The Intruder

After years of debate, the courts have finally ordered the desegregation of the nation's schools. A small (and fictitious) Missouri town must deal with the issue as black students go to the previously all white school for the first time.

Enter Adam Cramer (Shatner), a representative from Washington of the Patrick Henry Society. He claims to be a social worker, but it turns out that this society is a racist organization opposed to desegregation. Cramer hopes to interfere with the court-ordered policy and begins to stir up the community with fiery rhetoric and bold tactics. Cramer soon discovers that the mob he has helped create is beyond is ability to control.

"The Intruder" is a little known film written by Charles Beaumont (a core writer for "The Twilight Zone" and a screenwriter for many of American International's classic 1960s horror films) and directed by Roger Corman. It shouldn't be little known. This is arguably the best and most important film ever made by Corman and perhaps by Beaumont as well. Shatner puts in a sterling performance as the racist Cramer and the supporting cast, which included both veteran actors and local citizens from the town of Charleston, Missouri (where it was filmed), is also excellent. Corman and Beaumont took on some seriously volatile subject matter and used both tact and intelligence to tell a story and send a message. For those who are more sensitive to racist language or who are caught up with political correctness, "The Intruder" might be somewhat abrasive or uncomfortable to watch. Personally, I think that this would be ideal for viewing in high schools and colleges that are studying the subject of racism and integration in the United States. Regardless, for those seeking a well made, well acted film

I watched this for free at YouTube. I was expecting cardboard characters and clichés from the mouth of a virtually unknown William Shatner.William Shatner is brilliant. Charleton Heston or Burt Lancaster or Gregory Peck could not have done better.

In a confrontation scene between Shatner and Leo Gordon the tension builds to a magnificent and believable ending. Each actor and actress is wonderful. The local townsfolk come across as the real thing.

This is a movie about racism that does not have a filter. Nothing is corrected to protect the ears of the viewer and listener. Not all white folks are bad or stupid or anything. This was an era. These are the kinds of people we might find dealing with a national issue. Some of the people black and white wanted integration and some were opposed and some were violently opposed.

I don't think there is a more accurate movie about the times represented here. There are bigger budget movies.

This one is too bold for TV. Maybe the internet will bring it back to some top ten lists. Well worth watching.

With 100 times the budget ($80K) of Roger Corman's The Intruder, lesser directors have created thousands of films with less than a hundredth of the intelligence, sensitivity, entertainment-value and raw power of this film. Charles Beaumont, the unfortunately short-lived author and screen-writer, was contracted to produce a screenplay from his novel (and appeared in the film as the beleaguered but morally just principal of a newly integrated school), a young but accomplished William Shatner was hired, and a few veteran character actors were brought on board. Most of the actors and crew were locals who, according to Corman, didn't know very much about what they were getting into. The rest is legend.

Corman indulged in a form of guerilla film-making to make a statement that he felt needed to be made. Corman, the cast and the crew were thrown out of two locations, worked under constant threat of physical violence, and wrapped this lean, tight, morality play in a grand total of three weeks. Most of the cast had literally NO acting experience. Does it show? Occasionally - but in the end the odd representations of some of the extras in the mob only adds to the film's realism.

The Intruder is a story which examines the ease with which a charismatic leader with a pernicious all-consuming hunger for power can exploit fear to rally otherwise normal people into irrationality, violence and hatred. William Shatner stars as Adam Cramer, a northern hate-monger who has just arrived in the small southern town of Caxton to sow the seeds of racial violence just as the town has begun to integrate its schools in compliance with federal law. Cramer preaches non-violent resistance, but is unwilling to stand in the way when his followers escalate the issue in their own way. His powerful and dramatic speaking ability and his cunning turn most of the town's white minority against their black neighbors, culminating in his orchestration of a vicious frame-up of an innocent student.

Cramer is, in one way or another, behind almost everything that happens in this film. Yet the film does not permit facile scape-goating of this single sociopath. Rather, it indicts ignorance in general, and racism, hatred and intolerance much more specifically. Amazingly, it does so without exploiting stereotypes of southerners, yankees, blacks, whites, or anybody else. The Intruder deals with its subjects without reducing them to anything that could be wholly represented or analyzed in the hour and half of intense drama the film gives us. Instead, the Intruder leaves its subjects wide-open and raw. If you view this film about once every 6 months, you might just take something different away from it each time.

I do not believe the rumor that Roger Corman has ever, in any way, suggested that William Shatner's performance destroyed this film's box office potential. In interviews, Corman has consistently given Shatner a great deal of praise for his award-winning portrayal of evil incarnate. And rightly so. Shatner is nothing short of incredible in this film. He clearly dedicated everything he had to this film, and it shows. Other noteworthy performances are given by Frank Maxwell, Robert Emhardt and Charles Barnes.

The film is pristinely directed - lean and economically edited, even for Corman. The cinematography is straightforward and clean. And the locations are entirely appropriate - another Corman trademark.

Possibly the best truly low-budget film I have ever seen. Would-be film-makers, even some established big-budget purveyors of modern junk-food-film should learn a great deal from a careful study of the Intruder.

Also known by the more appropriate title 'I Hate Your Guts', this is probably Corman's best film, and takes its visual, stylistic and thematic cue from the work of Fritz Lang, especially 'Fury'. This may sound like an unintelligent, superficial comparison; sure, they're both lynch-mob films, but how can you compare the rigorous intellectual austerity of the German with the sensationalist populism of Corman? Maybe, and this is a film where Corman repeatedly grabs you by the collar and thumps you in the guts, never letting up on the violence or shock, while Lang would keep a more intense distance; but they both achieve the same ends with different results.

This is Corman's most painstakingly worked-out film, which is why it is so powerful, suggesting, like Lang, a set of mathematical propositions that seem simple but, add up to a theorem that seems to negate mathematical principles of logic, order etc. As in a Lang film, there is no 'hero' to root for - the lead here is a sinister right-winger linked to the KKK who arrives in an archetypal Southern town to stir up race hatred. He is given the conventional Hollywood hero treatment: the opening credits set up his point of view, establishing his way of looking at the world.

But even over these credits, Corman confuses us. At first we think he's a solitary figure, it is him alone we see entering the town and looking at it. Then he comes out with a woman and child, and we assume he's a family man, but that turns out to be wrong too. So, in these opening scenes we are presented with a lead character in the conventional manner, but, unconventionally, we are unable to get a grip on him.

Similarly, in spite of the title and the menacing opening music, Cramer's good manners and charm continue to suggest him as a hero, even though he is trying to stir up racist feeling, especially when compared to the next significant male character, a loud braggart who appears to be raping his nymphomaniac wife. In this first third, there are no sides drawn, we might almost be watching a racist film, such is Cramer's conventional heroic status. He even seems a movie star, with his dark shades and good looks, which Corman plays on ironically in the scenes of demagogary and when his 'fans' protest his jailing.

Like Lang, Corman switches point of view disturbingly and decisively. This opening out of point of view makes clear the issues, and in a way that conventional Hollywood cinema of the time could not conceive. The reason films like this were considered 'B' or exploitation is because they were telling truths that official Hollywood didn't even know existed. How many contemporary Hollywood films were even dealing with these issues, never mind as provocatively and intelligently as this one? When they finally got round to it, it was cosy liberal kramergloop.

There is no flip solution here - the moral centre is a moderate racist who is nearly killed for his growing ethical awareness (the newspaper editor) - other liberals are shown to be almost criminally useless. Corman asks questions with no easy answers - how do you enforce progressive laws? how do you hold back a mob without becoming as reactionary as them? Cramer, influenced by Lenin as much as Hitler, makes his appeals to democracy and freedom, and Corman forces us to admit that he is right, to reconsider what we mean by these concepts. This is a stunning film, full of tense calm giving onto explosions of harrowing violence, with an insight into its roots in sexual neurosis, including a sequence where the KKK come into town like an invading army, a huge cross like a tank turret, ready to be burned; a lynch sequence as shocking as Huck Finn or 'The Ox-bow Incident'.

Along with the unusual, Langian clarity of the monochrome imagery, note the grids on or around Cramer - crossed telegraph wires, the bars of the hotel lobby etc. - culminating in the demand for the accursed rapist behind a grilled window, like a frothing beast; or the childlike immaturity of the racists, whose hatred centres around the school's swing. The frightening 'speech' scene, outside a monumental civic building, in Nuremberg-like lighting, is more potent than anything in 'All the King's Men'.

William Shatner is very good in this film portraying a charismatic white supremacist who drifts into a small southern town to preach hate at the time the local high school is beginning to be integrated.

Extremely bold and brutally honest portrayal of race relations in the South in the early 60's when the film was made. By viewing it I can see it must have been way too inflammatory for its time. Yet, some parts of this flim made me kind of tense/uncomfortable. Therefore, I don't see it getting wide acceptance in today's politically correct world either.

Despite this, the film's theme and moral messages are ageless. The script is so intelligently written coupled with Shatner's convincing performance, I was not given impression that this is considered a "B" movie. OK, well maybe there are a few scenes that may indicate that but they are outnumbered by the compelling drama throughout the film. The final 5 to 10 minutes are particularly tense which may actually be hard to watch.

A commendable effort, I had no regrets in plucking down a few bucks to buy this flick.