L'intrus

I usually don't like movies based on famous and well-established authors, "sure bets". They seem to be telling the public "You can't POSSIBLY dislike this!!!" I tend to prefer movies that take chances with unknown authors or actors, movies that care for art, not money. But this one is so well-made. Everything works: the photography, the acting, the pacing, and it has that documentary beauty of real life that so few movies have (love those window shots where you see small town downtown traffic!). It's historic interest also makes it enjoyable. A kind of poetry pervades this movie that makes it far more effective than the similar "To Kill a Mockingbird". Hernandez is pure dignity - character and actor - and Jarman is a most refreshing contrast to today's smart-alecky youth. He has a humility that is touching. It is hard to imagine another actor in that role. Is this movie on the side of the angels? Sure. And the black and white poetry saves it.

Juano Hernandez plays Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer with a ten acre spread, who is facing a lynching at the hands of hundreds of poor and destitute looking whites who have come into the small Southern town by the busload, as he is locked away in the town's aging jail. His only hope is to prove his innocence of the crime of murdering one of the Gowrie boys, a family klan of five sons led by a father who lost an arm a long time ago as well as his wife. The back story of Lucas, the Gowries, and the assembling of whites who look more the part of poverty than any other film I've ever seen, give this film a heightened sense of realism, which is added to by super intelligent overall development. While there is a certain amount of overt racism in the film, the real story seems to lie in the faces of all the people the camera catches, whether they (the people) speak any lines or not. The crowd never really turns into the mob that you expect it to, which actually makes this movie more interesting and exciting. The film masterfully avoids that drama in order to get at the underlying decency of all the people. This is a must see for Will Geer fans, as he plays the skeptical sheriff who brings Beauchamp in near the film's beginning, with a crowd already gathering. Set amidst dirt roads, rundown farmhouses, with an intriguing batch of quicksand that is under a bridge, all of which now has probably been paved over, Intruder In The Dust is a real look at a life that doesn't exist anymore.

Chuck Mallison (Claude Jarmison Jr.) waits around in a crowd in the small Southern town where he lives as the sheriff brings in Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) for shooting VInson Gowrie in the back. Lucas, before entering the jail, yells out to Chuck and tells him to get his uncle, an attorney.

Chuck tells his uncle John Stevens (David Brian) that he is troubled by his confusion over his attitude towards Lucas. Lucas is not like the other black men in the town. He doesn't show deference or fear to the white men who live there. In Chuck's only encounter with Lucas, when Chuck fell into an iced up pond on Lucas' property, it wasn't that Lucas behaved wrongly towards him - in fact he was quite hospitable. It was the fact that Lucas treated Chuck as an equal who happened to be a guest in his home. This recognition of the roots of racism growing inside of him seems to be what bothers Chuck more than anything since Chuck is simply not accustomed to a black man who feels free to be unlikeable and haughty with white people.

Chuck goes with his uncle when he talks to his new client, Lucas, that night in the jail. But Lucas won't help himself that much when talking to his attorney past the point of saying that he did not kill Gowrie. Part of the reason for that is probably the fact that Lucas' lawyer thinks that the best Lucas can hope for is a fair trial followed by a hanging versus a hanging with no trial. Initially he won't entertain the idea that Lucas could be innocent. Slowly it is revealed - to Chuck, to his uncle, and to an older woman who is a client of Chuck's uncle (Elizabeth Patterson), that Lucas could not have committed this crime. But they need not only very hard evidence of Lucas' innocence, they need evidence of the guilt of whoever did commit the murder. The criminal justice system, at this point, is pretty much a rubber stamp for conviction when it comes to black men, especially black men accused of killing a white man. Lucas' advocates don't need a reasonable doubt, they need a shadow of a doubt. And there is the threat of lynching until this trio gets that shadow of a doubt.

This was an excellent very early film on racism and the criminal justice system in the south, beating out To Kill a Mockingbird by more than a decade. Juano Hernandez is the heart of this film as Lucas Beauchamp. He displays an enigmatic dignity - you never know where he is coming from with his lack of explanation of what happened until the end. I'd highly recommend this one.

As a fan of Wm. Faulkner since college, I was especially pleased to see Intruder In the Dust and for other reasons. My grandfather, also named Clarence Brown as was the director, grew up in the Oxford area having been born near there in 1888. We attended a week long family reunion at Oxford in July, 1964 a mere 15 years after filming the movie. It still looked mostly like it does in the film but was going thru a period of civil rights upheaval then as the site of Ole Miss. My recollection is of its being a nice little college town that summer but I was just an 18 year old college sophomore and white. I was just then beginning to see the injustice of segregation and prejudice but still had a long way to go. Anyhow, the movie is well worth watching but the filmmakers must have had to walk a tight rope to get it done there and I would love to know more about that story.

Now days, Oxford is a larger, more modern college town with all the ills that go along with such things and I hope to return again to see how it must have changed socially in the last 40 plus years. Juano Hernandez should certainly have been nominated for an Oscar that year but Hollywood was still to bigoted itself to let that happen. Other Faulkner stories have been filmed so look for them and compare. One of the best was a PBS treatment of The Barn Burner from about 1985 or so starring Tommy Lee Jones. It really captured the intensity of rural Southern whites that Faulkner wrote so incisively about so often.

A white man is killed in 1940s small town Mississippi. Proud black man Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernández) is arrested for the murder. He asks young Chick Mallison to get his uncle local lawyer John Gavin Stevens (David Brian) to defend him. Stevens would rather stay out of the case which everybody assumes Lucas' guilt. Lucas had helped Chick when he fell into a frozen creek and taught him about something. After a short interview, Stevens is certain of Lucas' guilt but Chick returns to hear him out. Lucas directs Chick to his own gun which is different from the murder weapon. Elderly Eunice Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson) just happens to be in Stevens' office as Chick tries to convince his uncle. Stevens is unconvinced. Chick, black servant boy Aleck and Eunice set out to prove Lucas' innocence.

Chick's relationship with Lucas is one of those big lessons like Scout in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. He doesn't know that he's learning even while he's learning it. I love the Habersham character. The story also gives a slice of small town Deep South pre-civil rights era. The racism turns a bit more towards a murder mystery later on.