Intruder in the Dust

1949

Crime / Drama

9
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 93% · 43 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 84% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 7.6/10 10 3194 3.2K

small town based on novel or book mississippi river falsely accused

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Plot summary

Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired. Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him, but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence.

Director

Clarence Brown Photo
Clarence Brown

Top cast

Dan White Photo
Dan White as Will Legate
Elizabeth Patterson Photo
Elizabeth Patterson as Miss Eunice Habersham
Claude Jarman Jr. Photo
Claude Jarman Jr. as Chick Mallison
David Brian Photo
David Brian as John Gavin Stevens
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
802.5 MB
1280*934
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 27 min
Seeds 23
1.46 GB
1480*1080
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 27 min
Seeds 50

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by momohund 8 / 10

Not as good as the book, but good enough

No movie could ever do justice to Faulkner's command of the English language. but they did a pretty good job here. Lucas Beauchamp is exactly the way I pictured him in the book, as is Chick. What the movie couldn't really go into was how Beauchamp wasn't liked by the Negro people either, because he was equally as stubborn. Not that it is a bad thing, but from my take on the book that was his attitude toward the world (yet, I got the feeling it was white society's racism that started it and it spilled over into Negro society, until that became his attitude toward everyone).the best part of the movie is that you get to see Yoknapatawpha county (actually, Oxford, Mississippi) exactly as Faulkner wrote about it (the film was made when Faulkner was alive and writing). It doesn't look that much different today. Because of this alone, the movie is worth a watch considering it is filmed in Faulkner's backyard. A true must see for Faulkner fans.
Reviewed by RanchoTuVu 9 / 10

quicksand

Juano Hernandez plays Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer with a ten acre spread, who is facing a lynching at the hands of hundreds of poor and destitute looking whites who have come into the small Southern town by the busload, as he is locked away in the town's aging jail. His only hope is to prove his innocence of the crime of murdering one of the Gowrie boys, a family klan of five sons led by a father who lost an arm a long time ago as well as his wife. The back story of Lucas, the Gowries, and the assembling of whites who look more the part of poverty than any other film I've ever seen, give this film a heightened sense of realism, which is added to by super intelligent overall development. While there is a certain amount of overt racism in the film, the real story seems to lie in the faces of all the people the camera catches, whether they (the people) speak any lines or not. The crowd never really turns into the mob that you expect it to, which actually makes this movie more interesting and exciting. The film masterfully avoids that drama in order to get at the underlying decency of all the people. This is a must see for Will Geer fans, as he plays the skeptical sheriff who brings Beauchamp in near the film's beginning, with a crowd already gathering. Set amidst dirt roads, rundown farmhouses, with an intriguing batch of quicksand that is under a bridge, all of which now has probably been paved over, Intruder In The Dust is a real look at a life that doesn't exist anymore.
Reviewed by AlsExGal 9 / 10

Three unlikely and even reluctant heroes

Chuck Mallison (Claude Jarmison Jr.) waits around in a crowd in the small Southern town where he lives as the sheriff brings in Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) for shooting VInson Gowrie in the back. Lucas, before entering the jail, yells out to Chuck and tells him to get his uncle, an attorney.Chuck tells his uncle John Stevens (David Brian) that he is troubled by his confusion over his attitude towards Lucas. Lucas is not like the other black men in the town. He doesn't show deference or fear to the white men who live there. In Chuck's only encounter with Lucas, when Chuck fell into an iced up pond on Lucas' property, it wasn't that Lucas behaved wrongly towards him - in fact he was quite hospitable. It was the fact that Lucas treated Chuck as an equal who happened to be a guest in his home. This recognition of the roots of racism growing inside of him seems to be what bothers Chuck more than anything since Chuck is simply not accustomed to a black man who feels free to be unlikeable and haughty with white people.Chuck goes with his uncle when he talks to his new client, Lucas, that night in the jail. But Lucas won't help himself that much when talking to his attorney past the point of saying that he did not kill Gowrie. Part of the reason for that is probably the fact that Lucas' lawyer thinks that the best Lucas can hope for is a fair trial followed by a hanging versus a hanging with no trial. Initially he won't entertain the idea that Lucas could be innocent. Slowly it is revealed - to Chuck, to his uncle, and to an older woman who is a client of Chuck's uncle (Elizabeth Patterson), that Lucas could not have committed this crime. But they need not only very hard evidence of Lucas' innocence, they need evidence of the guilt of whoever did commit the murder. The criminal justice system, at this point, is pretty much a rubber stamp for conviction when it comes to black men, especially black men accused of killing a white man. Lucas' advocates don't need a reasonable doubt, they need a shadow of a doubt. And there is the threat of lynching until this trio gets that shadow of a doubt.This was an excellent very early film on racism and the criminal justice system in the south, beating out To Kill a Mockingbird by more than a decade. Juano Hernandez is the heart of this film as Lucas Beauchamp. He displays an enigmatic dignity - you never know where he is coming from with his lack of explanation of what happened until the end. I'd highly recommend this one.
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