The Intruder

On September 4, 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock Nine were turned away from Central High School by a mob and the Arkansas National Guard. On September 23, these nine students actually got into the school before they were run out by the mob. On September 24, Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and on September 25, the Little Rock Nine successfully entered Central High School under military escort by the same guard that had turned them away weeks earlier.

In Through a Lens, Darkly, Vanity Fair‘s David Margolick gives us a retrospective article on the two girls in Will Count’s iconic photograph above: Elizabeth Eckford, the African American, and Hazel Bryan, her white taunter. I’ve sometimes wondered how the whites in some of these old photographs feel, fifty years later, about having been the face of race hatred. This article goes some way toward answering that question.

Five years later, in 1961, Roger Corman made a film based on a Charles Beaumont novel. Film and novel are called The Intruder. In the film, ten black students are attempting to enroll in the all-white high school of a generic southern town called Caxton. Adam Cramer, an outside agitator, member of the “Patrick Henry Society,” has come to town to rile up the locals and see that the integration doesn’t happen.

This movie was considered so incendiary when it was released in 1962 that theaters wouldn’t show it. Corman had mortgaged his house to make the film because he could not get backers. He made it for $80,000 and it lost money. The film was shot in Missouri, and the locals weren’t friendly.

By happenstance, I watched this movie on the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock integration, and it is appalling how little has changed. Now, even as we celebrate the Little Rock Nine, we also play out the drama of the Jena 6. And the current Supreme Court in its last term took a great step toward reversing Brown v Board of Education.

Although I consider myself culturally southern, I have difficulty understanding how it is that the region continues to allow its darker side to be exploited by opportunistic politicians, power seekers, and hate-mongers. It comes, I think, of being under-employed and under-educated. Politicians have been very skillful at displacing class resentment into racism. Still, whenever I read a liberal diatribe against “The South” as nest of all the country’s ills, home of religious bigots, elector of George W. Bush and his ilk, I just have to cringe. Even though the Supreme Court that put him in power has a mostly northeastern face, we in the South can’t seem to rise above our stereotype. As Quentin Compson said, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t hate the South.”

(As these comments imply, I get reactionary in response to preachments about the evil south. It’s hard for me to separate my cultural self from the so-called Southern Strategy — and here &mdash: of politicians, I suppose. It’s a visceral reaction and not perhaps my most attractive trait. However, it leads me to the conclusion that self-righteousness is not a good proselyting technique. The south is not monolithic, and after all there are southern politicians who’ve done the country some good, even the hated LBJ.)

The film actually works its characters against stereotype. It’s shot in black and white but that isn’t its world view. Although, in the form of an achingly handsome pre-James-T-Kirk William Shatner, the Adam Cramer character is pure irresistible evil, a man whose lust for power is inextricably mixed with his lust for seduction. (He has a playful way of tipping men’s hats over their eyes that struck me as very much in the George Bush cheek-pinching, bald-head rubbing mode.) Frank Maxwell is excellent as the local newspaper editor who isn’t sure he wants integration but is willing to stand up against his townspeople for the rule of law. But though he takes a stand, he is not heroic in Jimmy Stewart fashion. That role is given to Leo Gordon, who plays against type as the man who unexpectedly saves the day (deus ex machina perhaps). Charles Barnes, who only made two movies in his lifetime, is adequate and likeable as the black student who is nearly lynched by the mob.

One small side note, the black actors who play the residents of “niggertown” are mostly country types whose facial architecture is very much like that of the white actors who play the angry mob. (One of the white thugs kept reminding me of Dana Gioia, a silliness for which I apologize.) I noticed this because I think I had come to put an urban face on black America: the face of Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy, Colin Powell. These faces were more Morgan Freeman and they showed how black and white in rural America are the same people.

Shatner apparently turned aside from his brilliant Broadway career, playing roles such as Henry V and Tamburlaine, starring with Julie Harris in A Shot in The Dark, to make this edgy, chancy film, and I applaud him for it. Watching him almost makes me regret his success in Star Trek. He was a fine actor. And he was brave to put his beautiful face out there as the face of American racism.

In the end, Adam Cramer meets his nemesis not in the sheriff, who is a sort of neutral character, or the newspaper editor, who is rather symbolically half-blinded by the mob, but by another pitch man. Seeming almost brutish at the film’s beginning, the travelling salesman Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon) turns out to have the kind of quiet confident masculinity that can forgive his wife’s infidelity and see Cramer’s inner cowardice. It is Griffin’s quiet speaking of truth that calms the mob and turns it back into individual human beings.

Would it were so easy in real life.

A last anecdote: When Cramer was going through his rant about how the “niggers” given a little equality will take over the entire world, I turned to Poppysmatus and asked “Why are they so frightening.”

“Because,” he answered, “they have so much more talent.”