Intruder in the Dust (MGM, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie from MGM in 1949, Intruder in the Dust, based on a novel by William Faulkner published in 1948 (his first book in six years because in the meantime he’d tried his hand at Hollywood screenwriting, and while he got co-writer credits for Howard Hawks’s film noir classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, both starring Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, almost nothing of what he wrote for Hollywood got filmed) about a real-life lynching that had happened in Faulkner’s home town, Oxford, Mississippi (called “Jefferson” in the film and in Faulkner’s writing generally), in 1935. This came in the middle of a cycle of U.S. films dealing more or less with racism, including Home of the Brave (a powerful melodrama about racial discrimination in the U.S. military) and Pinky (a silly story about a light-skinned Black girl – played by white actress Jeanne Crain – trying to “pass” for white). What’s remarkable about Intruder in the Dust is it wasn’t made by filmmakers with a reputation for a social conscience: it was produced and directed by Clarence Brown, an old MGM “hand” who’d been in the business long enough to have directed Rudolph Valentino (in his next-to-last film, 1925’s The Eagle). The writer was Ben Maddow, a year before he collaborated with John Huston on The Asphalt Jungle. Intruder in the Dust is basically To Kill a Mockingbird 13 years early.

The central characters are a proud Black farmer and landowner, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) – though through much of the movie I thought the name was “Beecham” – a teenage boy, Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr., who for once in his career actually acted instead of letting his boyish good looks deliver his performance for him); and his uncle, attorney John Gavin Stevens (David Brian, who precisely because he’s edgier and more reluctant gives this character far more vivid life than Gregory Peck did in the equivalent role in Mockingbird). At the start of the movie, Lucas is arrested for allegedly shooting a white man, Vincent Gowrie (David Clarke) – the character is dead at the start of the film but is seen in two flashbacks – in the back. Gowrie’s father Crawford (Charles Kemper) and his four brothers are so angry at the crime they surround the jail where Lucas is being held and draw a crowd to form a lynch mob and “take care” of him without bothering with any of the niceties of a formal trial. Chick Mallison grew to respect Lucas from an earlier incident in which he fell through the cracks over a lake that wasn’t quite frozen over. Lucas not only rescued him but dried his clothes, gave him a dinner, and allowed him to spend the night. Lucas is so fiercely proud he refused Chick’s offer of payment and returned all Chick’s subsequent gifts to him. Lucas’s pride is explained by his being a landowner himself; he was willed 10 acres in the middle of a plantation by a white grandfather who had owned his mother as a slave and felt he owed something to his progeny. When Lucas is standing in the entrance to the jail, he sees Chick in the crowd and tells him he wants to see John to ask him to take his case.

John is as convinced as the rest of the town that Lucas is guilty, and he sees his role as Lucas’s attorney not to acquit him, but simply to ask for a change of venue so the trial can be moved away from “Jefferson” and the vengeful antics of the Gowries and their friends and Lucas can plead guilty and get a prison sentence instead of being either lynched or legally executed. The ubiquity of lynch-mob “justice” is emphasized by the continual snarls of the townspeople that Lucas isn’t going to need a lawyer, “Hell, he isn’t even going to need an undertaker,” one of them boasts. At first the presumed good guys, Chick and his uncle John, drop the word “nigger” as often as anyone else in town, and it’s only as John starts working the case and becomes convinced that Lucas is actually innocent that he and Chick stop using the “N”-word. One of the film’s most powerful scenes concerns an older white woman, Eunice Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson, whom Faulkner himself insisted should play the role), a client of John’s in a different matter. Eunice determines to stop the lynching no matter what, and she does this by stationing herself in the lobby of the jail and calmly darning socks while the lynchers start pouring gasoline around to burn down the jail with Lucas inside it. Even when the leader of the lynch mob pours gas at her feet and lights a match, she stays there and asks him to move out of her way so he won’t be in her light. Not wanting to kill a white woman, he puts the match he lit out and lets her be. Lucas insists that the bullet that killed Vincent Gowrie did not come from his gun, a .41 pistol, and he demands that John and Chick exhume the corpse to prove it. They do so, in dead-of-night scenes Brown stages like a horror film, and ultimately realize that Vincent was killed by a rifle shot.

The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Vincent’s brother Nub (Porter Hall, best known as Barbara Stanwyck’s hapless husband in Double Indemnity but here cast as a villain himself), who was having arguments with Vincent because Nub was stealing lumber from the Gowries’ family business and selling it on the black market. When Nub saw Lucas take a shot at a rabbit and miss, Nub saw his chance: he shot Vincent in the back with his rifle and framed Lucas for the crime. In the end the townspeople, who had been howling for Lucas’s blood and willing to kill him themselves, calmly disperse and let the law take its course when a white man is revealed as the real murderer. Intruder in the Dust is a quite powerful movie, occasionally sliding into easy anti-racist propaganda but for the most part telling its tale honestly, eloquently, and without obvious political breast-beating. One thing Clarence Brown, as both producer and director, did that was unusual, especially for an old-line Hollywood filmmaker, was insist that virtually the whole movie be shot on location in Oxford and that many of the townspeople be played by non-professional actors who actually lived there. This was starting to become a common sort of filmmaking in Europe in the 1940’s, as the burden of World War II militated against elaborate studio productions and forced filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Alberto Lattuada, and Federico Fellini to make their movies with real people on real streets and use nonprofessional actors in key roles. Those movies had just started to trickle in to American theatres by the late 1940’s, and directors like Brown and Robert Rossen (in his political drama All the King’s Men from 1948) began to emulate them.

Intruder in the Dust was presented by TCM as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley,” and though it’s not literally a film noir (albeit cinematographer Robert Surtees – usually known for romances and historical spectacles – shoots much of it, especially the nighttime exteriors, in the chiaroscuro style of classic noir), Muller defended it by saying that its essence – a man unjustly accused of murder and others racing against time to prove his innocence – is noir and was the theme of about half of Cornell Woolrich’s stories. Muller also pointed out the irony that many of the townspeople who played would-be lynchers were long-time Oxford residents, and some of them had likely participated in the real-life 1935 lynching that had inspired Faulkner’s novel. In his outro, Muller explained that Intruder in the Dust got excellent critical reviews (including one from African-American author Ralph Ellison, who said that out of all the anti-racist “problem pictures” of 1949, it was the only one that could be shown in Harlem without being laughed off the screen) but was a commercial failure. Apparently Louis B. Mayer, still hanging on as MGM studio head, refused to allow the studio to promote it. Ostensibly it was because the soundtrack contained the word “nigger,” though given Mayer’s overall politics this smacks of the same kind of hypocrisy that has led President Trump to declare holy wars against Harvard and other major American universities on the ground that they’re coddling anti-Semites, when Trump has had Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Muller suggested the real reason Mayer didn’t like Intruder in the Dust and didn’t want the studio to promote it was that its anti-racist message repelled him personally.