The Reivers (1969) Director: Mark Rydell
“A gentleman can live through anything.”
Remaining mostly faithful to William Faulkner’s original Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, with a few minor alterations, The Reivers offers a charming, coming-of-age adventure of Lucius McCaslin (Mitch Vogel) who becomes swept up in a wild, rollicking weekend trip from Jefferson in rural Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. The story is narrated by the legendary Burgess Meredith as he reflects back upon a unique moment in his youth in 1912 wherein the wild family chauffeur Boon Hoggenbeck (Steve McQueen) hijacked the McCaslin family’s brand-new automobile, a yellow Winton Flyer. Winton was indeed an automobile company, but they apparently never made a 1905 “Winton Flyer” model.
At any rate, Lucius and Boon are unexpectedly joined on their trip by Lucius’s black second cousin Ned McCaslin (Rupert Crosse) and they visit a brothel in Memphis where Boon’s paramour, a prostitute with a heart of gold named Corrie (Sharon Farrell) resides. In these scenes, young Lucius is forced to rapidly mature as he learns more about the wider world outside his little town. Ned loses the Winton Flyer which leads to a hair-brained plot for a horse-race, a run-in with a local sheriff, an older black man named Uncle Possum, until the elderly, Mark Twain-esque Boss McCaslin (Will Geer), Lucius’s grandfather and family patriarch, surprisingly arrives and confronts them over this whole debacle. In the end, they all return to Jefferson and Lucius cries in his grandfather’s lap while learning about the meaning of gentlemanliness. Outside, Boon offers to set the record straight and come clean that the whole trip was his idea –he plans to marry Corrie and have a child named after Lucius.
John Williams offers a delightful, whimsical score for The Reivers, and it was this music that apparently inspired Steven Spielberg to secure John Williams for his forthcoming major movies. In my view, The Reivers is very much a Hollywood picture –a light and carefree romp through old Americana cliches of the innocence of the South. I decided to watch this film in conjunction with my endeavor to read all of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (The Reivers won Faulkner his second Pulitzer Prize in 1963, albeit posthumously), and while much of this film can rightly be considered little more than unchallenging fluff, Faulkner’s novel presents a surprisingly charming little misadventure.
Click here to return to my film reviews.
Click here to read my review of William Faulkner’s novel The Reivers.
- Director: Mark Rydell
- Written by: Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch
- Based on: The Reivers, a Reminiscence by William Faulkner
- Produced by: Irving Ravetch
- Starring:
- Steve McQueen…..Boon Hogganbeck
- Sharon Farrell…..Corrie
- Will Geer…..Boss McCaslin (Lucius’ grandfather)
- Michael Constantine…..Mr. Binford
- Rupert Crosse…..Ned McCaslin
- Mitch Vogel…..Lucius McCaslin
- Narrator: Burgess Meredith
- Cinematography: Richard Moore
- Edited by: Thomas Stanford
- Music by: John Williams
- Other Facts:
- The Reivers was nominated for two Academy Awards: Rupert Crosse as best supporting actor (the first black actor to be nominated in this category), and John Williams for the musical score.