Intruder in the dust1/11/2024 ![]() ![]() He also wrote scripts for two films by John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The Unforgiven (1960). He had previously participated, together with Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz, in the making of Native Land (1942), a film about attacks against workers and unions in America in the 1930s, with Paul Robeson as narrator. The adaptation was done by Ben Maddow, one of the more interesting scriptwriters of the 1940s and 50s. He was from the south (although born in Massachusetts he lived in Tennessee from when he was 11) and he did have personal experiences of events such as those that take place in his film, as had Faulkner. Considering the kind of films he usually made Intruder in the Dust is something of a departure, but this was a film he wanted to make, and he struggled with MGM to be able to make it. Other known films are National Velvet (1944), with Elizabeth Taylor on a horse, and the very sweet The Yearling (1946). He was perhaps at his best in the 1920s but he is more famous for making films with Greta Garbo (he was her favourite), such as Anna Christie (1930) and Anna Karenina (1935). This is an angry and sad film, based on the novel by William Faulkner and shot in Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi. It was one of the last films made by Clarence Brown, being both its producer and director. Brown was an impressive filmmaker even though few of his films are remembered today. But here Lucas Beauchamp is the hero, not for doing heroic acts but for not giving in or giving up, and he is not sentimentalised. In films about racism and injustices committed against African-Americans it is usually in the end white characters who are the heroes. This puts his behaviour at odds with what the white majority can accept, even those that would consider themselves progressive. ![]() He is a proud man, and he will not let go of his dignity and self-respect. Everybody in the town had taken it for granted that Lucas was guilty, and since he is all too aware of the fact that this is the white man's world he refuses to play any games with them. One is that the white lawyer has been set up as a hero in the film, the other is that Lucas says it with such a matter-of-fact tone of voice, albeit with a flash of anger. It is a remarkably powerful scene, for two special reasons. "Would you have believed me?" Lucas asks, to which the lawyer has no reply. In the end of Intruder in the Dust (1949) Lucas Beauchamp, an older black man arrested for a murder he did not commit, is asked by the white lawyer why he did not tell what had happened at the scene of the crime.
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