Tulsa-style massacre. "This is my town," he barks at the dogged sheriff, the rule of law eroding before our eyes in the rifles that bristle around Ben, point him out of Packard's office like an overstayed errand boy. "I'd rather destroy it than let those dirty black devils take it over . . . I'm going to drive them out even if I have to kill every mother's son of them." Thus when we witness the Black men of the town gathering with small arms of their own, as much as we can't cheer the furious heartbreak of Carolyn's father, uncle, and grandfather that sanctions their mobilization, neither can we dismiss the self-defense of their militancy. "Now listen, men. There's hundreds of them up there. But this time we're not running. This time we'll be waiting for them. For every one of us, there's going to be two dead ofays. Two," Gaines repeats in his deep earth of a voice, "for one." They are facing an existential threat, not the racist fantasy of one. It should not escape the audience that even as he works frantically to deputize as many citizens of whatever color as can be trusted to carry riot guns, Ben isn't stressing about Black revolution, he's snapping at the Mayor (Tom Powers), "Just tell me how I can stop Packard and that wild mob with a handful of deputies!"
Notably, the film does not point the finger at the press for inflaming the situation. Reporters are conspicuously absent from the churn of half-truths and anxieties around the disappearance of Carolyn Crawford; it is taken as read that ordinary citizens can be trusted to work up the necessary head of steam to turn on their neighbors all on their own. Instead, parallel scenes of news mutating through Black and white chains of transmission demonstrate the involvement of the town as a whole in creating the conditions for the conflagration, neatly sidestepping in the process another popular failure mode of stories about racism, the deflection of blame onto individual bigots instead of the systems which enable them. Packard sets the match, but the powder is all the white men and women who accepted and amplified an assumption of Black violence. The misinformation that spreads through the Black community is more a kind of stopped clock in reverse, a misconstruing of the available details that might as easily have been the truth. It matches the characterization, which insofar as it exists is never clear-cut. We know for a fact that Claude Packard is innocent, but he makes a bad showing as a suspect, his horror at the crime of which he's accused and his fear of being railroaded for it coming out in blurts of unconvincing belligerence, too easily boxed into losing his cool with the ever more bare-knuckled interrogations of the police—if we'd come in five minutes late, we might not believe him, either. Mid-century Morgan could play heavies and oddballs, a loyally murderous factotum in The Big Clock (1948), a half-daft deaf-mute in Moonrise (1948), a sleazetastic picture snatcher in Scandal Sheet (1952); a wry-faced, nerve-racked, transient miner doesn't cut the most prepossessing figure no matter his connections. His realization that his uncle doesn't believe him and doesn't care is one of the script's casually dispensed gut-punches: "Oh, I see. It doesn't matter whether I'm innocent or not. It doesn't matter what happened to that kid. Just protect the name of Sam Packard from any disgrace, that's all that matters!" Then again, we are encouraged to admire Ben Kellogg for his low-key, rugged integrity, the unimpaired efficiency with which he organized a search for a missing child of any color and persisted in the face of privileged obstruction and marginalized non-cooperation and was ready to put himself on the front lines of a race war to keep half his town from tearing the other half apart, and he doesn't give Claude a second thought of doubt even when the man stands off his powerful uncle and then folds up like yesterday's news. Rough around the edges as it is, The Well is confident enough in its audience's grasp of nuance to let characters we like be wrong. We are not intended to mistake Ralph Crawford for a bad father just because he's reluctant to be called away from the garage for the latest apparent instance of his little dreamer playing hooky: "It was hard enough to get a good job in this town and I don't want to lose it." Neither he nor his brother-in-law is trying to knock Packard down in the parking lot outside City Hall, but the combination of their urgency for news of Carolyn and his distaste to get away from their dark, hurt, scandalous faces is not fatal, not even bruising, but in the incendiary atmosphere after the arrest, a disaster. Everything happens too messily and too fast for anyone to see the real shape of it, sharp as blood coming up under a slap. It is part of what sells the turn of the film which might otherwise slew out of pure wish-fulfillment with the news that Carolyn has been discovered in the dry well, still alive.
The idea of a racially torn community on the verge of irrevocable violence forgetting all their grievances in the collective rush to save the life of an innocent child is so facile and saccharine, The Well would drop dead at the forty-five-minute mark if that were actually what it was doing. Its rationale for the town's reunion is riskier, less feel-good, and dramatically and emotionally more compelling: all that adrenaline has to go somewhere. Everyone from the cops to the rioters to the mother waiting with friends in a frozen daze is strained to such a breaking point, the revelation of Carolyn's real fate crashes them into one another with the relief of a common enemy, a hard throw toward hope of the destructive energies that might allow them to share the streets in the morning, if they succeed. The stakes are high enough at the life of a five-year-old trapped sixty feet underground, the childish clew of her voice scratching up the static of the radio line like a little ghost already. As the film rejoins its divided populace in a massive set piece of night-lit engineering in which Black and white hands and faces are intermingled even more closely than in the original, informal daily life of the town, it strengthens the impression that if this interracial rescue effort fails, so too does any salvage of the community—figuratively or literally, the town will not survive if Carolyn is brought up dead. She was found by a classmate wandering the sunset field with his dog, not the police whose searches were interrupted and curtailed by the turmoil building in town. "Kid? What kid?" Packard asked blankly when brought the news, the catalyst for the day's racial strife having slipped his mind in the heat of organizing a good share of it. Perhaps some belated sense of contrition prompts his contribution of the industrial machinery needed to sink a parallel shaft and tunnel to the child in the time that the headlight-ringed crowd is praying for and not even a doctor can say if she's got left; a vivid sense of ill-treatment spurs a jail-sprung Claude to turn his back on the town and its dilemma, abandoning almost to the point of failure the little girl he bought flowers and escorted across the street as naturally as one of his own children. It is, of course, a charged moment when he comes up out of the shaft at last, a muddy, disheveled white man with a Black child's blanket-wrapped body in his arms, the image and obverse of all her parents' fears. The sheriff's announcement that "she's going to be all right" goes across the field like a shockwave, a detonation of shared rejoicing rather than bloodshed: not only does it reverse the Fiscus tragedy of which the extra-diegetic audience would have been well aware, it's eucatastrophe with the burnish of myth, Kalligeneia in northern California. The rescue of Carolyn Crawford won't fix the problem of race in America or even in her hometown, however it stands as proof of the teamwork of its Black and white citizens. Her parents hold tight to one another amidst the celebration, luminous with tears. Something precious has been brought out of the dark all the same.
Although it won neither, it's a point in the Academy's favor that this independent production was nominated for two Oscars, one for Best Story and Screenplay—it lost to An American in Paris, which especially since its competitors included Ace in the Hole and Go for Broke! is mind-croggling—and the other for Best Film Editing, which it would have deserved just for the rescue sequences in which Chester Schaeffer's cutting timed to the most discordant, clangorous variations on the movie's otherwise overworked theme by Dimitri Tiomkin makes a gripping short documentary of earth-moving, full of sliding pistons and welding sparks. The town itself was composited from location shooting in Marysville and Grass Valley and the use of local extras plus the clarity of the cinematography by Ernest Laszlo accentuates the effect of catching a breaking story, not a scripted one. It doesn't hurt the suspense that the latter stages of the rescue function as much like radio drama as film. All of that admitted, The Well is a really unvarnished picture and it does strike some false notes. Would any Black teens in the budding civil rights era really have debated the influence of "race prejudice" on the American legal system? It is not inherently stupid of the script to assign Ben a love interest in the form of pert diner proprietor Casey (Christine Larson), but it's embarrassing that it can't think of a way to communicate her anti-racism except by the comedy of over-peppering one bigot's combination salad and clouting another with a skillet when a mob comes for her short-order cook. The mix of professional and non-professional actors can be uneven; there are people in this film who can make two or three lines riveting and people who have trouble remembering their messenger speech. The two halves of the film hinge thematically together, but a montage does the heavy lifting of smoothing the seam. On the other hand, I love its threading of walk-ons through the sprawl of the narrative, like the unnamed student who recurs sometimes in the foreground of the audience's attention, sometimes part of the surrounding action, exactly as real people move through a world they share, and it knows when to isolate unexpected moments like the cat-eyed killer stare a young Black woman turns on the white truck that almost plowed her down. This movie is full of people who aren't protagonists and we're never in doubt that they're alive. It may be funny that Greene and Rouse are most famous for D.O.A. (1949) when, despite its oft-copied gimmick, it's the most conventional of their films of my experience to date. I got this one from YouTube and didn't foresee almost anything about it. It can't have done much business in the South. This harmony brought to you by my unique backers at Patreon.
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Literally I found it because it was in the filmographies of Richard Rober and Harry Morgan, both of whom I had recent occasion to look up, and I have positive feelings toward the filmmaking of Rouse and Greene! I hope it's received critical rediscovery and I just missed it, because I know cult movies with more reputation and this film really deserves one.
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Thank you. It definitely is not a no-spoons experience, but I am glad to have been able to see it, too.
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I can't believe it just hangs out on YouTube with no fanfare. It has almost no home media profile; I was able to find evidence of an out-of-print, so-so DVD. It's like a race film that has some white people in it.
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You're welcome! It is uneven, but I was saying to
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I will watch it; thank you.
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I was amazed by it! And not in the often ironically deployed way; I had not expected anything like it to exist. The other more racially confrontational dramas I have seen from this era of Hollywood either make the cushioning mistakes alluded to or their well-realized Black characters exist more in a vacuum of whiteness than within a context of their own. There may be other welcome exceptions out there, but The Well is the one I saw first and I want more people to know about it.
For the white writing/directing/producing team to make art about American racism without falling into the traps you mention, and to offer up a happy ending that doesn't let America off the hook or pretend to be a blueprint for the future--wow.
It isn't flawless, but its flaws are just almost none of things you brace yourself for when you hear "mid-century drama about race relations in America."
I will watch it; thank you.
You're welcome! I hope it rewards you as much as it did me.