Intruder in the Dust

Intruder in the Dust (1949)

It's Sensational!

Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired. Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him, but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence.

Date of release
1949-11-22
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (53)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Drama, Crime, Mystery
Director
Clarence Brown

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: National Board of Review: Top Ten Films

Intruder in the Dust is a 1949 American Southern Gothic film noir directed by Clarence Brown and written by Ben Maddow, who adapted his screenplay from the 1948 William Faulkner novel of the same name. It stars David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr. and Juano Hernandez.

Production

Clarence Brown, who had been born in Massachusetts but was raised in Tennessee, wanted to adapt Faulker's novel into a film when it was published in 1948. Brown, who had directed multiple films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for over two decades, asked studio head Louis B. Mayer about doing a film adaptation, but Mayer had his doubts over whether it would be commercially successful.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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