In a piece titled “No Phony Magnolias”, published in the Washington Post soon after the film’s release, Louisiana-born writer Hodding Carter voiced his admiration for how Faulkner’s complex exploration of racial tension and “the Southern character” had been sympathetically handled by the “Tennessee born and bred” Brown, pointing out that such nuanced representations had largely been absent from previous Hollywood films (B5). Both studio publicity and critical reviews alluded to Brown’s Southern roots, suggesting that it was his “understanding” of Southern culture and collective mentality (implicitly, white) that ensured the film could play in both the North and the South without undue censorship or critical backlash. Many commentators praised the film’s “authenticity” and “realism”, the latter enhanced by the decision to film on location in Oxford, Mississippi and by the use of nonprofessionals in minor roles. Theorist and practitioner Paul Rotha, in a private letter to director Brown, commended the film for a “sincerity that we seldom see on the screen” amateur filmmakers were advised to study the film for “effective examples of the dramatic uses of sound-and silence” (D.C. Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times called it a “grimly courageous picture” (11), while the reviewer for the racially conservative The Chicago Daily Tribune noted it was “a blunt sketch of problems in race relations” that was both “probing” and “accurate” (“Mae Tinee” B7).

In his review for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised Brown’s “brilliant, stirring” film that “slashes right down to the core of complex racial resentments and social divisions in the South” and “cosmically mocks the hollow pretense of ‘white supremacy’” (19). When the film was released at the end of 1949, it garnered largely positive reviews, both in the general press and among film writers. The soon-to-be blacklisted writer Ben Maddow provided the screenplay and Tennessee-raised Clarence Brown, a veteran of the studio system with a career stretching back to the 1910s, produced and directed it. Produced on the heels of independent film Lost Boundaries (Alfred Werker, 1949) and studio releases Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, 1949) and Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), Intruder in the Dust had perhaps the most impressive pedigree, adapted as it was from the novel by Pulitzer-prize-winning author William Faulkner. Īs one of the four big “race issue” films Hollywood produced in 1949, MGM’s film occupies a central place in the history of screen representations of blacks following the Second World War. In doing so, I hope to bridge the gap between a more traditional auteur-based focus and a new film history approach that involves the examination of archival papers, oral sources and newly accessible contextual material (most notably, a range of critical reviews in both national and local press).

This article offers a case study of one film, Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949), tracing its place in the larger historical context of evolving attitudes to race in America from the early twentieth century to the aftermath of the Second World War, and examining the factors, both personal and societal, that influenced its content and reception.

Such a methodology was deemed necessary after the excesses of the auteur studies of the 1960s and 1970s, but it perhaps risks overlooking the often-personal motives that might compel a director (or indeed an actor or producer) to take on a particular project. In their Introduction to the collection The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, editors James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper note the recent reframing of film history to accommodate a more inclusive approach that considers how “contextual factors-the mode of production, the economic and cultural strategies of the studios, the intervention of the censors” might serve to influence film content and, in turn, shape our understanding of the text (3). Exploring Racial Politics, Personal History and Critical Reception: Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949) Gwenda Young

Intruder in the dust movie