Sounds like To Kill a Mockingbird before its time, but the characters surprised me: Juano Hernandez’ Beauchamp is remote and uncooperative. Intruder opens with Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) arrested for the murder of Vinson Gowrie - he was found standing over Gowrie’s body with a recently-fired pistol in his pocket-and the locals, egged on by Gowrie’s brother Crawford (Charles Kemper) feel it their civic duty to skip the formality of a trial, stalled only by the absence of Gowrie’s father (Porter Hall.)Įnter Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr) a spectator in the crowd who knows something of the aloof “uppity” Beauchamp, believes him innocent, and enlists his older-and-wiser attorney uncle (David Brian) to defend him in Court.
Intruder in the dust movie movie#
Directed by Clarence Brown.Īs much a mystery/suspense movie as a social-problem film, and excellent on both counts. Screenplay by Ben Maddow, from the novel by William Faulkner. Porter Hall, Charles Kemper, Will Geer, and Elizabeth Patterson. David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr, Juano Hernandez.
for everyone except old Nub Gowrie, who escorts one of his sons to jail for killing the other, while a proud black man saunters off down the crowded sidewalk.INTRUDER IN THE DUST. Having read several of William Faulkner’s novels, I know that you can’t depend on him for neat and tidy resolutions that warm the heart and soul. As I watched it, I had no clue how it was going to turn out, and tried to look past the forced dialogue and melodramatic scene-setting. Intruder in the Dust could have been a better movie if the acting wasn’t so plastic. And unlike poor Tom Robinson of To Kill A Mockingbird, Lucas Beauchamp gets away with his life. Having an elderly lady stand off the mob while knitting in a rocking chair. However, the story has no trite conclusions. In the film, we get some of the conventions of Southern storytelling: the despicable white family disdained by blacks and whites alike, the black man wrongly accused, the white youngster who values righteousness over custom, the lynch mob ready for blood. He stands on his own, even apart from the black community Chick even remarks that it’s like the other blacks don’t even see him. Well, Lucas Beauchamp is the opposite of those characters- he is no servant, no aider, nor abetter. William Faulkner regularly used the precarious nature of race in his plot twists: the weird black man in “Barn Burning” who warns the victims of Abner Snopes’ forthcoming actions, the stoic butler in “A Rose for Emily” who aids through his servitude in concealing a corpse upstairs, or the ever-faithful Clytie in Absalom, Absalom! who stands by her father until the last. At first all he wants to know is: why did you shoot him? But Lucas confides in Chick, and as the mob outside is ready to overtake the supposed villain, the teenager has to solve the mystery of who really shot Vincent Gowrie. However, this lawyer is no Atticus Finch: John Gavin Stevens, Chick’s uncle, originally takes a much more foreboding stance on Lucas’ guilt. By this stage in film history, we’ve seen the young white Southerner, baffled by a racist social order that makes no sense, carry us through a regional bildungsroman, and we’ve also seen the white lawyer who is willing to defy lynch-mob culture to defend an innocent (black) man.
Predating the Academy Award-winning adaption of To Kill A Mockingbird by thirteen years, this story has both conventional and unconventional elements. However, when Beauchamp is arrested for the murder of a white man, he needs the boy’s help. The man, Lucas Beauchamp, is proud and dignified and will not hear of his hospitality being reimbursed, not even through gifts. In the story, we meet a white teenage boy named Chick Mallison who has been trying to repay the kindness of a black man – a landowner, which is a rarity in his day – who took care of Chick when he fell in a cold creek.
The 1949 movie adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust offers a different kind of race-relations narrative.