Down With.... Integration

Last month you may recall I screened The Music Man; Meredith Willson's beloved musical about a travelling con artist who arrives in a small American town and proceeds to have an enormous impact on the community there.

This week's film was released in the same year (1962) and tells the story of... a travelling con artist who arrives in a small American town and proceeds to have an enormous impact on the community there.

That is where the similarities end, however. The Intruder is not a beloved musical, Caxton Missouri is not River City, Iowa, and Adam Cramer is not Professor Harold Hill.

The Intruder was produced and directed by Roger Corman, a film-maker who had made his reputation (and his money) by producing very cheap genre pictures with titles like It Conquered the World and Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Roger Corman's working motto was "The monster should always be bigger than the leading lady."

Throughout the 1950s, Corman managed to build up a surprisingly profitable little film empire. His films were very cheap, very tacky, and very successful. By the early 1960s, Corman was well-established as a film-maker, but his name was not exactly associated with quality film-making, even though his films were always extremely profitable.

The Intruder was radically different from anything Corman had attempted to produce up to that point, but it was also in many ways his most personal film. It is loosely inspired by the events in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, when nine African American students were initially prevented from entering Arkansas Central High School by the National Guard, under the orders of the state Governor. President Eisenhower was eventually forced to intercede, and the students were escorted into the building under armed escort.

Protestors outside the Arkansas High School...

and a scene from The Intruder.

Roger Corman felt very strongly about integration, and had decided to use his position as a highly successful film-maker to say something meaningful about America in the early 1960s; going so far as to put his own money into the production.

The Intruder is the only Roger Corman film ever to make a loss at the box office.

The central character (The titular "Intruder" of the story) is played by a very young William Shatner, four years before he boldly went where no man had gone before. Here he plays a cynical stranger who arrives in the town, hoping to exploit the community's simmering racism and hatred as a quick and easy path to power. He eventually discovers that this type of hatred, once unleashed, is very hard to control.

 

We're so fortunate that nothing like this could ever happen today.

The Intruder remains an extremely powerful and "raw" film about a very unpleasant and painful moment in American history. If anything, it was too much, too soon for audiences in 1962 who were still too close to the issue and not ready to see it explored in a feature film.

Needless to say, the film contains depictions of extreme racial violence and very offensive language, but it also talks openly about an aspect of the United States that few other film-makers were prepared to acknowledge at the time.

We will be screening The Intruder at 7.30 on Thursday, the 19th of January at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.