Intruder in the dust movie#

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#

“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.