{"id":7406,"date":"2021-08-28T08:11:52","date_gmt":"2021-08-28T13:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackworldcinema.net\/blog\/?p=7406"},"modified":"2025-06-03T00:27:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T05:27:59","slug":"august-28-3pm-intruder-in-the-dust-1949","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackworldcinema.net\/blog\/2021\/08\/28\/august-28-3pm-intruder-in-the-dust-1949\/","title":{"rendered":"August 28, 3pm, Depicting Black Militancy: Intruder in the Dust (1949)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Depicting Black Militancy\u00a0<\/strong>
\nAugust 29, 3pm, 2021
\nIntruder in the Dust<\/em> (1949) Clarence Brown, 1h 27m
\nRegister for Free Online Screening and Discussion<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) is a strong, proud African-American man accused of murder in 1940s small-town Mississippi. As the town’s white residents prepare to lynch him, a teenage boy named Chick (Claude Jarman Jr.) whom Beauchamp had once saved from drowning becomes convinced of the man’s innocence, and races to discover the identity of the real murderer before it’s too late. This film, adapted from William Faulkner’s 1948 novel, was made on location in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.<\/p>\n

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As one of the four big \u201crace issue\u201d films Hollywood produced in 1949, MGM\u2019s film occupies a central place in the history of screen representations of blacks following the Second World War. Produced on the heels of independent film\u00a0Lost Boundaries\u00a0<\/em>(Alfred Werker, 1949) and studio releases\u00a0Home of the Brave<\/em>\u00a0(Mark Robson, 1949) and\u00a0Pinky\u00a0<\/em>(Elia Kazan, 1949), Intruder in the Dust\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>had perhaps the most impressive pedigree, adapted as it was from the novel by Pulitzer-prize-winning author William Faulkner. The soon-to-be blacklisted writer Ben Maddow provided the screenplay and Tennessee-raised Clarence Brown, a veteran of the studio system with a career stretching back to the 1910s, produced and directed it. When the film was released at the end of 1949, it garnered largely positive reviews, both in the general press and among film writers. In his review for the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, Bosley Crowther praised Brown\u2019s \u201cbrilliant, stirring\u201d film that \u201cslashes right down to the core of complex racial resentments and social divisions in the South\u201d and \u201ccosmically mocks the hollow pretense of \u2018white supremacy\u2019\u201d (19). Edwin Schallert of the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0called it a \u201cgrimly courageous picture\u201d (11), while the reviewer for the racially conservative\u00a0The Chicago Daily Tribune<\/em>\u00a0noted it was \u201ca blunt sketch of problems in race relations\u201d that was both \u201cprobing\u201d and \u201caccurate\u201d (\u201cMae Tinee\u201d B7). Theorist and practitioner Paul Rotha, in a private letter to director Brown, commended the film for a \u201csincerity that we seldom see on the screen\u201d; amateur filmmakers were advised to study the film for \u201ceffective examples of the dramatic uses of sound\u2014and silence\u201d (D.C. 1).<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Panelist: Andr\u00e9 Seewood\u00a0<\/b>is a multiple award winning independent filmmaker, writer and musician.\u00a0 He is the co-founder and former co-editor of FILM THREAT Magazine and a distinguished recipient of the Dennis Turner Memorial Film Studies Scholarship from Wayne State University.\u00a0\u00a0 He is the author of SCREENWRITING INTO FILM: Forgotten Methods & New Possibilities (2006), SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Edition (2011) and (DISMANTLING) The Greatest Lie Ever Told to the Black Filmmaker: Collected Essays on Film (2015).