In the late studio era, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was not the corporation from which you expected small-scale, serious movies that dealt realistically with explosive social themes. MGM? That meant high glamour, high thrills, high-cost lavish productions, and, most especially, in the post–World War II period, high-spirited, star-laden musicals. MGM was the studio of Gable, of Garbo (until she walked away), and of Judy Garland (until she collapsed as a result of their overworking her). It was the studio where Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy had warbled at each other, where Mickey Rooney had suffered through years of adolescent traumas as Andy Hardy, where stars such as Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer had endured a succession of elegantly gowned marital crises. Social problems? At MGM, this country had no social problems. If you thought America had social problems, you could haul your disloyal ass over to Warner Brothers. At the studio run by Louis B. Mayer, we loved America and our mothers. And the studio commissary proved it by having chicken soup, prepared from Mr. Mayer’s own mother’s recipe, on the menu every day.
And yet, and yet. MGM was a big operation, and sometimes a surprising little film could slip through the cracks, particularly if the higher-ups owed somebody a favor. And the higher-ups may have felt, understandably, that the director Clarence Brown was someone to whom MGM owed more than a few favors. He had been working for the company nearly from its inception, and had been one of those who helped shape its style. He had ranked among the select few directors favored by Garbo, with whom he worked on seven pictures, and had shown the range of female temperaments he could handle skillfully by directing Joan Crawford—a personality very unlike Garbo—in no fewer than six. In addition, he had shown a sensitivity in dealing with kids, having directed two notable pictures with Mickey Rooney (Ah, Wilderness!, 1935; The Human Comedy, 1943) and the highly popular The Yearling (1946). His sensibility might have been less than inspired, but his workmanship was always dependable; he had turned out movies in a great variety of genres. And after a quarter-century of reliable product, he was edging toward retirement age. Yes, if MGM owed anybody, it owed Clarence Brown. And 1949 would be the studio’s silver anniversary. Was there anything special he wanted to do?
Indeed there was. In 1948, William Faulkner had just taken the step, unusual for a Southern writer, of publishing a novel in which the central figure was a sympathetic but hard-mouthed Black man falsely accused of murder. Clarence Brown had been raised and educated in Tennessee. A proud graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (where a theater today still bears his name), he had studied engineering and run a car dealership in Alabama before his fascination with machinery shifted from automobiles to movie cameras, prompting his migration northward and then westward. He knew and loved the South, and he knew it well enough to love it without any false sentiment or illusion. He wanted to film Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. And MGM bought it for him, and let him do it his way.
Remarkable as this was for MGM, it was still more remarkable for 1948, when racism was not yet a concept commonly discussed on America’s movie screens. Black people who appeared in American movies fell into two categories: the subservient and the flamboyant. The subservient were sometimes presented as serious people simply doing their jobs, usually with affectionate loyalty to their employers, but far more often as wise fools with eccentric voices and clownish names like Stepin Fetchit or Molasses and January.
The flamboyant, who most often appeared in musicals, were allowed one number, or at most, two, to liven up the proceedings with their beauty, like Lena Horne, or their brilliant dancing, like Bill Robinson or the Nicholas Brothers. And if the plot called for them to engage in dialogue, they too were most often presented as exaggerated stereotypes. Often they went uncredited in the opening titles; far too often, their numbers were placed so as to be easily snipped out for the convenience of Southern theater chains that didn’t wish to provoke the local population by showing too many examples of what they termed “uppity” African-Americans, a species that Hollywood seemed to them to breed. When a dramatic story centered on light-skinned mixed-race characters, usually female, attempting to “pass,” these roles were generally given to white performers, which is how Jeanne Crain became Ethel Waters’ granddaughter in Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949).
Scenes that showed Blacks and whites mingling socially were particularly frowned upon, as they meant the film would lose the lucrative Southern market: The importers of the British supernatural omnibus film Dead of Night (1945) shredded parts of its best story to avoid showing Elisabeth Welch conversing as an equal with Michael Redgrave, and MGM executives went into a fury when they found that Vincente Minnelli had shot Lena Horne’s “Love” number in the revue Ziegfeld Follies (1946), set in a Caribbean dive supposedly frequented by pirates, with an interracial crowd of extras. The Caribbean gave the studio even worse headaches two years later, when Gene Kelly insisted on dancing with the Nicholas Brothers in Minnelli’s The Pirate (1948). The lack of Southern revenues may have been one reason for the picture’s poor financial showing.
And yet, somehow, in the midst of this contentious time, MGM let Clarence Brown produce and direct Intruder in the Dust. In 1949, every new picture MGM released began with a title card, fancily calligraphed to look like a wedding invitation, announcing it as “A Metro-Goldwin-Mayer Silver Anniversary Production.” We can safely assume that no other Hollywood studio has ever given itself such an anniversary present. The gift card is followed by the more familiar MGM logo of Leo the Lion, roaring in a circular frame lettered “ARS GRATIA ARTIS”—Latin for “Art for Art’s Sake.” The slogan had been suggested, half in jest, by the Broadway lyricist Howard Dietz, an MGM vice president who served as head of the studio’s New York publicity office; on few MGM movies has it seemed so apt.
Art for art’s sake, however, is about the last thing we get from Intruder in the Dust, though Brown starts the picture with falsely bucolic images: First greenery and then, as a church bell peals, shots of a pretty, Our Town–like small town, with parishioners strolling toward a church; we get to see the bell clanging in its steeple, too. And then the camera pans away from the churchgoers, along the empty street, to the barbershop, in front of which a man is sitting in the shoeshine chair, asking impatiently where the “shine boy” is, and remarking that he hasn’t seen any other person of color (he uses the opprobrious term “darky”) in town either. “Ain’t you heard?” asks one of the hangers-on. A man is dead, he explains, shot in the back by a—and we hear, for the first of what will be many times in this film, the forbidden N-word, which rolls off the characters’ tongues as casually on the soundtrack as it would have done back then in a Southern town’s real life.
We are already far from normal silver-anniversary territory, and we’re going to move even farther beyond it. An old car with one flat tire comes rumbling along the empty street as the hangers-on line up to watch, and out of it gets the local sheriff (Will Geer), followed, after a moment of obstinacy, by his prisoner, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez), a tall, somber-looking Black man. As he gets out of the car, his hat falls off his head, and he stubbornly puts it back on. “Knock it off again, sheriff,” shouts someone in the crowd, and other jokes about what they see in store for Lucas Beauchamp follow. The camera moves alongside him as he walks slowly down this long gauntlet of staring white men; it lingers on their hard-set, expressionless faces. Lucas speaks to only one person in the crowd, a teenager whom we will later learn is named Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.). “You, young man,” he says, “tell your uncle I wants to see him.” A voice in the crowd helpfully explains to the uninformed that Chick’s uncle is “Lawyer Stevens,” to which another chimes in, “Lawyer? He ain’t even gonna need an undertaker.” The sheriff tries one last time to shoo the staring white men away as he leads Lucas into the jail.
There is more, much more, to come, but we can stop here rather than spoiling the entire film with a shot-by-shot description. (I have in fact left out one significant cut rather than dampen its startling effect.) Aside from the tautness of this opening sequence, its swiftness, its grip, and its unitalicized truth, it carries the double shock of its time and its provenance. This is 1949; the Production Code’s censorship is still in effect. Movies do not use these words or mention these matters. And this is MGM, the most cautious and slowest to change of Hollywood studios. A playwright friend to whom I recommended the film supplied me with what I think will be many people’s first reaction: “How the f–k did they get away with that?” One may want to ask that question at many points in this amazing film. And one may go on to cry bitterly at the unjust truth that it is still relevant—hideously, painfully relevant—seven decades later. It makes no sense for our nation to be learning only now that Black Lives Matter. But there is the movie, with its copyright date, and here we are, 71 years after.
Brown’s cast boasts some familiar names, but no stars. Whether this was his choice or a matter of MGM riding herd on his budget, it works to the picture’s advantage. We feel like we know these people and have seen them before, but we don’t view them as resonating for us with the instantly recognizable magnetism of the stars who were MGM’s proudest boast, the Gables and Garbos, Powells and Loys of the studio’s great past. Such magnetism would be out of place here; this is not the story of a great crusader striding on till Justice triumphs. Instead, it tells of ordinary, limited, even hidebound people, a few trying to do the right thing, and others determined to keep on doing what they refuse to concede is wrong. The reduction of even the most sympathetic white figures to this ordinary level clears the way for the one extraordinary performance, which comes from Hernandez.
And it, too, is not a flamboyant performance. Nor is it subservient. It is that rarity among African-American film performances of this segregated era, a complete rendering of a distinct individual, with no apology and no comment. Lucas, too, is a hidebound, limited individual, infuriatingly obstinate on matters of principle, and close-mouthed, even with death staring him in the face, to a degree that nearly drives his lawyer (David Brian) to cry out in frustration.
Hernandez never underlines and he never italicizes; he simply lives the role. It is not the kind of make-nice performance that wins awards; unlike Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind 10 years earlier, he got no Oscar nomination for it. He did dominate the reviews, which were largely favorable, including one from William Faulkner, who told an interviewer that he rarely went to the movies but allowed that he had sat through this one and liked it, adding that he thought Hernandez was “a fine man, and a fine actor too.” (Not irrelevantly, the next year Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature.)
Hernandez dominates the reviews justifiably, because he dominates the film. The words Lucas says are few and carefully chosen, but his silent presence—the mouth a tight line, the eyes full of meaning—is strong enough to carry the movie by itself. Brown had begun his career in silent film, starting in 1913 as an assistant to the French-born director Maurice Tourneur, and here he makes great use of silences. Some are punctuated by sounds—the creaking of an iron bedstead in a jail cell, the calls of owls and crickets in a woodland. Others are simply moments of silent communion: two characters, or three, staring at each other from opposite sides of a jail cell, a desk, or a shotgun. All of these scenes have an unnerving, film-noir beauty. When Hernandez is in them, they have more: something that might be called moral stature augments him. (Quick, name 10 MGM movies of the ’30s and ’40s to be celebrated for their moral dimension. Good luck.)
Hernandez had an exceptional history which partially accounts for his exceptional presence. The San Juan–born son of a Puerto Rican father and a Black Brazilian mother, he had been a boxer and a circus acrobat before working his way into more conventional show-business areas. He had appeared in several Broadway shows, including the stage adaptation of Lillian Smith’s anti-racist novel, Strange Fruit, directed by José Ferrer. His film work, prior to Intruder in the Dust, had largely been in the “race films” of Oscar Micheaux, who pioneered the making of films with Black casts intended for a Black audience, mostly on threadbare budgets.
Hernandez carries all this experience, as he carries the gravity of Lucas’ situation, lightly, with no showiness or excess. Undoubtedly Brown, by then a master at letting an actor’s presence serve the role, saw how fully Hernandez could radiate what was needed simply by being there, and simply let him be. The screenwriter, Ben Maddow, follows Faulkner in stressing Lucas’ dignity and containment: this is the story of a proud man whose pride makes him resist display. Hernandez handles this, too, without any inflation or ponderousness. It is hard to think of another actor, of any race, who could resist so many of a role’s unwise temptations with such ease—or of another director who would let him do so, and would himself resist falling into factitious temptations. One reason Intruder in the Dust is not so well known as it might be is that it is not a feel-good picture. If you want to feel relieved at the end, you can, but nobody involved has pushed you toward that feeling, least of all Hernandez and Brown.
There is a small moral at the end, pointed in a speech by Lawyer Stevens—a character whom we have already learned asserts too much and is prone to use too many words. But even this has been carefully crafted by Maddow to unsettle us. It is not an easy moral, and it holds out its faint glimmer of hope for the future without ever painting the world in facile shades of dark and bright. The last we see of Lucas—a tall, straight-backed figure, striding silently along the open space of the town’s one street on a sunny, busy market day—is a man we will never wholly know, and the onus of how to deal with the wrongs visited on such a man is left for us to bear. For once, a Hollywood film provides no easy answers.
The racist bigotry that brings Lucas Beauchamp nearly to the point of death is not the story of Intruder in the Dust but its setting and atmosphere. Buried within its riveting context, what we find resembles other stories of the film noir era: a murder mystery in which an innocent man is falsely accused and to save his life, the real killer must be hunted down. The changes the film works on this simple matrix as the story evolves are many and startling. They include non-racial matters associated with the Faulknerian Deep South, and they too are presented in a quiet, unflinching way that suggests Brown must have caught the Production Code office in a decidedly liberal mood. (The scene where the corpse is discovered makes clear that Lucas’ unyielding personality isn’t the only element in the film that steps beyond the conventional rules.)
Readers alert to the politics of the era may have already noted that both actor Will Geer, who plays the beleaguered but stubbornly principled sheriff, and screenwriter Ben Maddow were subsequently blacklisted, after declining to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This does not seem to have been a matter of a left-friendly atmosphere, as with some other films made before the blacklist era. The plainer truth is that people on the left in Hollywood, both those who were Communist Party members and those who weren’t, were the only ones interested in conveying American social reality on film. (And remember that the CPUSA was a legally recognized political party like any other, until 1949, when its leaders were prosecuted under the Smith Act, which the Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional.) Both Maddow and Geer went on to long and distinguished careers: Maddow earned an Oscar nomination for his next screenplay, for John Huston’s exciting The Asphalt Jungle (1950); he spent his years as a blacklistee writing in the “stable” of Philip Yordan, who fronted for several blacklisted writers, taking the screen credit and the larger portion of the fee for himself. Geer acted on the stage (notably as the heroine’s father in the Broadway musical 110 in the Shade), planted a Shakespeare garden, and, when the blacklist ended, found his way back to film and television, winning new fame as the grandfather on the TV series The Waltons.
Their presence does not make Intruder in the Dust a by-the-book leftist film; quite the contrary. Both Brown and Maddow have clearly taken pains to avoid messaging, a fact particularly evident in the dialogue for Chick (which includes some voice-over narration of past incidents) and for his uncle. Chick is not a superhero fighting crime but a confused, sullen, sensitive teenage boy, trying to figure out an adult world that does not make complete sense to him. Jarman, who had previously won acclaim under Brown’s direction as the central figure of The Yearling, handles his questioning role with a remarkable nuanced grace: Listening to the delicate shifts in his tone as he greets his mother, father, and uncle at the dinner table always makes me catch my breath. Again, no signaling, no underscoring; it all just happens.
Brian, whose role is far talkier and more complex, tackles it with every bit as much aplomb. John Gavin Stevens is a white Southerner of his time, with the same prejudices as his coevals, only hedged about by a few principles from his legal education, and Maddow has not shrunk from letting him speak what he thinks. He too is no superhero, and Robert Surtees’ camera shows us clearly that there is no mythologizing of him in his nephew’s eyes, and no fantasies of a white knight riding to the rescue in Lucas’. Crisp and articulate, Brian, who began his career as a song-and-dance man, nails every discomfiting point. He received a Golden Globe nomination, but this too is one of those performances too troubling in its honesty to win awards. (In what must have been a spirit of bleak irony, the Golden Globes also gave the 53-year-old Hernandez a nomination, as “Most Promising Newcomer.”)
If the movie has any actual heroes, it’s a pair of minor characters, one tragic and one faintly comic, both given arresting performances by a pair of familiar names. The faintly comic one is Elizabeth Patterson as Miss Eunice Habersham, a respected local spinster who comes to see Gavin Stevens about an entirely different case and finds herself in the middle of this one. She, and not any of the male figures, is the galvanizing force that drives Chick to the sleuthing that ultimately leads to the murder case’s solution. And before that solution is fully discovered and resolved, she finds herself in a standoff (though in her case a sitting-down standoff) with a lynch mob planning to torch the jail and drag Lucas out of it. Even lynch mobs in this old-time South, it seems, have second thoughts about setting elderly white ladies of their own community on fire—though at one point they come terrifyingly close. Patterson, who was 75 at the time (the character tells the mob she is approaching 80), had played an enormous number of small roles on stage and screen, including a stint with the Washington Square Players in a bill of O’Neill one-acts. She was from Savannah, Ga., and a Confederate veteran’s daughter, so, like Brown, she knew what she was dealing with. And, like her colleagues under Brown’s direction, she does no underlining. Undoubtedly among her many previous roles there had been some in which she exaggerated a feisty-grandma stock type, probably because she had been asked to do so, by a director lacking Brown’s discretion. Here her fuss-free performance is a marvel; she imposes on you not as a conventional type but as a person carrying out an intention, unperturbed.
Even more startling is the very brief role of Nub Gowrie, the murdered man’s father. The Gowries are among the town’s bad apples, and Nub, of whom Brown shows us very little, lays no claim to being a shining soul. But he wants a just vengeance, not an assault on a man who did not kill his son, and this faint scruple drives the small key role he plays in the film’s final third. For film buffs, the actor’s name on the cast list supplies yet another of the film’s shocks, for the actor incarnating this brief role, virtually unrecognizable, is Porter Hall, who spent most of his life in sound film playing bureaucrats—stuffy, pompous, dithering, or irritable as needed. (I always think of him as the tetchy J.P. who marries Betty Hutton to Eddie Bracken in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.) Nothing in the crabbed, hard-bitten, grieving backwoods man we see resembles anything I can think of in Hall’s innumerable other roles. Brown must have known something of his background, or sensed something in him, that justified the casting; it cannot be found in the brief online biographies of Hall. Whatever it was, the gamble paid off. This tiny performance—it is one of the smallest speaking roles in the film—hangs on one’s conscience afterward like a guilty secret unearthed in a Greek tragedy. It is the next to last of the points at which the movie and Faulkner merge.
And the last—far too marvelous to spoil—is the moment when Lucas comes to pay Lawyer Stevens his fee, and then walks away. We see him moving down the broad sunlit space, his tall, black-coated figure looking neither to the left or the right as he moves along. The spirit of the town seems to go with him; everything else is static. And the film’s final words, between Chick and his uncle, remind us how much work we have left to do before the problem that is American life can be solved.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
