INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1949) B/W 87m dir: Clarence Brown

w/David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Juano Hernandez, Porter Hall, Elizabeth Patterson, Charles Kemper, Will Geer, David Clarke, Elzie Emanuel, Lela Bliss, Harry Hayden, Harry Antrim, George T. Hemphill, Noel Hodge, Dewey McCoy

A lawyer and his nephew come to the aid of a black man when he's accused of murder.

From The Movie Guide: "The lack of big name stars is, if anything, a plus in making this one of the most powerful movies ever made about racism. Based on [William] Faulkner's novel and filmed on location near the writer's native Oxford, MI, Brown's film features more than 500 people, only a small portion of whom were professional actors. Hernandez plays Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly black man who owns his own property, something the locals resent. The police arrest him for the murder of a townsman because he was discovered near the body and the revolver he carried had just been fired. On the way to jail he spots Chick (Jarman), a young white lad with whom he is friendly. He asks Chick to get Stevens (Brian), the boy's attorney uncle, to come to the jail. ...

"The most chilling scene in the movie is a lengthy sequence which cuts from the people of Oxford gleefully assembling (not unlike the crowd to see the man trapped below ground in THE BIG CARNIVAL) at the jail for a lynching to shots of music playing and kids eating ice cream. Everyone is in a jolly mood, in direct contrast to the grisly plans they have for the prisoner. This is not a pretty story and it does not exactly feature the people of Mississippi in a flattering light. Brown must have had a silver tongue to convince so many locals to play in the film, when one considers how they are portrayed. After many years of seeing stereotyped blacks on screen, Hernandez's role was a revelation as he stood up to the charges with pride and dignity. Patterson [as Miss Habersham] is equally marvelous in one of the finest roles in her lengthy career."

From the San Francisco Chronicle, this article by G. Allen Johnson, published 1 June 2017: "Claude Jarman Jr. starred in one of the most beloved children’s films of all time. He made a classic John Ford Western with John Wayne. And after leaving acting for a varied career that included a successful business and a stint as head of the San Francisco International Film Festival, he is happily retired to Kentfield, having raised seven children.

"But there’s one career achievement that wasn’t as successful, and that is a wrong he is gladly helping to make right.

"Jarman, now 82, was the star of Clarence Brown’s 1949 adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, one of the most hard-hitting films addressing racial injustice of the golden studio era. It was a box-office dud at the time.

"MGM initially 'didn’t want to get involved with something as controversial as a lynching,' said Jarman over coffee on his patio on a recent sunny morning. 'But when they made it, they didn’t promote it. And it was getting rave reviews.'

"But a recent DVD release and Jarman’s dogged presence at film-festival screenings are helping the film finally find an audience.

"Jarman will introduce Intruder in the Dust at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 4, as part of an excellent nine-film series 'Auteur, Author: Film & Literature' at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive, co-presented by the Bay Area Book Festival. ...

“Intruder in the Dust stars Juano Hernandez, in a powerful performance, as a black farmer who is accused of murdering a white man. As the slain man’s family organizes a lynching, the farmer asks a white teenager (Jarman) to get his lawyer uncle (David Brian) to defend him. The boy senses that the farmer is innocent, and sets out to prove it.

"But first, he must wrestle with his own racism. It is a wonderful, nuanced performance by a then-14-year-old Jarman.

"The movie was filmed in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Miss., and Faulkner was present for much of the filming.

“'He was a very quiet, quiet guy,' Jarman said of one of the giants of American literature. “His daughter was my age, and we used to have parties at her house, and he would walk through quietly. He was one of those guys who never talked to you until you talked to him first. … He smoked his pipe and observed.”

"It was a mostly happy set, he added, with Oxford citizens supportive and many used as extras. But Jarman was careful to note that Oxford was ground zero of one of the key events in the battle for civil rights years after the film was shot there — the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962, which sparked a deadly riot. The seeds of that were present in 1949.

“'When we made the movie, Juano Hernandez and Elzie Emanuel (another black actor in the film) had to stay in a private home — they couldn’t stay at the hotel,”' he said. 'So it was still segregated at that time.'

"The film is also a testament to Brown, one of the sadly forgotten figures in cinema history. Brown literally helped invent motion pictures, beginning work in the silent era as far back as 1913, and was a house director for MGM for some three decades. He directed Greta Garbo seven times and Joan Crawford six times, churning out hit after hit, and yet never won an Academy Award.

"But because of Brown, Jarman did. Jarman was a 10-year-old schoolboy in Nashville when Brown found him after a nationwide search to play the boy who raises a young deer in The Yearling (1946), an adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ children’s book. Gregory Peck was Jarman’s dad.

"Jarman won a Juvenile Academy Award for his performance (that Oscar was given out only 12 times, first to Shirley Temple in 1935 and last to Hayley Mills in 1961 before the award was retired). It is sitting on a shelf in Jarman’s living room.

“'He wanted a young boy who was not Hollywood. He wanted somebody that was from the South,' Jarman said, adding that the shoot was grueling and intense on location in hot, sweaty Florida. 'It took almost two years to make that movie. I was 10 when we started and 12 when it came out, so we spent a lot of time together. He nurtured me; he really was like a father at that point.'

"Under contract to MGM, Jarman was educated in the studio’s two-room schoolhouse, along with classmates Elizabeth Taylor, Dean Stockwell, Margaret O’Brien and Jane Powell. He appeared in 11 films, but aside from The Yearling and Intruder in the Dust, made just one other rock-solid classic: Rio Grande.

"Directed by Ford and starring Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr. and Chill Wills, it was the third part of Ford’s revered cavalry trilogy, after Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Jarman plays Wayne’s son, who has flunked out of West Point but is working his way up the Army ranks and is assigned to Wayne’s unit on the Texas frontier.

"Jarman called it the best experience he had making a movie. Even taskmaster Ford liked him.

“'I was a favorite because I learned Roman riding,' said Jarman, referring to the style of riding standing up on two horses. 'Ben Johnson would say, "You little brat!" It was a great, unbelievably fun movie. Maureen O’Hara and Wayne were terrific. It was a fun, fun movie — compared to The Yearling, which was drudgery.'

"After the studio system broke up and most actors were no longer under contract, Jarman left acting, attending Vanderbilt University and serving in the Navy. Eventually he found his way to San Francisco and ran the film festival from 1968 to 1980. Then he built a travel business that arranged meetings and conferences for large companies before retiring.

"Along with seven children, the youngest of them 23-year-old twin daughters, Jarman has eight grandchildren. He lives with his wife, Katie, a real estate agent.

"It’s a great life, he said, but with a small career regret: the initial failure of Intruder in the Dust.

“'It wasn’t recognized for so long, and yet I knew it was a terrific film,' he said. 'People who saw it would say "Oh my God, this is great." Historically, it had some meaning to it.

“'I’m very heartened that it’s come back and had a rebirth.'”

From the Library of America website (www.loa.org), this 2017 article about the film, "Intruder in the Dust captures the chilling reality of Jim Crow," by Farran Smith Nehme:

“'Shot in the back,' adds a skinny, laconic patron, 'by a n****r.' Within minutes, a siren sounds, and the barbershop denizens all come running, grabbing wallets, coats, shoving a hat over a head still full of shampoo, eager to see the prelude to what will no doubt prove to be the biggest show in some time: a lynching.

"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. But Intruder is a brief book by Faulkner’s standards, and it hangs on an unusual whodunit plot. 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. 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.

"There were three other earnest Hollywood attempts at tackling Jim Crow America in 1949: Pinky, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries. Intruder in the Dust has aged the least. Its location filming, its unvarnished textures and sounds still feel uncannily accurate. Witness the willingness to invoke that atomic bomb of a slur. Aside from being condemned in Gentleman'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. 'Why, Chick,' is his mother’s gasped rebuke when her son says of Lucas, 'They’re gonna make a n****r out of him once in his life.' This is the rare studio movie that strives to avoid euphemism.

"Ben Maddow’s screenplay follows the novel in nearly all the most important ways. 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. 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. 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.

"And Maddow recreates Faulkner’s characters in all their richness. 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. 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. 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. Chick has a black counterpart in the smaller role of Aleck, played by Elzie Emanuel, who also has a gangly physique and transparent emotions. Alas, Brown mis-directed Emanuel to several eye-rolling, knock-kneed 'comic' moments that were derided at the time in the African American press. When allowed to react naturally, he’s very effective. Patterson’s Miss Habersham is a grand creation; an elderly, childless woman, she has status in the community, but no power. The lack of power helps give her the empathy that makes her want to help Chick and Aleck investigate the murder. The status means that she can get away with it. She can even watch a lynch mob’s leader soak the floor with gasoline and light a match, and call his bluff.

"Most indelible of all is Lucas. 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. Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez, in a magnificent performance, shows with every gesture how that landowner status affects Lucas’s bearing and manners. Hernandez gives Lucas a distinctive walk: legs apart, arms hanging straight, with a pronounced sway from side to side. It is the walk of a man who believes in his right to take up space. Numerous times Brown’s camera catches the white characters as they watch Lucas and seethe over what that walk implies. 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.

"When Uncle John and Chick visit Lucas in his jail cell, the sheriff has taken away the mattress. Lucas has laid down newspaper to ease the pressure of the bedsprings on his skin, and he is lying on his back with one shoe under his head, so composed he suggests royalty at rest. The shoe is high-quality, like everything else he wears or carries. The mystery of who killed Vinson Gowrie is solved in part due to Lucas’s unusual gun, an heirloom Colt .41 that he carries on Saturday, like 'a white man,' notes an exasperated Uncle John.

"Lucas measures his speech like his gait, unhurried and precise. Faulkner, who declined to write the script but offered the company advice on casting and local customs, deemed Hernandez’s natural voice too sonorously classical for a Mississippi native, and coached the actor on the accent. David Brian also possessed a good voice, but it’s used to different effect. Tasked with most of the movie’s speechifying, Lawyer Stevens’s talk breaks into scenes like a radio announcer. The two actors play their most memorable scenes together, as in a jailhouse exchange when a frustrated John snaps, 'Has it occurred it to you that if you just said "mister" to white people, and meant it, you might not be sitting here now?' Lucas responds, with scathing calm, 'So I’m to commence now? I can start off by saying "mister" to folks that drags me outta here and builds a fire under me?'

"There are other strong hints that Brown and Maddow are, at times, actively undermining Lawyer Stevens’s didactic pronouncements. As he and Chick stroll home through the warm dark after seeing Lucas in the jailhouse, and encounter Mr. Lilley (played by R. X. Williams, probably a Mississippi local), who’s out watering his plants, Mr. Lilley and Uncle John exchange a few words about the brewing Gowrie lynch mob, and Lilley ends with the jocular farewell, 'Tell ’em to holler if they needs any help.' Uncle John turns to Chick and, as though this thought follows quite naturally, remarks 'See, he had nothing against Lucas.' Uncle John adds that Lilley would be one of the first to contribute to Lucas’s funeral, and winds up with, 'Now the white folks are gonna take [Lucas] out and burn him, with no hard feelings on either side.'

"The movie finds other, non-verbal ways to convey the dark irony of this passage from the novel. For one, nothing about Lilley, or indeed Southern tradition, explains why Uncle John would find the man likely to do anyone a good turn, let alone a black man’s hypothetical family (Lucas’s wife is dead). Then and now, Lilley looks to most rational people like a fat, grinning ghoul, and Chick’s expression indicates he’s not convinced. Just a few scenes later, as Chick, Aleck, and Miss Habersham drive a truck out to a remote cemetery to dig up Vinson Gowrie’s body, Brown cuts several times to black tenant families tucking their children into bed, glancing fearfully at the headlights, and cringing at the sound of wheels on a dirt road. That light and those sounds mean one thing only, and the feelings about it are very hard indeed.

"Clarence Brown read Intruder in the Dust in galleys. As a young man he’d witnessed the Atlanta race riot of 1906, and he said, 'This was a picture I had to make.' One roadblock was Louis B. Mayer, still in charge of MGM, and as always not a man receptive to political filmmaking. And political this story certainly was; years later, it’s still hard to believe that Andy Hardy’s studio made it. It helped that Brown had been a top director at the studio for more than twenty years and considered Mayer a friend. Eventually, the boss relented after the project got the firm backing of MGM’s head of production, Dore Schary, 'even though,' wrote Scott Eyman, Mayer 'would undoubtedly have had a stroke if John Huston had tried to make it.'

"Another question was where to film. MGM had the biggest and most spectacular backlot in the business, one that had subbed for everything from the streets of Laredo to the gardens of Versailles, and they didn’t see what was so goldurn special about Oxford, Mississippi. Brown, born in Massachusetts but raised in Tennessee, knew different. Shooting on location was --- aside from casting Hernandez --- his most vital decision. The town square is dusty, vast, and real. The people evoke Walker Evans, not central casting. And then there may have been whatever intangibles resulted from experiencing southern-style segregation up close. White company members enjoyed the hospitality of the University of Mississippi. Hernandez was housed separately at the home of a black undertaker. The cast and crew, wrote film historian Thomas Cripps in Making Movies Black, 'were so careful not to violate racial etiquette that the locals gave them a farewell fish fry.'

"Meanwhile, the real 1949 Oxford was going on screen, forever, as in the sequence that begins with a high-placed loudspeaker blaring the old Charleston dance tune, 'Runnin’ Wild.' In several long, linked tracking shots, Brown and cinematographer Robert Surtees sink down to ground level, to a bus with its horn blaring as a bunch of eager young men tumble out. The camera glides past a little girl waving a mechanical flag, past other kids eating ice cream, a woman re-applying her lipstick in a side mirror, a card game, a kid with a yoyo. Finally Brown and Surtees light on a middle-aged woman carrying a baby, as she strides purposefully toward what turns out to be the car of Nub Gowrie (Charles Kemper), the murder victim’s brother. 'Well, Mr. Gowrie,' she says, 'when you reckon you gonna get started?' Gowrie climbs out of the car, and in another track, carries a gas canister to a nearby filling station, where a man in a suit fills it to the brim. The sloshing gas forms a wet track as Gowrie carries the can across the square. There is not a single black face in any part of this scene.

"The truly chilling thing is that it’s possible --- likely, even --- that some of those faces in the crowd had real-life experience with what Brown was asking them to fake. In 1935, a twenty-eight-year-old black man named Ellwood Higginbotham was dragged from the Oxford jail and hanged by a mob of about 150, while a jury was still deliberating in his trial on a charge of killing a white farmer.

"Intruder in the Dust had its premiere at the Oxford Lyric Theater on October 10, 1949. The budget had been top-drawer, the notices were stellar, but as Mayer had predicted, it was a box-office dud. People were tired of social problems, said the conventional wisdom; lack of star power undoubtedly didn’t help, and neither did MGM’s tepid promotion. The film was swiftly shunted to the lower half of bills. But the film’s participants knew the quality of what they had made. Brown always cited it as a favorite, and Claude Jarman has said more than once that 'Intruder in the Dust is the one I’m most proud of.' Ralph Ellison, however, gave the film its finest accolade. He wrote that of the whole cycle of race-based movies in 1949, Intruder was 'the only film that could be shown in Harlem without arousing unintended laughter, for it is the only one of the four in which Negroes can make complete identification with their screen image.'”