Don’t congratulate Hollywood too quickly — would this honest and accurate story of American racism have been filmed if the author of its source story weren’t William Faulkner?  Juano Hernandez is a propertied black man who won’t back down or apologize when he’s accused of murder … in a town where a lynching could still happen. Director Clarence Brown films on location, with a screenplay that stays clear of liberal sermonizing. Even the trailer is a shocker. David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Porter Hall and Elizabeth Patterson star.

Intruder in the Dust
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1949 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 87 min. / The Intruder / Street Date August 26, 2025 / Available at MovieZyng / 24.99
Starring: David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Juano Hernandez, Porter Hall, Elizabeth Patterson, Charles Kemper, Will Geer, David Clarke, Elzie Emanuelm Lela Bliss, Harry Hayden, Harry Antrim.
Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Randall Duell
Film Editor: Robert Kern
Music Composer: Adolph Deutsch
Screenplay Written by Ben Maddow from the novel by William Faulkner
Produced and Directed by Clarence Brown

The experts that write about the issue of race in American movies don’t mince words — the late 1940s movies that addressed anti-black predjudice weren’t as bold and courageous as they might have been. Produced and authored by white filmmakers, they were hampered by outright racism that discouraged the hiring of black actors. More often than not, movies meant to illumnate the black experience were actually about white people. A peculiar problem crops up when Hollywood made films about minorities: Elia Kazan’s Oscar winner  Gentleman’s Agreement takes for its focus some liberal white characters ‘discovering’ the problem of antisemitism.

Hollywood’s social problem movies of the 1930s deserved the praise they earned from the liberal press. Warner Bros. pictures 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). After World War II, things became much more complicated.

The immediate postwar years saw a new wave of crusading pictures on previously untouched subjects, starting with racial and ethnic prejudice. The liberal producers Dore Schary and Darryl Zanuck searched out liberal issue movies to challenge the status quo, and advertised them as bold and courageous tellers of The Truth. The compromises began with the fact that the box office still ran on white star-power. Fox’s  Pinky cast a white actor as a light-skinned black, as did the honest independent  Lost Boundaries. There were other limits, too. Schary’s  Crossfire was about the hate killing of a Jew; in the source story the victim had been a homosexual. Hollywood could admit that Jews and Blacks existed, but not gays.

Black spokespeople seldom praised Hollywood’s depictiions of ‘their’ issues, but one 1949 picture still surprises audiences. Produced and directed by Clarence Brown,  Intruder in the Dust was singled out as a shining exception. Its prominent black character is allowed to be independent and unapologetic in his dealing with whites. Such defiance was possible only because the story source was a 1948 novel by the respected William Faulkner.

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. Hollywood veteran Brown insisted that Intruder be filmed on location in Mississippi. Standing in for the book’s township of Jefferson is author Faulkner’s own hometown of Oxford.

The story closely follows that of Faulkner’s novel. White teenager 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. When Chick fell into an icy stream, Lucas offered him hospitality and a chance to dry his clothes, but refused Chick’s attempt to repay him. 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. Then Sheriff Hampton (Will Geer) arrests Lucas for the murder of Vinson Gowrie, of the bigoted, mean-spirited Gowrie clan. Lucas sends Chick for his uncle John Stevens (David Brian), a lawyer. But John presumes his client’s guilt, and is angered when Lucas refuses to fully cooperate with him.

Knowing that he needs special help, Lucas asks Chick to investigate further. Along with the family servant Aleck (Elzie Emanuel) and his neighbor lady Miss Eunice Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson), Chick travels in the dead of night onto Gowrie land to exhume Vinson’s body, to see what kind of bullet did him in. Chick succeeds in getting John, the Sheriff and even old Nub Gowrie, the father of the victim (Porter Hall  ←  ) in on the investigation. Meanwhile, Miss Eunice stands guard at the entrance to the jail, where a huge crowd has gathered to see what the angry Crawford Gowrie (Charles Kemper of  On Dangerous Ground) will do. A woman with a baby walks up to Crawford and asks “When you going to do something?” Crawford fills a jerry can with gasoline, in anticipation of burning Lucas to death.

Intruder in the Dust is in many ways a standard liberal film about racial prejudice. A black man’s life is at stake, and we spend most of our time following a trio of white crusaders. Chick rebels against the Jim Crow attitude he finds at home. His father expresses disgust at the presumed lynching that will occur, yet passively accepts the idea that Lucas will be burned alive. The proper thing for good white folk to do, seems to be to look the other way until it’s all over. Miss Eunice is an exemplar of simply standing up for what’s right, which in this case almost seems an accident. We could just as easily see the independent old lady standing firm against racial integration.

The imprisoned Lucas Beauchamp remains the film’s center of interest. Chick and his Uncle John learn to respect Lucas’s chosen form of dignity, which is easy to mistake for arrogance. The movie begins with the town emptied of blacks in anticipation of a vigilante reaction to the news of the murder. But we see Chick’s impressions of race friction through a pair of telling flashbacks. Lucas Beauchamp acts fairly but coldly to Chick. At the general store, Lucas ignores Vinson Gowrie’s taunts and refuses to defer to the Jim Crow rules. He enters by the front door and doesn’t say “Sir.”  Every time the whites expect him to be intimidated, Lucas takes his time.

Black audiences must have loved Lucas Beauchamp. Such quiet defiance had never been depicted in a Hollywood drama. William Faulkner rarely praised movies, but stepped up to express his admiration for the adapation of Intruder.

Screenwriter Ben Maddow had contributed his talent to liberal movies about  Spanish anti-Fascism and  labor struggles. He’s the screenwriter of the superb noir  The Asphalt Jungle but the blacklist robbed him of his credits for  The Wild One,  The Naked Jungle,  Johnny Guitar,  Men in War,  No Down Payment,  Murder by Contract and  God’s Little Acre. John Huston finally credited Maddow on 1960’s  The Unforgiven; the writer would express his jaded response to modern life in an experimental docudrama,  The Savage Eye.

A major William Faulkner tenet is that character is always formed by environment. A voiceover in the movie rushes through Lucas Beauchamp’s heritage, which is made more distinct in the Faulkner book, and in an earlier story in which the Beauchamp family appears. Lucas is a man of property with serious roots in the local history. He can make a claim to being ‘just as good’ as any of his neighbors: he is related by blood to an old white family of the district, and inherited his ten acres through this family connection.

Chick is making a concerted effort to understand Lucas’s obstinate attitude, and to reconcile it with his own father’s surrender to an unacceptable status quo. The liberal attorney Uncle John initially resents his client’s unyielding pride. Lucas is a fierce and stubborn individual who won’t play by white rules even when they’re offered in sympathy. He doesn’t give a damn about ‘representing his race’ one way or another. And why should he give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him beg or ask for favors, when he might at any moment be pulled from his cell and burned alive?

The film’s chilling ‘lynching day’ festivities is an apocalypse for basic human decency, one that predates the evil carnival in Billy Wilder’s  Ace in the Hole. People arrive in buses waiting for the fun to start; an old record of the song “Running Wild” plays over loudspeakers in the Jefferson Town Square. We wonder if the residents of Oxford that played extras for this scene realized that they were portraying social barbarians. Or were they proud to help make the movie, out of love for their local-boy-who-made-good William Faulkner?  ^*

Black author Ralph Ellison hailed Juano Hernandez’ portrait of Lucas Beauchamp in an essay book called  Shadow and Act. After looking at several recent race-themed movies (Pinky, Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave) Ellison declared Intruder in the Dust the only one that a Harlem audience could take seriously, the only one with a screen image with which black audiences could fully identify. Hernandez had a lot of stage experience, but prior to Intruder his film work had all been with the ‘race’ films of director Oscar Micheaux.

While watching Intruder in the Dust we kept waiting for Production Code or special interest compromises to surface, with scenes rewritten or re-shot to remove controversial statements, if not the author’s entire point. Warners’ Black Legion is about the Ku Klux Klan, yet has no references to that organization’s terror war on black Americans. The emotionally gripping  The Well has an admirable first hour, but then all but abandons its fiery theme of racial conflict. At the conclusion, the important black characters we most care about are mostly kept on the margins.

The bit of liberal preaching that remains in Intruder in the Dust never compromises the Lucas Beauchamp character. At the finale, Chick can see that the whole town is now in the position he was in — afraid to look Lucas in the eye because he has the upper hand and won’t let go. They tried to kill him unjustly, and there’s nothing the town can do to erase that guilt. Chick has saved the day, but he knows that his motives weren’t altogether noble, that his good efforts were partly to get Lucas to acknowledge their relative status as black and white. John is humbled as well. Because John had discounted the possibility that he was innocent, Lucas refuses to ‘go more than halfway’ and feign gratitude. John then speaks the now- cliché line that would soon become a mantra for guilty liberal storytelling:

Pauline Kael opined Intruder as Clarence Brown’s best movie. It’s a beautiful production, with vivid characterizations and authentic locations. Brown’s cameraman Robert Surtees shoots several scenes as indoor-outdoor setups, in particular dialogue scenes in John’s office showing the crowds in the street below. The acting is excellent throughout. Of the white actors David Brian seems the least like a local. But his tough-guy screen image prevents Uncle John from coming off as a liberal sage, here to enlighten us with social wisdom. Claude Jarman Jr. has little star appeal, which is an asset for a character not meant to be a natural do-gooder. As Faulkner would prefer, Chick is a product of his environment.

Often singled out for praise is Porter Hall as the one-armed Gowrie patriarch — he’s wholly convincing, as is Charles Kemper as his malevolent son. Neither try to embellish their characters with colorful aspecs. Kemper contributed consistently arresting performances to films for directors John Ford and Nicholas Ray, before his untimely death in an auto accident just a couple of years later.

←  Although her presence may seem a sentimental touch, Elizabeth Patterson’s Miss Eunice was part of Faulkner’s original book. From one angle the book does seem like a liberal confection: in the racist south, justice is won by a callow kid, an old lady and a cynical lawyer. The movie doesn’t play that simply — its portrait of Lucas Beauchamp is far too powerful.

We often see Intruder in the Dust compared to the 1962 Gregory Peck picture  To Kill a Mockingbird. Robert Mulligan’s picture is at heart a sentimental story about a white attorney dealing with several problems, only one of which is white racism. Brock Peters’ victimized black man isn’t as prominent a character. As the show is a period piece taking place in the 1930s, audiences could tell themselves, ‘things aren’t like that now.’

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Intruder in the Dust is a fine presentation. It looked good on DVD and the Blu-ray flatters Robert Surtees’ rural images even more. Clarence Brown’s formal compositions keep the film from taking on the docu-real look of Italian Neorealism. Because of its socially conscious attitude, the film is compared to the Italian movement just the same.

The DVD carried no extras, something that the WAC has corrected. A Fitzpatrick Traveltalks featurette is about Michigan, a northern state. The only connection we can with the feature is that the ‘vacation paradise’ we see is entirely white. The inane narration script makes a passing reference to the native American Indians that are no longer to be seen.

Also included is one of Tex Avery’s better MGM cartoons. The rascally Counterfeit Cat disguises himself as a dog to get closer to a bird he wants to eat. He effects his disguise by literally scalping a dog, taking the dog’s ears as well. Kiddie cartoon carnage!

And very surprising is the original MGM trailer, a hard-hitting item that doesn’t back away from its subject matter — it uses the ‘N’ word twice. On-screen text claims “No side-stepping, no double talk!”  The soundtrack shouts “You can’t film that novel … but we did!”

We’re told that Intruder in the Dust was not a moneymaker for MGM, as Louis B. Mayer had predicted. Is it wrong to presume that the film wasn’t given many exhibition playdates in the American South?  Notorious Tennessee censor Lloyd T. Binford likely answered back, “Film whatever you damn well want, but you won’t show it here!”

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Intruder in the Dust
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Travel Talk featurette Playlands of Michigan
Tex Avery cartoon Counterfeit Cat
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 8, 2025
(7418dust)

^*  As a nine-year old girl in Mountain View, California of 1933, my mother remembered when the entire town and all the towns around literally emptied out to go to San Jose to see the lynching of two suspected murderers of Brooke Hart. The incident formed the basis for two of Hollywood’s most powerful films about lynch terror, Fritz Lang’s  Fury and Cyril Endfield’s Try and Get Me!

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