#Intruder in the dust movie movie#

When Uncle John and Chick visit Lucas in his jail cell, the sheriff has taken away the mattress. Indeed, Lucas’s everyday attire is better than what a Gowrie could scrounge up for church: a morning coat, a spotless hat, a gold toothpick. Numerous times Brown’s camera catches the white characters as they watch Lucas and seethe over what that walk implies. It is the walk of a man who believes in his right to take up space.

Hernandez gives Lucas a distinctive walk: legs apart, arms hanging straight, with a pronounced sway from side to side. Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez, in a magnificent performance, shows with every gesture how that landowner status affects Lucas’s bearing and manners. He owns the land he farms, ten acres in the middle of a plantation, passed down through his family after a bequest by the original slaveowner. She can even watch a lynch mob’s leader soak the floor with gasoline and light a match, and call his bluff. The status means that she can get away with it. The lack of power helps give her the empathy that makes her want to help Chick and Aleck investigate the murder. Patterson’s Miss Habersham is a grand creation an elderly, childless woman, she has status in the community, but no power. When allowed to react naturally, he’s very effective. Alas, Brown mis-directed Emanuel to several eye-rolling, knock-kneed “comic” moments that were derided at the time in the African American press. Chick has a black counterpart in the smaller role of Aleck, played by Elzie Emanuel, who also has a gangly physique and transparent emotions. Chick’s encounters with Lucas give him a model of masculinity that is entirely unlike Chick’s own fussy, bourgeois father, who shrugs, “It’s happened before and it’s bound to happen to again” and is ready to leave it at that. Lucas once fished him out of a frozen creek, an act of decency that Chick tried to pay for this was an insult he eventually came to regret. As played by Jarman, whom Brown himself discovered in a Nashville classroom when casting The Yearling, Chick has an open, guileless face that suggests someone far more sensitive than an average son of white Southern privilege. 1949 theatrical poster (click to enlarge)Īnd Maddow recreates Faulkner’s characters in all their richness. Maddow retains Faulkner’s wry humor as well as some telling moments of physical business, like the sheriff cooking himself breakfast while he listens to evidence of Lucas’s innocence. Jettisoned are the things that would fail to transfer to film, such as Faulkner’s meditation on Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, now famous from Shelby Foote’s reading of it in Ken Burns’s The Civil War. The script observes the South’s intricate class divisions, making it clear that the town’s sheriff (Will Geer) is working to keep his prisoner safe not out of liberal nobility, but because he won’t let “a passel of Gowries” usurp his authority.

#Intruder in the dust movie movie#

“Why, Chick,” is his mother’s gasped rebuke when her son says of Lucas, “They’re gonna make a nigger out of him once in his life.” This is the rare studio movie that strives to avoid euphemism.īen Maddow’s screenplay follows the novel in nearly all the most important ways. Aside from being condemned in Gentlemen’s Agreement, the word had been unheard in a major Hollywood film since The Emperor Jones in 1934, according to scholar Thomas Doherty. But it was common enough in mid-century Mississippi, even if nice folks weren’t supposed to utter it. Witness the willingness to invoke that atomic bomb of a slur. Its location filming, its unvarnished textures and sounds still feel uncannily accurate. There were three other earnest Hollywood attempts at tackling Jim Crow America in 1949: Pinky, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries. Assisting Chick are the town’s oldest spinster, Miss Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson) his childhood friend, a black teenager named Aleck (Elzie Emanuel) and, with some reluctance, Chick’s Uncle John Stevens (top-billed David Brian), a lawyer who represents Lucas despite believing in his guilt. Charles “Chick” Mallison (played in the movie by The Yearling’s Claude Jarman) works to prove the innocence of Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez), a proud black landowner who’s accused of shooting a white man. But Intruder is a brief book by Faulkner’s standards, and it hangs on an unusual whodunit plot. Intruder in the Dust, published in 1948, has Faulkner’s trademark long sentences snaking across the page, as well as the digressions that often achieve the cadences of poetry.