Tonight I watched another of the films I found yesterday at Mid-Valley Libe : "Intruder In The Dust" (1949), starring an actor named David Brian as an attorney living in a small town in rural Alabama in the 1940s. Brian is one of those Hollywood veterans whose face and voice you would recognise from many films and television shows. Co-starring is Claude Jarman Jr., who became a child star with the success of "The Yearling" in 1946. He was 15 when he got the job for "Intruder", and though he only made 14 screen appearances in his career, his name is still famous today because his wide-eyed presence in the films mentioned, and also in "Rio Grande" with John Wayne, has left a lasting impression on moviegoers and critics ever since. Here, he plays Brian's nephew, a gangly kid who has black friends in a part of the country where such things were not done at that time. When I say black friends, he only has two, simply because he, and the friends, live out in the boondocks where there aren't a lot of people to begin with.
One friend is a kid his own age, with whom he goes hunting. The other friend, more significant, is an older man, a landowner. In the story, we see that it was rare for a black man to own land, even as late as the 1940s. However, in the movie he has inherited it though the generations that have passed from a Civil War settlement. He has inherited the former plantation land his grandfather was enslaved upon. As a result, he is a very proud man, very stubborn. He has money, knows that he is resented by the poorer white rednecks in town, and is haughty because of it.
This attitude works against him when he is accused of murder and arrested by Sheriff Will Geer. The movie begins with the murder, and has the feel of a film noir, though plotwise I'd call it more of a social justice story like "To Kill A Mockingbird". Lucas, the black landowner (Juano Hernandez), is approached in his jail cell by lawyer David Brian, who has been asked by his nephew to represent the man. Brian is an enlightened citizen who hates the lynch mob mentality of his community, but Lucas - because of his misplaced pride - will not cooperate with the attorney, will not tell him the truth about what actually happened the night of the murder. Finally, after repeated badgering, Brian gets Lucas to reveal one small detail that will prove important. He says that he owns a Colt 41 (yes, a 41 not the more famous Colt 45). He says that if they can find the body of the murder victim - a local redneck - the bullet inside the man will vindicate him, prove he is not the killer. This leads to a search for the body around the murder site. It is located in a church graveyard, and here, the already noirish aspects of the story and even the b&w photography take on a horror tinge.
This is because the body of the murdered redneck needs to be exhumed (now there's a word for ya)....man......."exhumed"......how gruesome is that? Well anyhow, lawyer David Brian says that it's a waste of time because the local racists who own the cemetery will never allow this to happen, nor will the equally bigoted local government.
So what happens is that young Claude Jarman Jr. decides to take matters into his own hands. He knows nothing of racism. Lucas has been a friend to him, as has the teenaged Aleck. It is not clear if Aleck has a family relationship to Lucas, but he lives with him and both are black. Claude Jarman is the white boy who lives nearby, and all three are friends. So now, with Lucas in jail for a murder he didn't commit, and with his lawyer unwilling to press for an exhumation, Claude Jarman and Aleck decide to dig the body up on their own.
The movie was based on a book by William Faulkner, so I suppose that explains this bit of Southern Gothic, but man, it plays like a scene in an old time Universal Horror flick, right down to the opening of the casket...........
At which point I can tell you no more, for I would be spoiling the main plot point. The underlying theme, though, is not the murder itself but the resentment of a community toward a landowning black man, even 85 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared. By this late date, most of the townsfolk have to keep their lingering hatred under wraps, but once Lucas has been arrested, they feel emancipated themselves to let their buried feelings out, and only the decency of the Sheriff, the two teenaged friends and a few other folks, including lawyer Brian, can save the town from going through the upheaval of a lynching. But once the two teens dig the body up, everything changes. ////
"Intruder In The Dust" was released on Warner Archive, which means that it was forgotten for a long time, and would have been overshadowed by productions from the civil rights era a dozen years in the future like "Mockingbird", but really the film seems to be ahead of it's time. This is attributable to Faulkner, I'm sure. He is the legendary Southern author. I have not read him, but I've no doubt of his stature. Growing up myself in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, and especially that I went through the L.A. public school system of that era - the best of it's type - we kids were taught that all people are created equal. We were taught friendship with our fellow children, we were exposed to world news and to different cultures. What is taking place now, with AOC and people like her who think they invented this stuff, we learned as kids in the 1960s. It's just that the peaceful, cooperative culture of that time got destroyed by LBJ and Nixon and J.Edgar Hoover and the assassinations of the era.
The bad forces stomped everything out, which resulted later in the destabilising of black communities in the 1970s and 1980s, with crack cocaine being imported into urban neighborhoods by the CIA at that time.
I'll shut up now, but the history is there for all to see, and it makes me mad because it shouldn't have happened that way. The good news is that the ideas and philosophy of Martin Luther King ended up being advanced anyway, as with the ideas of JFK, who sent us to the Moon, and his brother Bobby, who believed we could all live in peace.
We have come a long way since our forefathers first brought slaves to this country. Generations later, and once Trump is gone, maybe we can all live as one and let the last bit of lingering bad feeling simply fade away. /////
That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning. Love through the night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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