PROBLEMS OF FILMING ' NATIVE SON'

How do you make a movie out of ''Native Son''?

Richard Wright's book, which was published in 1940, is still assigned in hundreds of high school and college classes. It has now been made into a movie, which opens Wednesday in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The first commercially successful novel in which a black writer confronted white America with his anger, ''Native Son'' has long been considered of great sociologic as well as literary importance. But critics, both black and white, also acknowledge that from today's perspective the book has serious flaws.

Many scholars consider the book crude and melodramatic. ''It's awkward and ungainly and unpolished, but if you don't know 'Native Son' you can't understand Afro-American literature in this country,'' said Richard Yarborough, an associate professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles.

''I don't know much black discourse that goes on without reference to 'Native Son,' said Arnold Rampersad, a professor of English at Rutgers whose biography of Langston Hughes was recently nominated for an American Book Award. ''The depth of America's involvement in race and racism hadn't been addressed before from the viewpoint of the victim.''

Others contend that the novel by Mr. Wright, who died in 1960, is weakened because an accidental killing - as opposed to an action arising from character - sets the plot in motion.

Valerie Smith, an associate professor of literature at Princeton, and many other feminist critics feel that Wright denigrated black women. ''In everything Richard Wright wrote, he had a lot of problems dealing with black women,'' Professor Smith said. Dispute Over a Story Cut

Although Diane Silver, who spent nearly three years trying to produce a movie version of ''Native Son'' before she raised the necessary $2.4 million, brushes aside such criticism, she made significant changes in the story and fought bitterly with her director over one major cut.

''Native Son'' tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a 19-year-old black man who accidentally kills the daughter of his white employers, then deliberately bashes in the head of Bessie, the young black woman who loves him.

The film, which will be released by Cinecom, was written by Richard Wesley. It stars a previously unknown actor, Victor Love, as Bigger Thomas, Oprah Winfrey as his mother, Elizabeth McGovern as the rich young white woman he kills, Matt Dillon as her Communist boyfriend, Carroll Baker as her mother and Geraldine Page as her family's housekeeper.

The murder of Bessie is nowhere to be seen in the final cut of Miss Silver's film, and the character, played by Akosua Busia, has been almost completely trimmed out. Jerrold Freedman, who directed the movie, says that by deleting Bessie's murder, Miss Silver has tampered with Mr. Wright's intended statement.

''The scene is pivotal in the novel because it underscores the disintegration of Bigger Thomas, a victim of racism and segregation in Chicago of the 1930's who in turn becomes a victimizer,'' he said. 'Concerned With the Audience

Mr. Freedman suggested that the producer was ''concerned with the audience losing sympathy'' with Bigger Thomas and thus altered the movie to make it more commercial.

Miss Silver defended her changes. ''The angst that worked in the book was impossible to put on the screen,'' she said. ''The book and this movie are about Bigger's realization that the depths of his fear are a reflection of his humanity.''

Mr. Yarborough, who specializes in both black literature and the modern American novel, said: ''The book is morally complex. You can forgive Bigger for the accidental killing but not for the killing of Bessie. The movie keeps the moral very simple. Bigger is much more a sympathetic victim in the movie than he is in the book. Wright didn't want him to be sympathetic, so he made him very brutal. Wright didn't want tears. He felt that pity would be an evasion.''

Lindsay Law, the producer of the PBS series ''American Playhouse,'' which helped finance the movie along with Cinecon and the video distributor Vestron, stands with Ms. Silver.

''The book had more layers than you could explore in a two-hour film,'' Mr. Law said. ''Once the terrible accident has taken place, Bigger has this giddying sense of control over his life for the first time, and his freedom causes him to kill Bessie. Even when we were reading the screenplay, we asked ourselves many times, 'Why is an audience going to want to attempt to understand this man if he goes this step further?' '' Wright Portrayed Bigger

''Native Son'' was made into a movie once before. A French director, Pierre Chenal, shot the 1949 film in Chicago and Buenos Aires, with Richard Wright, then 40 years old, playing Bigger Thomas.

According to ''The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright,'' a biography by Michel Fabre, Wright had received Hollywood offers, including one from M-G-M, to make a film on the book, but the studios wanted to make the characters white.

During the casting of the 1949 version, according to Mr. Fabre, numerous actresses turned down the role of Mary because it required physical contact with a black man. The Chenal movie, criticized as amateurish and melodramatic, was cut by about half an hour by the New York Board of Censors and was banned in several states. In addition to showing black-white relationships, the film presented a Communist favorably. ''The ending was just as fuzzy as it is in this film,'' Mr. Yarborough said.

The book fared better in 1941 as a play produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles. Starring Canada Lee as Bigger, the play got excellent reviews and did good business.

In an essay published in 1971 in ''New Letters,'' Mr. Houseman related his exasperation because he felt the original script, by Paul Green, betrayed Mr. Wright's intentions by having Bigger become religious in the final scene. Without letting Mr. Green know what he was doing, according to the essay, Mr. Houseman, with the help of Mr. Wright, replaced Mr. Green's morality with the anger of Mr. Wright's original ending.