The late novelist Harper Lee was press-shy almost her entire life, especially after “To Kill a Mockingbird” made her world famous. That was her way of avoiding answering one obvious question that weighs on the mind of cinephiles.
“Did you ever read ‘Intruder in the Dust?'”
On seeing the
Clarence Brown film adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel while researching the University of Tennessee alum Brown for a profile I was writing, I distinctly recall formulating how I’d ask Lee the question if I was to ever get the chance.
“How many times did you watch that movie?”
Faulkner beat Lee to the innocent Black man in jail in the Deep South story by a dozen years. Brown, one of MGM’s longest serving contract directors, the studio’s choice for Garbo movies and auteur of such studio system classics as “The Yearling,” “National Velvet” and “Flesh and the Devil,” got his film of that 1948 novel in front of audiences a year later — in 1949.
Another “coming of age” tale from the director of “The Human Comedy” and “The Yearling” or not, America wasn’t ready for “Intruder in the Dust” in the late ’40s.
Lee sentimentalized her coming of age narrative, that of a child’s view of an accused Black man defended by the ultimate “white savior,” Atticus Finch, a lionized version of her father. The adoring, tomboyish Scout was her alter ego in the narrative. The novel became one of the most beloved texts in American literature and the Civil Rights Era release of the Robert Mulligan/Gregory Peck film version was a watershed moment for shifting race relations in America.
Faulkner wasn’t sentimental. Most filmmakers who tackled his novels tended to give them florid, drawling Tennessee Williams touches. Brown made sure his coming-of-age movie didn’t lapse into sentiment or Deep South soliloquies, even as he was casting his “Yearling” star Claude Jarman Jr. as his sympathetic if skeptical protagonist, a witness and grudging “friend” to the “proud, stubborn and insufferable” antagonist, a Black man (Juano Hernandez) accused of murdering a belligerant, racist bully.
Brown & MGM made a Southern Gothic noir, a suspenseful thriller that didn’t blink at the big questions it was asking, a movie years ahead of its time. MGM, run by the ever-cautious, don’t-rock-the-cultural-boat Louis B. Mayer, was a most reluctant partner in this one.
“Mockingbird” may be an emotional Oscar winning classic, influencing generations. But “Intruder” is Clarence Brown’s masterpiece, flinty and blunt and cynical, and not shy about showing racists in their natural environment, trotting out their favorite slur as the ultimate evocation of white privilege.
In an unnamed town (Oxford, Mississippi) in a nameless Southern county in the fictive 1940s “present,” a local tough has been murdered. It’s the buzz of the barber shop, which bristles with racist fury wondering if the sheriff (Will Geer) has “got the n—er” who everybody knows pulled the trigger.
That barber shops empties out when the sheriff rolls up in his mud-covered, one-tire-flat sedan and Lucas Beauchamp (Hernandez) is led out in cuffs. The accused is stoic and inexpressive. But that one kid (Jarman) he fixates on in a crowd of angry white men gets his attention. He wants to see the Chick’s uncle.
That would be the boy’s Uncle John (Brian James), an arrogant, cynical lawyer who wants nothing to do with this case, and makes that plain over Sunday dinner with the family. That’s one reason Chick takes his sweet time passing on Beauchamp’s message. Another is to underscore a point about how even the justice and fair play white folks in town are in no hurry to “save” this Negro. The murder victim might have been a redneck bully. But he was white. Beauchamp’s fate is sealed.
Even lawyer Stevens is resigned to the lynching to come. “Won’t be their first,” he notes, firing up his pipe as if he has all the time in the world.
The boy has history with the Negro, an awkard encounter (seen in flashback) that was uneasy because the boy didn’t know what to make of a proud, self-assured man who treated him as what he was, a boy, and not the “white boy” who expected and received deference from the other Black people he’s met.
Something about that meeting and their “exchange” has Chick feeling indebted to Beauchamp, or at least determined to get a humble “thank you” from him. That’s why he takes Beauchamp’s next and most unbelievable request to heart. With the help of a household servant (Elzie Emmanuel) and a little old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) determined to ensure the sheriff does the right thing, Chick sets out for the fresh grave containing the victim, far outside of town.
Do-nothing lawyer be damned, they’re going to look for what caliber bullet killed Vinson Gowrie.
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