Lucas' plight bothers white middle-school-aged Chick (Claude Jarman Jr.), who owes Lucas for a past favor. Chick convinces lawyer and family friend Stevens (David Brian) to defend Lucas, and Stevens begrudgingly does so. The two prod the equally indifferent sheriff (Will Geer) into ensuring Lucas' safety from the gathering lynch mob, and into an investigation of who actually murdered the luckless Gowrie brother.
The script is based on a William Faulkner novel published just one year before. Faulkner received 50K for the film rights, roughly equivalent to a million dollars today. The film was shot on location in Faulker's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.
How others will see it. Intruder in the Dust (1949) was a money-loser for MGM, a studio not known for films with social content. One suspects it never even played in Southern theaters. Nonetheless, the movie was recognized in its day with nominations from the Golden Globes, BAFTA, the National Board of Review, the Writers Guild of America, and the New York Film Critics Circle.
Today at imdb.com, the movie has a respectable 3K user votes and a fairly high user rating of 7.6 out of 10. The user reviews are almost uniformly positive, praising the skilful adaptation the Faulkner source novel and the performances of Hernandez and Jarman. The lawyer, as played by David Brian, comes in for some scorn, even though he comes through in the end.
How I felt about it. A most unlikely trio on a most unlikely mission. In the context of a 1949 Hollywood film, it is surreal that two boys (one white, one black) and an elderly woman travel to a distant cemetery together to dig up the grave of a murder victim. With no motive other than to learn the truth about whether a man they hardly know is falsely accused of murder, and despite the admonition not to leave home due to the likelihood of encountering an angry lynch mob.
The point of this episode is that no one else, not the accused's lawyer and not the sheriff, would take the trouble to find out whether the slug in the murder victim's back belongs to the accused's gun. The sheriff and lawyer expect Lucas will be lynched shortly, and show little interest in preventing it until Lucas is practically exonerated. Perhaps a competent investigation seems less likely in Jim Crow country than two boys and an old woman risking their hide to free an unrelated black man, as if the story was lifted from a Hardy Boys novel.
The film also reminds one of To Kill a Mockingbird, although Atticus Finch is far more heroic than Stevens is here.
One also must admit that the story is too tidy. All the speculating comes true. Maybe Lucas wasn't the killer. Maybe the shot didn't come from Lucas' gun. Maybe the body is buried in the quicksand. Maybe the killer will attempt to shoot Lucas in his own home. Maybe the most obvious suspect is the person who actually committed the murder: the murder victim's own brother; a menacing, humorless figure (Charles Kemper) who not coincidentally seems the biggest advocate of lynching Lucas.
One scene is particularly touching. The jailer has removed the mattress from Lucas' prison cot, forcing Lucas to sleep on the uncomfortable steel link support.
Upon researching this film, I learned that its lead, Claude Jarman Jr., died less than a month ago at the age of 91. A long life for a child actor. Jarman's three biggest films were only a few years apart, starting with his Oscar-winning debut in The Yearling (1946), and ending with his fourth-billing in Rio Grande (1950).
The Yearling was also directed by Clarence Brown. Although Brown made other films of note (especially Anna Karenina and The Human Comedy), much of the credit for the present film's quality likely belongs to screenwriter Ben Maddow, whose best-known movie, The Asphalt Jungle was made the following year.