The Intruder is the best Hollywood film about race relations of its era. It is the only film of its time that I have seen that shows what it might have actually been like in the South during the civil rights movement. There is a sense of honesty and reality to this film that is still jarring.
Even at their best intentioned, Hollywood movies like To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heat of the Night seem to have a sense of equivocation and calculation. They are consistently trying to figure out how far they can go without offending Southern or conservative white audiences. I have no doubt that Robert Mulligan and Norman Jewison and the makers of the films like the one listed above sincerely wanted to speak out against bigotry with their respective films, but the message ended up being too watered down, to sugar coated. You never got the sense that you saw what was actually happing.
Independently produced and shot on a very low budget in a small town in Missouri, The Intruder reminded me in some ways of the neo-realist cinema of De Sica. The intruder of the title is a Northern racist and anti-Semite named Adam Cramer, and he comes to an unnamed town that is due to begin integrating their high school for the first time. Almost none of the white townspeople are in favor of this (and the few that are keep their mouths shut), but most are resigned to letting the black students attend. After all, as the editor of the local newspaper observes "It's the law!" Cramer's goal is to stir up the townspeople into illegally intimating the blacks from not attending, and he assembles a really, soon followed by cross burning. Things get out of hand, however, when the most vicious bigots of the town firebomb the black church and kill their minister. Cramer is smart enough to know that violence will not help his cause and will only illicit Northern sympathies, but he is powerless to stop the people he set off, and things begin to spiral out of control.
I have waited until this point to mention that Cramer is played by William Shatner. Shatner is a performer like Charlton Heston- neither were bad actors, but both had such distinctive mannerisms and iconic characters that it was easy to make fun of them, and hard to take them seriously outside of the roles they became famous for. However, despite his distinctive delivery on much of his dialogue, this is a truly great performance from Shatner. He finds the complex elements of Cramer's character that takes him far outside a generic villain and turns him into a real, although understandably unlikable, human being.
Corman, who was best known for his grade Z-programmers and (much better) Freudian Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, completely alters his usual style. The DVD documentary that Corman actually decided to spend money to make the movie look better (a rare occurrence in the director's canon) and made the great choice of filming it the Missorri small town, where he and his crew received death threats from racists. This is also an unusually smart movie, as it tries to understand how the good white people in the town can still have moral beliefs about race that abhorrent.
I will not reveal the ending of the film, but I will say that it does not end a character making a speech about how we all must get along, it does not end with the implication that everything will be okay from this point on, and, in fact, barely resolves much of anything. It is however, true to what must have gone on down at the time, and after I thought about the actions of a few brave black teenagers and their effect on society, I realized it in its own small way, offered a small amount of real hope.The Intruder (1961)