« Previous Post | Main | Next Post »

Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Filed under: Imported

Mexican movie poster for The Intruder

Last week�s quiz movie was, I believe, the first to have three titles to pick from (or four, if you count its British nom de plume), but while Shame and (especially) I Hate Your Guts are both fitting choices, its original title, The Intruder, is still the best. Released in 1961, directed by Roger Corman and written by Charles Beaumont (from his novel), it stars a young William Shatner as a racist agitator who travels to a southern town to keep its high school from being desegregated. (The town is never named, and while it�s likely that it�s meant to be Selma, Alabama, most of the movie was actually shot in Illinois.)

Shatner has never been better than he is in this film, and while many might think that�s slight praise, he won many acting awards for the film at various festivals, and deservedly so. Besides being possibly his least mannered performance, it also took great courage to take such an unsympathetic role, especially so early in his career. And according to conventional Hollywood wisdom, he was also taking a �wrong� direction, careerwise by appearing in such a low-budget movie--Corman estimates that the entire production cost less than $80,000-- but as he tells Corman in the interview feature on the DVD, he would have paid the director to have gotten the part. (The ever-frugal Corman replies, �I wish you�d told me that then!�)

Just the making of the film was an act of courage for all involved. Both men relate stories of police harassment (the climactic scene, where a public spectacle is made of a black high school student, had to be shot in three different towns) as well as death threats by locals. Corman mentions that a scene where Shatner leads a convoy of Klansmen through a black neighborhood was so fraught with danger that after the cameras stopped, all the actors stayed in their cars and drove straight to St. Louis. And it was only after they�d completed the scene where Shatner first rouses the rabble that they learned that the site they used-- the front lawn of a local courthouse-- had been the scene of an actual lynching.

It all made the film better, however, and there is a sweaty tension and realism to it that's missing in later big-budget attempts like Mississippi Burning. While The Intruder was the first movie Corman ever made that lost money (southern drive-ins weren�t keen on showing it), it�s possibly his all-time best, and it�s well worth watching if you�ve never seen it.

Posted by Steve Monaco at March 14, 2005 10:47 PM

« Bad commercials of the past | Main | The Monday Movie Quiz #50 »