"A Stranger in the Kingdom," director and screen writer Jay Craven's newest film, aired publicly for the first time last Saturday evening in Spaulding auditorium.
The film is based on Howard Frank Mosher's well-received novel about a small Vermont town struggling with its dark past.
Shot on location Vermont, perhaps the most memorable thing "A Stranger in the Kingdom" in the stunning autumnal landscape. The bittersweet fall-time atmosphere is also evoked by a beautiful musical track by the Horse Flies.
However, the film itself is a perfect example of the difficulties that often arise when translating a long written work into a hour and a half long film.
"We had to condense about 420 pages of writing into about an 80 page screenplay," Craven commented.
Indeed, the novel on which the film is based on is quite complex, and the shortcuts taken by Craven led to some confusion on the part of the audience, although the sound for the first half of the film was awry.
The story begins in 1952 in Kingdom, Vt., a small rural community bracing itself for the winter.
Ernie Hudsonplays a minister recently assigned to the Kingdom parish. Racial tensions begin to spark between the preacher and his rustic congregation.
To make matters worse, a free-minded young woman from Quebec (Carrie Snodgrass) wanders into the town in hopes of meeting an admired woman. Although the town folk dislike the French-Canadian girl, Hudson's character shelters her, causing more consternation.
Later, when the girl is murdered, Hudson's character, as the outsider, receives the blame and it is up to a young, idealistic defense attorney (David Lansbury) to prove he is innocent.
Of all the actors in "A Stranger in the Kingdom," Hudson gives the strongest performance. The viewer is told that he was an army chaplain before his assignment to rural Vermont. His cool stare and steady, rumbling voice make this tidbit of information very believable.
In spite of Hudson's performance and the beautifully shot pastoral scenes of the Green Mountains, the film often struggles for coherency. At first it seems that "A Stranger in the Kingdom" will be a sitcom-like story about race relations, but more than halfway through the film it turns into a courtroom drama.
Landsbury's character is at first seen running about with the racist town members and attending cockfight, but somehow at the end of the film he is transformed into Atticus Finch.
Although the lawyer character never took part in the base activities of the townsfolk in the novel, Craven explained that he threw these details in to show a Prince-Hal-like transformation in the character. As it was, the transition was far too abrupt and unaccounted for to be at all believable.
Although "A Stranger in the Kingdom" has many flaws, it is worth seeing in the spirit of autumn in New England. The film really takes off when Craven stops trying to fit a complicated, cumbersome plot into a 112 minutes of film and starts focusing on the Vermont landscape.
