William Shatner plays shady character Adam Cramer in powerful film about school integration in a southern town
THE INTRUDER (Roger Corman, 1962)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, August 20, 9:30
Series continues through August 28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Exploitation master Roger Corman shot out of the gates in the mid-1950s, directing and/or producing more than three dozen films between 1955 and 1961, directing doomsday disasters (Day the World Ended, Last Woman on Earth) and sci-fi quickies (It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters), cheapie Westerns (Gunslinger, The Oklahoma Woman) and teen rave-ups (Sorority Girl, Teenage Doll), crime dramas (Machine-Gun Kelly; I, Mobster) and horror (A Bucket of Blood, The Undead), as well as the tales of Poe (House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum). But he tried something a little different with 1962’s The Intruder, a gripping, yet still exploitative, story of integration set in the ultraconservative south. Adapted by Charles Beaumont from his 1959 novel, which itself was inspired by the Little Rock Nine, the film stars William Shatner as Adam Cramer, a self-styled “social reformer” who arrives in the small southern town of Caxton just after integration has become law and just as ten black students, led by Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), are about to join whites at the local high school. Under the auspices of the John Birch-like Patrick Henry Society, Cramer is determined to continue the fight against integration, stirring the locals to potential mob violence through carefully orchestrated speeches filled with hate and lies. He allies himself with wealthy plantation owner Verne Shipman (Robert Emhardt) and cozies up to high school girl Ella McDaniel (Beverly Lunsford), daughter of newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), one of the only reasonable white men in town. The manipulative Cramer will do just about anything to rile up the masses to keep the blacks from ruining America, but his own questionable personal morality might just get in the way, especially as he flirts with Vi (Jeanne Cooper), the wife of traveling salesman Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon).
Beaumont, who wrote nearly two dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone — though neither of the classics starring Shatner — appears in the film as Mr. Paton, a teacher in the school, along with fellow Twilight Zone scribe George Clayton Johnson, who plays Phil West; Johnson later wrote “The Man Trap,” the first regular episode of Star Trek. Indeed, The Intruder contains numerous Rod Serling-like elements, from the general social and political themes to Taylor Byars’s black-and-white cinematography and Herman Stein’s score. The Intruder is screening August 20 with Charles Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning short, Nine from Little Rock, as part of the BAMcinématek series “A Time for Burning: Cinema of the Civil Rights Movement,” which runs through August 28 with such other political films as Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Daniel Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun, Edward Pincus and David Neuman’s Black Natchez, and St. Clair Bourne’s Let the Church Say Amen! The two-week festival was organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but it now takes on even more meaning with the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional.