The Intruder (1962)
Daring, bare bones, raw, insensitive, necessary, superb. And flawed. And terrific.
It's what a good movie strives to be--saying something, sucking you in, chewing you up, leaving you impressed and interested and glad.
Where to start? Rather than mention the main actor, it's better to say that here is a rare film, a low-budget black and white drama, that deals with racism in the early days of de-segregation directly. It mostly shows the bigoted South--the map on the wall implied Missouri, so it's not even the deep South of Alabama. When ten black children are told by Federal law to attend the white school, the town has largely and bitterly gone along. It's the law. But a troublemaker comes in to stir things up, and we see a caricatured but not so wrong impression of the worst sides of ordinary people who grew up thinking segregation was normal and good.
That actor? William Shatner, of Star Trek legend (beginning in 1966). Here he shows he can pretty much act. I say pretty much as a kind of compliment to the movie makers, especially the big force behind the film, its look and its theme, Roger Corman. Because this is no Brando or Newman coming in to really command the town, the movie, the racial injustice. That would be too impressive, and with Shatner we have something is almost what you picture really happening. The rest of the movie is no documentary, for sure, and so the need to be cinematic and theatrical is met. The cast is a gritty, drawling bunch of regular folk, and my guess is that Southerners didn't appreciate the typecasting. But I've lived in a small Southern town much like this one, and it is not so far from the truth. Simplified for the movie, but the general drift is there.
The themes (segregation, racism, etc.) are clichés, kind of, and a little uncomplicated, but if you think of when the movie came out you can appreciate how it might have resonated then. It's not a masterpiece of slick filmmaking, not at all, but it's a masterpiece in some other sense of high drama, fast editing, and pertinent material. It was shot in several locations in Missouri. To compare them even briefly to the high profile films about race and racism, many of them starring Sidney Poitier, you can see how polite and restrained those films are, and how really afraid they are. This one is above all fearless. It hams, it exaggerates, it uses stereotypes, it ignores human complexity. But it works. Very much. See it.
