Clarence Brown (1949)

This adaptation, by Ben Maddow, of William Faulkner’s 1948 novel is compelling and concentrated – there’s hardly any subplot but there is a crucial backstory.  As a twelve-year-old, a white Mississippi boy called Chick Mallison is hunting rabbits on land that a black man, Lucas Beauchamp, owns and works.  Chick falls into an icy creek and Lucas takes him back to his house to dry and warm up.  Although technically a landowner, Lucas is poor; the food he gives Chick is the only food he has.  Lucas is also proud:  when Chick offers him money in return for his hospitality, he stonily rejects it.   Four years later, Lucas is arrested for the murder of a white man, Vinson Gowrie.  Chick, convinced that the charge is false and racist, sees an opportunity to repay his debt to Lucas.  Chick’s uncle, a successful lawyer, takes on the case and Lucas is eventually proven innocent.  The victim’s brother, Crawford, leads the lynch mob that gathers at the courthouse where Lucas is held, threatening to mete out ‘justice’ if the law drags its feet in doing so.  It turns out that Crawford is also his brother’s killer.

Clarence Brown’s intelligent direction maintains a skilful balance between racial drama and whodunit, and the film is very carefully cast for faces and physiques.  The townspeople outside the courthouse express Jim Crow, lynch-mob culture realistically.  This stolid, staring mass is believable and troubling to an extent that actors playing vicious racists in a more dynamic, histrionic style rarely are.  This virtue of Intruder in the Dust also points up one of its shortcomings.  When Lucas Beauchamp is exonerated and the mob disperses, Chick describes them as ‘running away’ and his uncle explains that they were ‘running away from themselves’.  The lines spoken by the liberal lawyer, John Stevens, over the course of the film include plenty of sententious moralising and it’s as well that the acting of David Brian, who plays Stevens, is pretty basic.  The effect might be worse if he declaimed his insights powerfully.  In any case, it’s important to remember how benighted America was, in terms of civil rights and racial justice, when the film was made – and that material of this kind was, for Hollywood, novel and ambitious in 1949.   William Faulkner thought well of the picture.

Juano Hernandez, with his teak-tough appearance and stiff-legged gait, is impressive – he makes Lucas Beauchamp’s proud rectitude and refusal to ‘play nigger’ admirable and infuriating.  There’s also a humorous light in Hernandez’s eyes whenever Lucas is besting John Stevens (which is quite often).  Claude Jarman Jr gives a strongly felt performance as Chick and there’s fine work in smaller roles from Will Geer (the sheriff), Elizabeth Patterson (the elderly and indomitable spinster who helps to ensure justice is done) and, best of all, Porter Hall as Nub Gowrie, the father of Vinson and Crawford (Charles Kemper).  The film was shot in Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, Mississippi, some of whose citizens appear in the crowd scenes; Porter Hall, no less than any of these actual locals, is convincingly part of the geography and culture.  The episode comprising Chick’s rabbit-hunting expedition and the subsequent scene in Lucas’s kitchen are especially well observed (there’s a resonance between Chick’s re-emergence from the creek and a later sequence, in which Nub Gowrie is rescued from quicksand).  Julia S Marshbanks appears in the kitchen scene as Lucas’s wife Molly:  she has no words but she is a memorable image.

4 May 2015