The Spitter

The movie begins with the lynching of a Negro in Memphis. Joe Grant, the victim's brother, grimly decides to get out, and travels north to New Jersey, determined to pass as a white man. The scene changes to a Trenton lush with palm trees, Negro retainers and a hand-kissing aristocracy. Enter Joe. He latches onto a local blonde and takes her swimming, an activity they both enjoy stripped to the waist. Then he switches to a sausage maker's two daughters, seduces one in the bathroom, the other in the bedroom. Soon, Joe and one of the hot-dog girls are fleeing for Canada. Joe's guilty secret has been discovered, and the cops are closing in. A burst of machine-gun fire finishes Joe, his girl, their problems and the movie.

This gaudy story, filmed as J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I'll Spit on Your Graves), played at four Parisian theaters last week to enthusiastic reviews. But those who had read the novel from which the movie was made should have realized that it was a phony from the start. The Spitter was written 13 years ago by Boris Vian (a civil engineer by day, a jazz trumpeter in a Left Bank cave by night); its publishers claimed that it was a translation from a U.S. novel by one Vernon Sullivan. The public loved its fake sociology and integrated lust, but when police found a copy beside a murder victim and saw that the book was opened to the account of a similar crime, the Ministry of the Interior banned the book as objectionable "foreign" literature.

Undaunted, Author Vian, an early-flowering French beatnique with a strong commercial sense, went on to write hit songs, cabaret acts, serious plays. He even translated some books that were actually American: General Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story, The Three Faces of Eve, Young Man with a Horn, The Man with the Golden Arm. But Vian's greatest success was still The Spitter, and to ensure accuracy in the movie version, the producer sent Director Michel Gast to the U.S. to soak up atmosphere. The outlandish results seemed more than satisfactory to French critics. "Nothing shocks us in this reconstitution," reported Le Canard Enchainee "It is as if we were seeing an American film perfectly dubbed." Only the Paris Herald Tribune's Critic Thomas Quinn Curtiss spotted the movie as "absurd and scandalously inaccurate," labeled it a "silly, sour travesty of American life."

Where Author Vian's views might lie between these two extremes, no one will ever know. He attended a preview of The Spitter, took one look at his fantastic Trenton, and slumped in his seat. At 39, Boris Vian was dead of a heart attack.

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