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New William Faulkner screenplay discovered after 'hiding in plain sight' for nearly 80 years
A previously-unpublished, full-length screenplay by 20th-century novelist William Faulkner has been discovered, a murder story so complete experts say it could see him hit Hollywood again.
The Nobel laureate winner last co-wrote films in the 1940s, with his stories being turned into movies directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
But unlike To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, his latest production could be the first to be shot in colour.
Professor Carl Rollyson, author of a forthcoming Faulkner biography, spoke of his “utter excitement” in finding it. He told the Telegraph: “Nobody knows about it, no film scholar, no Faulkner person.”
Titled "Angel’s Flight" and dating from the 1940s, it is a thriller about a juror called Vera Morgan who, in believing that the wrong man has been convicted of murder, tries to exonerate him - only to be pursued by the real murderer.
Prof Rollyson can imagine Bacall as Vera but, if Angel’s Flight were to go into production today, he can see the Australian actress Cate Blanchett in the role, with British actor Ralph Fiennes as the murderer.
Faulkner, who died in 1962 aged just 64, was a novelist and short-story writer, whose masterpieces include The Sound and the Fury, a 1929 novel about a family’s decline and fall.
He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”. His movies were collaborations with other screenwriters.
Prof Rollyson believes that Faulkner hoped that Hawks would also direct "Angel’s Flight", judging from a letter that he wrote to his wife, Estelle. Referring to a script on which he was working with screenwriter Buzz Bezzerides, he said: “Faulkner mentions that the two of them had cooked up this story which they hope to sell to Hawks. I’ve matched up the dates. It couldn’t be anything else. It’s not clear why Hawks didn’t buy it.”
He said that the typed 94-page screenplay had been “hiding in plain sight” among other Faulkner material in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California.
Although catalogued correctly, it had been overlooked, partly because other biographers “simply didn’t look at Faulkner’s screen work with any seriousness at all”, he added. “They bought what Faulkner said in interviews, that he wasn’t good at it.”
Prof Rollyson, who has written biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer among more than 40 books, will include the discovery in his forthcoming biography, The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962, to be published by the University of Virginia Press in September.
In the screenplay, Faulkner wrote of Vera as the only juror who thinks the accused, Joe Trotter, is innocent of murder, even though he had been found drunk in a room next to a man bludgeoned to death and has no alibi.
Faulkner described Trotter as a “rugged, hard-looking young man,” but with “something introverted, vexed about him; the look of a man who is accustomed to abuse, has given up fighting it, but does not yield without an element of cynicism.”
Vera is driven to approaching the district attorney, who dismisses her, saying justice was done, and a church rector, who suggests she is only troubled by her conscience.
She begins to investigate the case herself and tracks down the true killer, who tries to throw her into traffic and kills the drunk who witnessed the murder.
Prof Rollyson said that the fact that it is a female protagonist is particularly interesting: “There’s so much written about all the male characters of Faulkner. People say he doesn’t understand women. Well, he does actually. This screenplay is a really good example.”