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Intruder in the Dust [VHS]

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Based on a novel by William Faulkner, and filmed in 1949 in black and white, this is the story of an African American man wrongly accused of murder in a small Southern town. Actually filmed in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner's hometown, and using local residents as extras, there's a ring of authenticity about it.

There's tension throughout, from the very beginning when the dignified Lucas Beauchamp, played by Juano Hernandez is arrested for supposedly shooting a white man in the back. There's a huge crowd of white people lining the streets but there is absolute silence as the thud of Beauchamp's footsteps echo as he is led to the jail. A young white teenage boy, played by Claude Jamen, Jr., who had been befriended by the dignified Beauchamp several years before, convinces his uncle, played by David Brian, to help save Beauchamp from the inevitable lynching.

I thought the story was a good one as it kept me glued to the screen, not even walking away when my computer signaled that fresh e-mail had arrived. But yet, with the exception of Porter Hall who played the one-armed father of the murdered man and Elizabeth Patterson, cast as the feisty elderly lady who instigated the investigation and single handedly delayed the potential lynching, the performances of the leading characters seemed wooden. This is a basically a good film though and it deals with some important themes. Yes, it could have been done better, but I still think it's worthwhile seeing. And so I give it a warm recommendation.

It's almost impossible to think that this 1949 film was made by the same studio, MGM, that earlier in the decade had still been depicting small-town life in Andy Hardy terms. The studio asked Clarence Brown to make this adaptation of a William Faulkner novel, which was a terrific choice: Brown was himself a Southerner, and lavished careful attention to this adaptation (which many consider his best film), so that the film, shot in and around Faulkner's own hometown of Oxford, Mississippi (which any Faulknerian knows is the original for Faulkner's Jefferson, the seat of his mythical Yoknapatawpha County), has a wonderful authentic feel to it. The center of the film is an elderly African-American farmer, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez), who refuses to avert his eyes in the presence of or to defer to the town's white folk. When a white man who had become enraged by Lucas's manner earlier is found shot to death in the back with Lucas standing over him with a warm pistol, Lucas is not only arrested but put in danger of imminent lynching; a teenager (THE YEARLING's Claude Jarman, Jr.), who had previously been tormented by his offending Lucas by trying to pay him for hospitality, begs his lawyer uncle (David Brian) to take Lucas's case.

The cinematography is so sharp and imaginative that it's often genuinely astonishing. There are genuinely great sequences, including a traveling shot from Lucas's POV of the suspicious menacing white townsmen--their faces hardened into masks--as he is frogmarched to the county jail; a scene between Lucas and the teenager, Chick, through the diamond shaped grillholes of a jail cell; and a haunted moonlit forest as Chick, a friend, and an old townswoman (who all believe Lucas was set up) return to the dead man's burial site to dig up his corpse. Two of the performances are extraordinary: Hernandez as the unbending Lucas, and Porter Hall as the murdered man's one-armed father. These performances, like the cinematography, have an uncanny hyperrealism to them that almost overcome the burden of the horrible character of Chick's uncle (David Brian), who keeps mouthing stupid pieties and weighs down the whole picture.

(Please note that there are a couple of spoilers in this review)

This 1949 film doesn't look like, or sound like, anything that came out of Hollywood's major studios during the Forties. As a former film student, I'd say it's a sure bet that the director, Clarence Brown, his screenwriter, Ben Maddow, and his cinematographer, Robert Surtees, were influenced by the new Italian neo-realist genre that used naturalistic or location settings, documentary cinematographic techniques, and non-professional performers to create an intensely realistic film experience for the audience. In this respect, "Intruder in the Dust" packs a unique visual punch, because the drama doesn't feel forced; instead, it kind of rises out of the observation of the details of the place and the time in which the events of the plot were filmed. It is important to remember that lynchings of victims of all races -- though most were overwhelmingly African-American - still occurred in the South at the time this film was made.

Since "Intruder in the Dust" plays almost like a documentary, it's hard to single out most of the performances for any special praise, because the characters are not written in bold strokes or flourishes. The two that do stand out do so because they carry the greatest burden of advancing the film's action and exposition: the protagonist, Juano Hernandez, who plays the proud, self-reliant African-American farmer, Lucas Beauchamp, accused of murdering a white man, and Elizabeth Patterson, who plays an elderly spinster with a strong moral conscience and a formidable amount of courage in the face of pure, unadulterated race-hatred.

And yet, for most of the film's tightly constructed length, Lucas Beauchamp, the terrorized character who is ensnared in a life-threatening crisis, has a presence that comes off as more symbolic than dramatic. He's like a catalyst that sets off a series of events that provide the white characters with a platform, or soapbox, from which they pontificate eloquently about the weaknesses of human character, and the violence that lurks within men's souls. There's no doubt he's strong-willed, haughty, and perhaps even imperious in the way he quietly expresses his disdain for the white mob that can't wait to torture him and kill him. It's just that it seems that the only thing that serves to establish his purpose in the plot is his skin color mixed with a little attitude, which I feel limits one's ability to sympathize with him.

That is not to say, however, that Juano Hernandez' performance lacks affect. On the contrary, he picks the bones of the filmmakers' meager outline of his character and manages to wring some amount of dignity and personal power out of it. Interestingly enough, much of the impression he made on me was physical, which is a result of the clothes that he wears, such as that too-white-to-touch hat that he arranges so cockily on his head like a warning sign that clears the sidewalks when he strides into town, and the contrasting dark, maxi-length coat draping his large frame highlights his swaggering, insolent gait as coolly and iconically as the one Neo wears in "The Matrix" trilogy.

Still, without any revelation of what has made him so aloof , he comes dangerously close to being a one-dimensional figure, a cut-out character that one can only react to, negatively or positively, rather than empathize with.

For example, in the scarce scenes that take place within his house on his farm, we see what appears to be an elderly African-American woman who sits quietly in her rocking chair without speaking a word of dialogue. Later, after she dies, we find out that she was Lucas' wife...but how could we have known that? It's a surprise without a pay-off. Not only does she look like she's old enough to be his grandmother, but more importantly, nothing happens between her and Lucas; no conversation, no mutual expressions of caring or affection. It's as though the deprivation and racial terror that the blacks live under has pre-empted their right to possess deep feelings. It's possible that this portrayal of the absence of a vivid interior life for the black characters was an intentional device employed by the filmmakers to dramatize the spirit-withering effects of forced impoverishment and legalized inequality on their lives. However, for me at least, it only robs them of any personality. They are frozen in a timeless world of unending misery, wthout hope, without dreams of a better life. I don't believe blacks could have survived the horiffic forces of racist evil prevalent in those times in such a passive, fatalistic way. Hardship only destroys those who don't possess the will to live. Obviously, blacks had it in abundance, or they wouldn't be here.

To my mind, the only place in the film where any truly affecting emotion breaks through is when the father of the murdered white man reacts to the discovery of his son's dead body. The speechless grief, the wrenching ache of sudden loss radiating from his tired eyes and stoic face is powerful, genuinely heart-breaking, and jarringly unexpected in a film as rigorously unemotional as this one is. His deep and obviously unconditional love for his son is painfully and sympathetically projected into our hearts. It allow us to identify with him, to bond with him in his sorrow, regardless of his role in the film. Nothing even remotely like this is allowed in Lucas Beauchamp's world.

Nonetheless, somehow this film manages to make its point about the injustice of racism, although in a spare, subdued, unadorned way. Even more, it demonstrates convincingly the tragic consequences of racist violence on the lives of the perpetrators, which is saying a lot. Perhaps William Faulkner's novel has the depth, the texture, and the observation of detail that if it could have been incorporated into this film would have made it a more emotionally involving viewing experience.

...director Clarence Brown (reputed to be Greta Garbo's favorite director) shows his chops with this very interesting film about murder, lynching and racial hatred in a small southern town in what looks to be the 1930's (the film is made in 1950). The black and white documentary style appears to be influenced by Italian neo realism, which makes Brown's achievement notable for a director who started in silent films. The tempo is fast, the tension as nicely built as a Hitchcock suspense thriller, and the story by William Faulkner is absorbing. I was sucked right into the characters' placid, but dangerous world of racial separatism. Brown gets good performances from his experienced character actors, Elizabeth Patterson, Porter Hall, and Will Geer (before he was blacklisted). Although Claude Jarman Jr is pretty wide-eyed and non-plussed throughout the film, his character, a teen-aged boy, is charged with saving his black friend from a lynch mob, so I guess wide eyes are appropriate for that situation. Of course the acting award goes to Juano Hernandez as the proud and innocent man charged with shooting a white man in the back. Well worth the price of admission, the film holds up 60 years after it was made.

This was a very good classic movie about racism. I am too young to recognize any of the actors and I wonder if any of the Black actors really experienced racism while filming this movie. Example, did they have to go through the back doors of restaurants and hotels. Also, maybe did they have to drink out of the "white only" water fountains while filming. This movie had to be surreal to the Black actors in this movie because I am quite sure they experienced racism in their everyday real lives.

Everything in this movie is a metaphor to encase its statement in an entertaining venue. People are singing in the full sanctuary of St. Peter's Episcopal Church while Park's barber shop is selling baths, shaves and hair cuts two blocks away. And a crowd seen only on Saturday afternoon populates the town square of Jefferson. The Oxford town square was dead on Sunday's and the church was empty on Saturday's.

But this is not Oxford. While "Intruder" may not have been part of the trilogy about Yoknapatawpah, there is a "Jefferson" banner on the wall of Claude Jarman, Jr.'s character's room along with those of "Ole Miss" and other possibly fictional schools.

One must realize that Faulkner lived in the deep south and spoke out against the social system in the 1920's. Clarence Brown came to Faulkner's home town and made a movie with a powerful social statement in 1949. In both cases the statement had to be on two levels -- one a story that keeps the reader or viewer's attention, and the other a deep insight into how the human mind works.

The extras in the movie didn't worry about the social statement: they were just having fun. But today I cannot believe that the movie was even released, much less premiered in Oxford, given that the Civil War was only 85 years gone and reconstruction was still deeply engraved in the memory of many people.

Having said all that, I hope the reader of this review understands that I am recommending this movie for more than its entertainment value. I must recuse myself from judging the art and entertainment content because my father was the location consultant and one of the extras with a speaking part. Some of my 9-year-old friends were in it, I saw them film much of it, and I know where just about every scene was made.

I am probably better qualified to provide trivia than a review. You probably wouldn't have known that the ice is really parrafin or that the quicksand is really oatmeal. I wouldn't have noticed either, until my father told me. Yoknapatawpah may have had ice and quicksand, but I never saw either in the county where I lived (others may have roamed farther than I, or lived through a "great blizzard"). The flat tire on the Sheriff's car kept coming off the rim so they had to reshoot many times. Today they would have just added sparks where the rim hit the pavement.

Since I first wrote this review, I have discovered that the country store is now being preserved for posterity, and is not near theone I thought. My apologies to the people of College Hill. The country store I first mentioned is a famous restaurant today.

But whereas in 1949 I just saw a bunch of people milling around, today I see at one level my home town caught and preserved before all the buidings were rennovated. At another level I see the camera work -- the framing, the zooming, the closeups, the perspective, the black and white imagery. And I understand the story better, too.

Find this movie, see it with someone intelligent, and discuss it.

The movie "Intruder in the Dust" takes some liberties in changing the details, but the storyline remains consistent with the book. Faulkner (and the movie) included some over-the-top social-statement lines -- an unheard of thing for the times, but effective. Movie is very good on several levels.

I know this is a great movie. However, it would not play on my DVD player. Could it be a bootleg copy?

Enjoyed this film a lot. Excellent adaptation of the Faulkner story. Well acted, good character photography. Tape in good condition