New Picture

Intruder in the Dust (MGM) is a too-earnest treatment of a wildly imaginative novel. The story, derived from one of William Faulkner's most polemic works, was shot almost entirely in Faulkner's home town (Oxford, Miss., pop. 3,500), with the author acting as a sidewalk superintendent during the filming. Nonetheless, the movie, stripped of Faulkner's peripheral probings into mind, heart and scene, is not only dead serious but dead on its feet; its cautious approach to its material results in a film that is more like an arty still photograph than a motion picture.

The plot focuses on two days in a Southern town where "an arrogant, hard-headed . . . independent Negro" named Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) is accused of shooting a white man in the back. While Lucas rests tranquilly in the jailhouse and most of the county stands outside trying to decide when to lynch him, a few conscience-stricken citizens (including Claude Jarman Jr. and David Brian as a lawyer) set out to prove his innocence. The path they take to clear him leads to such Tom Sawyerish hocus-pocus as grave-robbing and fishing in quicksand for a vanished corpse.

Movies produced or directed by Clarence Brown (Flesh and the Devil, National Velvet") are not likely to be commonplace. Intruder is an honest attempt to picture the South as it actually is, but Brown's efforts to underplay the sensational and the macabre material lead to an impression of stiffness. The menacing events are pictured with such a reaching for poetic blandness that, by contrast, an energetic shot of the sheriff whipping up some scrambled eggs becomes a hardhitting, action-filled image.

Faulkner's book suggested that the North, East and West should leave Southerners alone to work out their own redemption for mistreating the Negro. The Faulknerian message is left out of a movie that could have stood almost any sort of clear social comment.

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