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ROGER CORMAN’S 1962 FILM ‘THE INTRUDER’ AND THE CRISIS OF
NATIONAL VALUES  
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Luca Celada
May 30, 2024
Il Manifesto Global
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_ Disinformation and innuendo are weaponized. “Intruders” abound
as well, even if they no longer need to take the Greyhound to the
backwoods. Today’s agitators work through social media and podcasts.
_

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When Roger Corman passed away at 98 this month, film lovers from
around the world mourned the director and producer who became known as
King of the Cult. Corman built a 300-plus filmography on a steady
supply of sci-fi, drive-in monsters, fast cars and caged heat. He
proclaimed the legendary thriftiness of his budgets in the title of
his autobiography: “How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and
Never Lost a Dime.”

There was, however, at least one exception to that record of
low-budget profitability, as he himself admitted in interviews. One
movie that lost money was also his only “serious” work,
1962’s _The Intruder, _a film which has more in common with those
of Stanley Kramer, Norman Jewison and other directors who at the time
began delving into social issues and civil rights. _The
Intruder_ ‘s release came a few months before that of _To Kill A
Mockingbird_. In Alex Stapleton’s 2011 documentary _Corman’s
World, _the director says: “I wanted to do something a little bit
different. I read the book ‘The Intruder,’ which is about the
integration of schools in the South, and I wanted to make the
picture.”

“The Intruder” was a novel published in 1959 by Charles Beaumont,
a prolific author of genre short stories and many _Twilight
Zone_ scripts, part of the generation that included Ray Bradbury,
Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison. His one novel is inspired by
events that had been roiling the Jim Crow South following the Brown v.
Board of Education Supreme Court decision, whose 70th anniversary was
last May 17.

Stemming from a case in Topeka, Kansas, that 1954 ruling, which found
segregation of schools in violation of the 14th amendment, would be
followed by a second decision a year later which resulted in a federal
mandate for school integration across the South. The landmark rulings
would serve as catalysts for the civil rights movement, but it would
take more than just the rulings to end the long-established apartheid.
Rather, the mandates set in motion a series of confrontations as many
Southern states openly rebelled against federally imposed integration.

The episode which perhaps most endures as the iconic embodiment of the
constitutional crises of the times, was the integration of schools in
Little Rock, Arkansas, only achieved when Eisenhower federalized the
state’s National Guard in 1957 and ordered the troops to protect
Black children’s access to schools. But scenes of irate white
demonstrators encircling schoolhouses and berating Black kids trying
to go to class were commonplace for months and years in many places,
including the East Tennessee town of Clinton. In that small community
on the outskirts of Knoxville, the National Guard intervened even
prior to Little Rock — in 1956 — to quell the supremacist riots
which tried to stop integration. In the years of unrest, the local
high school was bombed with dynamite.

The violence in Clinton was stoked by outside agitators bent on making
it a flashpoint of segregationist activism. Among these were Alabama
racist Asa Carter, who would later be associated with George
Wallace’s presidential run, and Ku Klux Klan member John Kasper, who
traveled to the South from New York to incite violence with his
inflammatory supremacist rhetoric. These were the events which
inspired Beaumont’s novel, including the integration by the first
Black students (known as the Clinton 12), the riots and the vicious
beating of a white pastor who had accompanied the Black pupils to
school.

Above all, the titular character of Beaumont’s book, as well as of
the screenplay he would later write for Corman’s film, is a
composite of Carter and Kasper. The latter was originally from New
Jersey, but endeavored to inflame Southern spirits with his rabidly
racist rhetoric; the former had delivered an infamous speech at
Clinton’s Anderson County Courthouse.

In the film, Clinton is changed to the fictional town of Caxton but
the speech features prominently as delivered by the protagonist, here
called Adam Cramer, and played by a 29-year old William Shatner. Like
Carter and Kasper, Cramer is a virulent racist, in this case 
representing a Washington group called the “Patrick Henry Society”
and, as he tells the assembled townsfolk, “We’re dedicated to
giving people the truth. What I’m gonna tell you is gonna make your
blood boil. Because I’m gonna show you that the way this country
goes is gonna depend entirely and wholly and completely on you!”

Those words introduce ideas that will be familiar to any 2024 viewer
and highlight the discomfiting familiarity of viewing the film from
the vantage point of the current national regression into reactionary
populism. Kasper uses identity politics to heighten victimhood with
the language of grievance and paranoia, casting his audience into an
imagined last stand against encroaching change. He also asks them
“Are you willing to fight to the last ditch until it’s over?” a
not-so-distant echo of the “fight like hell” exhortation Trump
lobbed on Jan. 6, 2021, to incite a base he really does not have much
in common with.

Even his rhetorical flourishes sound eerily familiar like when he
says, “People are saying you don’t give a damn, because you
didn’t fight!”

Other mainstays of Cramer’s invective are the concept of the
“truth” he delivers versus the implicit fakeness of those who
would swindle the honest townsfolk (“they’ve cheated and deceived
you, filled your heads with filthy lies…”). The speech is infused
with the same suspicion of deceiving elites employed today by red
state fear mongers and MAGAs, and the evergreen appeal to conspiracy
to insinuate suspicion of the other and the foreign.

In the film the agitator turns to age-old tropes of
“blood-poisoning” by “Jews and communists” who are abetting
the “negroes” in a plot to “mongrelize” the nation. And in
another glaring parallel he attacks the judiciary: “They went to the
courts (to) Judge Silver who is a Jew and is known to have leftist
leanings…” You could be forgiven for thinking you’re at one of
Trump’s post-trial press conferences.

Beaumont wrote what amounts to a case study of demagogy and of the
power of inflammatory language, he also highlighted the very narrow
emotional terrain that separates willing listeners from expressing
their worst selves. American propensity for guns and mob violence was
inextricably tied to Jim Crow ugliness as it viciously lashed out at
attempts to finally eradicate it, a century after Reconstruction.

Arguably divisions in the country were deeper then than even today and
they would deepen with the generational rupture brought on by the
Vietnam War and the emerging counterculture. Gene Corman, Roger’s
brother, recalled how, at the time, the lives of the filmmakers were
threatened while shooting on location in Missouri (Tennessee had been
deemed too dangerous), “People were driving us out of locations, we
had to change motels, it got to be very heavy down there (…) I think
we were a little naive at the time.” Nor was the animosity confined
to the South. “At the screening preview at Pacific Theater,”
recalled Roger Corman, “there was almost a riot. Someone came up,
pinned me to the wall and said: ‘You’re a communist, you
shouldn’t belong in this country’.”

Even so, the turmoil back then portended great change and progress,
marking the beginning of a civil rights awakening that would sweep the
land and shape national policies. The feeling today is that the nation
stands on the precipice of an epochal involution that could
realistically mark the end of democratic experiment as we have known
it. Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas marked the anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education by insinuating that the ruling may have been
unconstitutional. In the current backlash, books are banned and
assaults on civil rights are once again cloaked in “states’
rights.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been severely curtailed,
Roe v. Wade nullified, and the promise of police reform made after the
George Floyd protests, quietly shelved.

And in today’s connected landscape, disinformation and innuendo are
weaponized and viralized at the speed of the internet, reaching many
orders of magnitudes more than simple stump speeches. “Intruders”
abound as well, even if they no longer need to take the Greyhound to
the backwoods. Today’s agitators work through social media and
podcasts. Pundits like Charlie Kirk have given xenophobia a shiny new
coat of paint while white suprematists like Nick Fuentes coat their
racism in updated eugenic conspiracy theories. Both are young white
men radicalized in their respective hate bubbles, much like Kasper was
(specifically as a follower of Ezra Pound.)

Abetted by Trump’s GOP, the movement today speaks from governors’
mansions and wields the gavel on the Supreme Court. Crusades against
DEI and Affirmative Action are stand-ins for “stopping negroes at
the schoolhouse doors.” When African-American studies and critical
theory are banned, the intent is as clear as when Cramer asks the good
people of Caxton: “Are you gonna sit back and allow integration to
go ahead in the whole country!?”

The young provocateurs who are invited to dinner at Mar-A-Lago or
given microphones at CPAC rail against “cultural marxists” instead
of “reds,” but they are playing Kasper’s and Paxton’s game.
Burning crosses may have gone out style, but marches with torches are
still very much in vogue as we saw in Charlottesville — the KKK may
hold less sway, but others have taken up its mantle of hate,
“standing back and standing by” to fight their battle.

As America is once again in danger of succumbing to its worst
instincts, the dog whistles today are as loud as they were 70 years
ago, and for the first time are amplified by the platform of a major
party. There is little question that the GOP which today has closed
ranks around Donald Trump has co-opted many themes that would have
been commonplace in the segregated South. That party may be funded by
interested billionaires, but it is fueled by a base that, like the
citizens of Caxton, seem to heed Cramer’s call to “see the country
remains free, white and American!”

* Films
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* Racism
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* demagoguery
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