Intruder in the Dust

 Intruder in the Dust (1949) is a noirish murder mystery set in the Deep South and based on a novel of the same name written by William Faulkner the year before.  The picture is most remembered for its indictment of Southern racist bigotry -- although, in truth, this element of the plot is subordinate to its crime film elements.  The picture is not a tragedy and, even, has a happy ending of sorts.  I expected the picture to be much darker than it was -- in fact, at a mere 87 minutes long, the movie has has some of the breezy characteristics of an escapist film for young adults.  The protagonist is a teenage boy who forms an unlikely alliance with an old lady (and his lawyer-uncle) to save a Black man from being lynched for a crime he did not commit.  Aspects of the film are a bit like a Hardy Boys mystery.

A Black man named Lucas Beauchamp lives on a ten acre parcel landlocked within an old plantation.  Beauchamp is fantastically proud, indeed, to the point of being insufferably arrogant.  He struts around in a high boots and an archaic plantation-masters garb with a huge Colt revolver tucked into his blouse.  His family has owned tide tract of land for a long time -- it was a gift resulting from some tangled Southern Gothic family relations between Beauchamp's grandfather and father and the plantation owner.  In any event, Lucas is wholly self-sufficient and beholding to no man and he strives maniacally to keep things that way.  

As the film begins, the Black population of the rural county seat where the action takes place (it's Faulkner's hometown Oxford, Mississippi) is hiding.  A Black man has been accused of murdering a member of a prominent, if disreputable, White family.  A mob has gathered around the courthouse and the dead man's brother declares that he will lead an attack on the jail, drag out the Black defendant, and burn him alive with gasoline.  The Sheriff appears with Lucas in custody.  The suspect is dragged past a gallery of hate-filled faces, enraged rednecks looking forward to the lethal festivities.  Lucas recognizes a teenaged boy named Chick in the crowd and shouts out to him that he wants to hire the kid's uncle, John Steele, a local lawyer.  Then, the man is dragged into the jail.  Chick runs across town to see his Uncle at the family home where everyone is gathered for Sunday dinner.  (These White people don't approve of the declasse lynch mob, but regard the extrajudicial killing as a fait accompli and intend to look the other way.)  In the first of several flashbacks, Chick tells John Steele, the lawyer, how he met Lucas.  He was rabbit hunting and fell into an icy creek on the Black man's property.  The man fished him out of the drink and gave him dry clothes and a warm meal.  When Chick tried to pay his benefactor, Lucas was offended and wouldn't take the money.  Chick, then, sought to humiliate Lucas by having him stoop and bend to pick up the money.  He dropped the coins on the floor but Lucas refused to pick them up.  Later, his attempts to make gifts to Lucas also failed, convincing him of the man's singular, even self-destructive pride.  Chick pleads with his Uncle to represent Lucas.  He says:  "they're gonna make a nigger out of him for once in his life" -- referring to the imminent lynching.  Steele and Chick go to see Lucas and he reminds arrogantly hostile, implacably (and inexplicably) rebuffing his own lawyer.  He refuses to tell the attorney about what he knows about the crime for which he is accused -- shooting one of the Gowrie twins in the back during a brawl.  (There are aspects of the film that undoubtedly made sense in the Faulkner novel that don't translate well to film -- you need Faulkner's famous rhetoric to put across some of these effects and that sort of diction doesn't work on-screen,  For instance, Lucas' reticence is based on his sense that it is debasing to tell the truth to a White man and, then, be disbelieved and so he doesn't even make the attempt -- this might make sense embalmed in the sugared molasses of Faulkner's oratory, but doesn't make seem plausible in the context of a late forties film noir which is, in effect, what this picture is.)  Enigmatically, Lucas says that if Chick exhumes the corpse of the dead Gowrie boy, the murder mystery will be solved.  Chick goes to tell this to his uncle who happens to be meeting  on a car crash case with an elderly spinster, Miss Haversham.  The old lady is intrigued by the situation and assists Chick and Steele in their efforts to prove that Lucas didn't fire the fatal shot that killed Gowrie.  In the dead of night, the old lady and Chick with a teenage Black boy dig up the casket where Gowrie was buried -- but it is empty.  The next day, the corpse is discovered in quicksand near a river crossing.  Gowrie's elderly father, a one-armed man named Nub dives into the quicksand to retrieve the muddy body.  Sure enough, the bullet extracted from the corpse doesn't match the ballistics of Lucas big Colt 45.  By this time, the mob has surrounded the courthouse and the dead man's brother tries to break into the jail.  But the door is guarded by the formidable Miss Haversham who is knitting in a rocking chair and blocking the way into the jail.  The dead man's brother pours gasoline all over the floor and strikes a match but the old lady is indomitable, won't yield, and, in fact, just tells him to move so as not to block her light.  The mob retreats.  A little later, the crime is solved and Gowrie's actual killer apprehended.  The lynch mob, ashamed of itself, simply melts away into the darkness.  The next day, the Black folks are back in town celebrating.  Lucas pays his lawyer's fees in small coins, mostly pennies, and, then, stands motionlessly, a big man towering over the lawyer.  "What do you want?" the nonplussed lawyer asks.  "I'm waiting for my receipt," Lucas says.   We last see him strutting like a rooster through the crowds of Black people on the street.

The film has some of the nasty and macabre ambience of Faulkner's As I lay Dying with its rural graveyard and empty casket and the subsequent discovery of the cadaver buried in the quicksand.  Nub Gowrie is a frightening figure, an old man who keeps a revolver tucked under his arm -- to remove the gun, he has to laboriously unbutton his shirt and open his tunic to remove the big pistol (like Lucas') that he carries everywhere.  We see him delicately brush the mud off his dead son's face before covering it with his own hat.  The movie is full of small, but memorable details:  Nub's pride in his coon hounds, the Black people hiding in their cabins as cars and trucks whirl by on the way to the lynching, two Black prisoners in chain-gang garb recruited to dig up the casket of the murdered man, the dirt lane to a rural farm rutted and grooved by erosion so that it looks like a ravine in the Badlands of South Dakota.  Most impressive is the performance by Juano Hernandez playng Lucas Beauchamp.  When we first see Lucas, the camera pans from Chick's perspective up his shiny boots to riding trousers and his barrel chest in a loose-fitting blouse tunic and, then, the man's ebony head, gleaming next to a big ax that he has slung over his shoulder.  Beauchamp is a man who can not be intimidated and his self-reliant pride is offensive to everyone that he meets -- he's a hero to his fellow Blacks but an inconvenient kind of hero, the sort of fellow who gets innocent people killed.  It's an uncompromising performance, a portrait of a man who's insane arrogance doesn't even make sense to himself.  Hernandez plays the part straight and make no effort to  "humanize" or "soften" the character -- he's willfully proud, insensitive, and insufferably arrogant.  It's a very brave performance, particularly in that Hernandez also shows the man's desperation and, even, fear at facing fiery slaughter at the hands of the mob.  As it happens, the reason Lucas Beauchamp has to be saved by a 15-year old boy and an 80 year old White woman is that he'd too proud to be helped by those capable of offending him.