When the whites expect him to react with fear, he takes his time. He doesn't say "Sir" and enters by the front door. When Lucas visits a general store, he refuses to defer to the Jim Crow rules and ignores Vinson Gowrie's taunts. But we see Chick's impressions of Lucas through a pair of telling flashbacks.
#Intruder in the dust movie movie#
The movie begins with the town emptied of blacks in anticipation of the white backlash to the news of the murder. Remarkably, the imprisoned Lucas Beauchamp remains the film's center of interest. Chick and his Uncle John learn to respect Lucas Beauchamp's chosen form of dignity, which is easy to mistake with arrogance. Miss Eunice is an exemplar of noble Southern values standing up for what's right, which in this case almost seems an accident - we could just as easily see her independent thinker standing firm against racial integration. His father expresses disgust at the presumed lynching that will occur yet passively accepts the fact that Lucas will be burned alive - the proper thing for good folk to do is look the other way until it's all over with. Chick rebels against the Jim Crow attitude he finds at home. A black man's life is at stake, but we spend most of our time following a trio of white crusaders as their innate sense of justice emerges. Intruder in the Dust is in many ways a standard liberal film about racial prejudice. A woman with a baby walks up to Crawford and asks 'when he's going to do something'. Crawford fills a jerry can with gasoline, in anticipation of burning Lucas to death. Meanwhile, Miss Eunice stands guard at the entrance to the jail, where a huge crowd watches the angry Crawford Gowrie (Charles Kemper of On Dangerous Ground). Chick succeeds in getting John, the Sheriff and even old Nub Gowrie, the father of the victim (Porter Hall) in on the investigation. Along with the family servant Aleck (Elzie Emanuel) and Miss Eunice Habersham, a neighbor lady (Elizabeth Patterson), Chick travels in the dead of night to Gowrie territory to exhume Vinson's body, to see what kind of bullet did him in. Lucas tells Chick to investigate further. But John presumes his client's guilt, and is angered when Lucas refuses to fully cooperate with him. Lucas sends Chick for his uncle John Stevens (David Brian), a lawyer. Then Sheriff Hampton (Will Geer) arrests Lucas for the murder of Vinson Gowrie, of the bigoted, mean-spirited Gowries. Angered that he should be so humiliated by a stubborn black man, Chick has been trying to pay Lucas back, only to have his gestures repeatedly rebuffed. When Chick fell into an icy stream, Lucas offered him hospitality and a chance to dry his clothes, and refused Chick's attempt to pay him.
Teenaged Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr., of Clarence Brown's The Yearling) holds a grudge against Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) a propertied black man getting on in years. The story closely follows that of Faulkner's 1948 novel.
Instead of simply showing the injustice of racism, Faulkner penetrated into the psychology of a particularized black man, whose main affront is that he refuses to play the "submissive negro" for his white neighbors. The show was filmed in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford Mississippi, standing in for the book's Jefferson. Clarence Brown produced and directed this fine film, adapted from a book by William Faulkner. Hollywood could admit that Jews existed, but not gays.īy far the most artistically successful immediate postwar look at racial tension is MGM's 1949 Intruder in the Dust. Schary's Crossfire was about the hate killing of a Jew in the source story the victim had been a homosexual. Fox's Pinky cast white actors as blacks, as did the boldly honest independent Lost Boundaries. The Box office still ran on white star-power. At about the same time that the armed forces were desegregated, liberal producers like Dore Schary and Darryl Zanuck were finding success fashioning outspoken, but compromised films. The immediate postwar years saw a new wave of crusading pictures that stepped boldly forward on previously untouched subjects - racial and ethnic prejudice. The "social problem" movies of the 1930s voiced strong liberal opinions on subjects like lynching ( They Won't Forget), prison corruption ( I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and bigoted secret societies ( Black Legion). Written by Ben Maddow from the novel by William Faulkner Starring David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Juano Hernandez, Porter Hall, Elizabeth Patterson, Charles Kemper, Will Geer.
#Intruder in the dust movie archive#
Street Date Febru/ available through the Warner Archive Collection / 19.95
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