Native Son (2019) on Netflix
Bigger Thomas lives with his family in Chicago and interviews to become the live-in chauffeur for wealthy businessman Henry Dalton, while his girlfriend Bessie urges him to take the job.
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- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb5.7/103,141 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes60%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bigger Thomas, a young African-American man, lives with his family in Chicago. He gets the chance to apply for the live-in chauffeur's job with Henry Dalton, a wealthy businessman, and his family. His friend Gus would rather he join a robbery, but his girlfriend Bessie talks him into the interview. Dalton hires him, and Bigger meets Mrs. Dalton and Mary, the family's radical daughter. That evening Bigger drives Mary to a meeting of a political group her boyfriend, Jan Erlone, leads. Jan and Mary then take him to a club he knows, and the three become friends. While Bigger draws closer to Jan and Mary, he quarrels with Gus, who says he has surrendered to the white upper-class world he once mocked.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Native Son (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks made Henry Dalton a fan of old technology so the house would have the furnace used to disguise Mary's killing and no video cameras in the scene where Bigger kills Mary; the old tech also stands for systems and patterns that still hamper society.- Director Rashid Johnson cut Bigger raping Bessie, in part over sexual-assault issues of the 2010s, and let Bessie survive so Bigger could be both complicated and empathetic; a trial scene was also dropped to leave room for Bigger and Mary's social interactions.
- Suzan-Lori Parks moved Jan and Mary from the Communist Party to Occupy Wall Street because the Communist Party of the United States no longer had the stature it had in the past.
- Rashid Johnson had the Dalton family's home in the film filled with artwork by African-Americans, saying he often saw such art in the residences of white liberals.
