The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The 1952 film A Member of the Wedding was a closet drama. Only Ethel Waters gave it any life, and what she gave was hysteric and flat. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968) is a different kind of closet drama—a young girl’s view of a small town and its inhabitants. But it is not really the girl’s view that matters—it is the deaf mute, played in the film by Alan Arkin, who takes in the life of the town and suffers for what he sees and feels. Both films focus on a young adolescent girl afraid she is missing out on life. In A Member it is her brother’s wedding. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter it is simply life, the life everyone else is living, the life that her family’s shrinking circumstances threatens to deny her.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter strains for a kind of lyricism that it never quite achieves. The Member of the Wedding strains for a tragic awareness of life’s darkness. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores the trope of a small town’s hidden life.

The girl Mick, played in the film by Sondra Locke in her first major film appearance, lives in a family that is typical in some ways but not in others. Her father has suffered some sort of injury that at least temporarily leaves the family without income. Her mother is frustrated and anguished, not only over the lost income but also over her own life. She has a strained and histrionic appearance, and in a key scene she tells Mick that all her aspirations and ambitions will come to nothing, that she will find a man and marry him and that if she is lucky there may be love. In another scene the parents tell their daughter that she may have to start attending high school at night so that she can earn money for the family during the day working at a general store. This is Mick’s context throughout the film, and she strains against it constantly, despite her love for her parents and her brother.

Mick is the archetypal young girl waking up to life, full of hope, interests, ambitions, running up again the pessimism and obstacles of the adult world. She is awkward and gangly, a tomboy, alternatively loud and horsey, sensitive and yearning. She never quite fits in with other girls her age, and when she has a party to which she invites other friends her age, the outcome is a disaster. She is fascinated by Mozart, and her love of music suggests that McCullers, a musician of some accomplishment, invested herself in Mick’s character. Sondra Locke is not quite successful with this character. She seems too old for the part, and she overplays it. But the film as a whole is overplayed.

Analogues to this film’s portrayal of small-town life are numerous: Dylan Thomas’ voice play Under Milkwood (1953), Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio, Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel. Hidden secrets, grotesque characters, repressed sexuality, jealousy, envy, poverty, small aspirations and smaller abilities, these are the bywords of small-town American life.

The source of lyricism in the film is the deaf mute John Singer. Alan Arkin is wonderful in this role. He never speaks, but his expressive, interested, eager face displays his longing and his need for connection. He is an empath who absorbs and fully feels the emotions of the people around him, who suffers from his ultimate inability to help others, especially the people who matter most, such as Mick. At a crucial moment, her rejection of his attempts to communicate leads to the tragic conclusion of the film.

Singer befriends a retarded Greek young man, Spiros Antonapoulos, a drunk winningly played by a young Stacy Keach, an African American doctor disappointed in his daughter’s decision to settle for being a made rather than making something of herself, and Mick. The doctor, Doctor Copeland, is a complex and difficult man. He’s socially ambitious, devoted to his patients, a hater of whites, a man who yearns for material success and security for his daughter, who has married a man he feels is beneath her. She in turn hates him and recognizes his cowardice in crucial moments. He is also dying of lung cancer, a secret that only John Singer knows. Singer, the white deaf mute, is the one man who is able to break through Copeland’s intolerant, unwelcoming exterior.

Doctor Copeland is similar to Sergeant Waters of A Soldier’s Story. He’s trapped by race and racial categories, by his own inability to fit into any niche, by his own unhappiness within his own skin.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter gives some acknowledgement to the race problem of the mid-20^th century American South. But mostly it exploits the small Southern town as a setting for examining the mysteries of human character. We see through this film (and through the novel) that McCullers views the South as a place where the individual suffers in silence from community pressures, family traumas, and human failings. She is far more interested in the inner lives of her characters than their exterior lives and how geography and social pressures that derive from geography affect them.

John Singer is a kind of Christ character who takes on the suffering and sins of those around him and ultimately dies for them. He is an extreme example of isolation—his inability to communicate coupled with his need for connections with other human individuals makes him a pathetic and sad figure. He is a modern figure rather than a Southern figure. He reminds me of characters in Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, as well as in William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. It is the modern human condition this film and the novel on which it is based are most deeply interested in displaying.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as a title describes both Mick and John Singer. Mick is isolated from the world by her awkwardness, her ambitions to be significant, and her family situation. John Singer (who sings through his face and his behavior towards others rather than with his voice) is isolated by whatever sad medical or biological misfortune left him disabled. Life is full of unkindness beyond the reach or correction of human effort. This is the sad message of the film and the novel.