{"id":18309,"date":"2022-05-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=18309"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:12:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:12:48","slug":"the-unnerving-timelessness-of-the-intruder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-unnerving-timelessness-of-the-intruder\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unnerving Timelessness of The Intruder<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A charismatic, well-dressed white man delivers a lengthy monologue about the impending destruction of the true America, appealing to the patriotism of his white male audience, warning them against a progressive organization that is \u201cnothing but a communist front headed by a Jew who hates America.\u201d Is this a modern right-wing cable news show? No, it\u2019s Roger Corman\u2019s incendiary 1962 drama The Intruder<\/em>, which premiered 60 years ago this week to mostly unreceptive audiences in New York City. The Intruder<\/em> remains an outlier for Corman, known for his low-budget genre films that filled drive-ins for decades, with the mercenary approach of co-opting various trends into easily digestible B-movies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Intruder<\/em> takes on the timely issue of school integration and civil rights, but it never comes off as opportunistic or crass. Corman is a born showman, so The Intruder<\/em> is gripping and suspenseful, full of tense confrontations and inflammatory speeches, and Corman can\u2019t resist a little sexual titillation, too. But it all serves the serious, urgent message, which Corman delivers with fiery passion, never shying away from making his audience uncomfortable. He shoots stark black-and-white images, with frequent skewed camera angles to add to that discomfort. Corman is aided by a smart, powerful screenplay by Charles Beaumont, adapting his own novel, and by a mesmerizing lead performance from William Shatner in one of his earliest\u2014and still best\u2014roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shatner plays Adam Cramer, the aforementioned charismatic, well-dressed white man, who rolls into the small Southern town of Caxton on a bus, clearly a man on a mission. Corman punctuates Adam\u2019s arrival in Caxton with the kind of ominous music usually reserved for serial killers or Satanists, so when Adam helps a little girl and her mother off the bus, already ingratiating himself to the locals, it\u2019s obvious he has something sinister in mind. Caxton has just been ordered to integrate its schools, and starting on the Monday after Adam arrives, 10 Black students will be attending the previously all-white local high school. None of the white residents appear to support the decision, but everyone Adam asks about it expresses a weary resignation to following the law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adam questions that reaction, using his knowledge of \u201cthe truth\u201d to spur Caxton\u2019s white residents to action. He may be the catalyst, but it doesn\u2019t take much of a push before the townspeople are burning crosses, bombing the local Black church, and swarming a Black family\u2019s car as they drive through town. Adam, who sometimes says he\u2019s from Los Angeles and sometimes says he\u2019s from Washington, D.C., is just as much of an elitist outsider as the vague boogeymen he blames for Caxton\u2019s problems, but he speaks the locals\u2019 language. He knows just what to say to get the reaction he wants, then he knows exactly when to step back so he isn\u2019t directly involved in any illegal actions. He calls what he does \u201csocial work\u201d or \u201csocial reform,\u201d but it\u2019s the exact opposite of those progressive-sounding terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Adam\u2019s nebulous background is just one way that Corman and Beaumont depict him as an almost supernatural figure, arriving from nowhere on his way to nowhere else. But The Intruder<\/em> doesn\u2019t try to shift blame for its characters\u2019 racist attitudes, and Adam is certainly not the source of their ugliness. Characters casually drop the N-word right from the start of the movie, and they lament the \u201cbig Black flood\u201d that\u2019s coming with integration. Even the movie\u2019s most noble white character, local newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), starts out as an opponent of integration, only coming around to the opposite perspective when he sees the kind of violence that Adam has incited. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom is the closest that The Intruder<\/em> comes to a white-savior character, but while he eventually puts his life on the line to stand up for what he believes in, it\u2019s clear that the danger he chooses to face is nothing compared to what Caxton\u2019s Black residents deal with every day. One old Black man even expresses his own opposition to integration, because he fears the violence it will bring to his community. Corman and Beaumont stumble a bit with the Black characters, who are never as prominent as the white characters, and mostly exist to suffer quietly. This is a movie aimed at showing white audiences the rot in their own midst, though, and it achieves that effect masterfully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shatner deserves much of the credit as well, bringing greater subtlety to his performance than he\u2019s generally known for, and making it count when he eventually unleashes a signature Shatner freakout. That comes late in the movie, as Adam is losing his grip on the town, in a way that ultimately lets the Caxton residents off the hook a bit. It\u2019s hard to blame Corman for believing in the possibility of social progress, though, even in small increments. He couldn\u2019t have envisioned that Adam Cramer would be the template for similar demagogues 60 years later, with barely a word changed in their rhetoric. \u201cThis is just the beginning!\u201d Adam wails futilely at the end of the movie. Sadly, he turned out to be right. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Corman’s social thriller was released 60 years ago this week, but it feels as vital and urgent as today’s headlines. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":18310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1428],"tags":[1429,1422],"class_list":["post-18309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-happy-birthday","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21974,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18309\/revisions\/21974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}