by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 22, 2008   Last Updated: February 23, 2008

"The Intruder" is a remarkable film from 1962. It follows the arrival of a stranger into a southern town, and his attempts to stir up racial tensions before the desegregation of a local school.

The movie stars William Shatner, who gives an intense performance as the visiting trouble-maker. He plays a smooth talker who checks into a boarding house, then starts drawing the locals into carefully-directed conversations. Soon Shatner's character is giving fiery speeches to a large mob, enjoying his position as the demagogue at the center of the movement. And he even uses his persuasiveness in other ways, seducing of the wife of the salesman in the next room.

But it's ultimately this salesman who recognizes the pattern behind his actions, suggesting the danger that's about to explode. He warns the strange demagogue that he may not be able to control the energy he's unleashed. The movie culminates with a mob descending descending on the school, inflamed by a false accusation of rape and about to hang an innocent black man. But in its final scene, Shatner loses the crowd's loyalty, and he frantically orates (to no effect) as they turn their backs on him.

The movie is a personal statement from Roger Corman, who used his own money to fund the film after it was turned down by several studios. After decades of producing cheap horror movies, he felt it was time to make a serious film - and he'd been moved by the struggle for civil rights in the south. (In real life, the Mississippi town where the movie was filmed had only integrated its schools 12 months before.) In his biography Corman remembers the crowd of Mississippi locals who appeared to watch Shatner's rabble-rousing speech. "They were already quite responsive to Bill's demagoguery," he writes, adding that they even received threatening letters during the production of the film. But he speaks fondly of the "old, toothless, lined weary rural American faces" he found in a local cafe "with worn-out overalls and the whirring overhead fans in the stifling heat."

The movie received positive reviews, and was later exhibited at several prestigious film festivals, but it also ran into problems. It was schedule for exhibition at Cannes, but withdrawn after real-life racial tensions at the University of Mississippi. The film's distributor went out of business, and ultimately this became Corman's first movie which failed to earn a profit. He identifies it as the largest disappointment in his career, a case where socially-conscious art failed as commerce during a crucial year in the early 60s.

It's one last real-world lesson that this movie delivered.

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