Southern Discomfort

Racism Revised in the Film Version of Intruder in the Dust

The flowing, undulating passages of William Faulkner's writing style aside, the most striking phrases in Intruder in the Dust are those that sound archaic to 21st century ears. For readers born after the birth of the civil rights movement, the treatment of people of color in Faulkner's novel seems politically incorrect at best - bigoted and shameful at worst. Yet in the film version of the film (directed by Clarence Brown in 1949), there is a different tone, one that does not shy away from the racism of the South but regrets it.

Faulkner's novel tells of a black man named Lucas Beauchamp who has been arrested for the apparent murder of a white man. The entire novel is seen from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy, named Charlie "Chick" Mallison, who had been rescued by Lucas after falling into a frozen river on his land. Since that time, Chick had been trying to repay Lucas be he was unwilling to be in a black man's debt. Years later, Lucas asks Chick to help prove his innocence by doing the one thing he can't expect of any white man: he needs Chick to believe he may be innocent.

The idea that a black man standing over a dead white man must be guilty of murder becomes a lynchpin to both the film and novel. Granted, there is a smoking gun, but no one bothers to ask Lucas for an alibi, as if one is not possible. The aphorism "innocent until proven guilty" is abandoned (presumably) because the crime is against a white man. By the end, it becomes clear that this blind racism is merely a side effect of the Southern way of life, their inherent beliefs.

In Faulkner's writing, the mentality of the Southern man becomes startlingly clear. At one point Chick's Uncle Gavin Stevens, a lawyer, explains to him that blacks and whites in the South are all assigned roles and expected to play the part. In reference to a man they meet on the street Stevens says:

"All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man - which Mr Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do - and now the white people will take him out and burn him… both of them observing implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side of the fence… Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors." (Pg. 48)

While this same passage is used almost verbatim in the film, the fatherly uncle (renamed "John" in the film and played by David Brian) makes clear that this is backwards thinking (despite his casual use of the word "nigger"). The uncle is a lens for everything Chick sees, helping him (and the reader/audience) understand it. He appears more like an outside observer than one of the town. As a result, the audience has someone in which they can believe and to whom they can relate.

But there are long passages of the novel that are not introduced or explored in the film, such as the long diatribe about the homogeneity of the South and the interference of the North in setting the slaves free. Stevens suggests that this has only hindered the cause of the slave because it sticks like a thorn in the side of every Southern man. As Faulkner writes:

"That's why we must resist the North: not just to preserve ourselves nor even the two of us as one to remain one nation because that will be the inescapable by-product of what we will preserve: which is the very thing that three generations ago we lost a bloody war in our own back yards so that it remain intact: the postulate that Sambo is a human being living in a free country and hence must be free. That's what we are really defending: the privilege of setting him free ourselves…" (Pg. 151)

In defending his perception that only the South can set the black man free, he undermines the idea that blacks are already free - as all humans should be. His notions, however personally motivated they may be, seem to expose an underlying racism and prejudice that Faulkner cannot remove from himself or his writing.

In Brown's film, however, the racism of the South is portrayed as an anachronism that neither Chick nor Uncle John can fully fathom. When the townspeople show up in the square to see if the Gowries lynch Lucas, the event takes on a surreal quality. Men stand around talking, bored children eat ice cream, and a woman fixes her makeup… all as if they were waiting for a parade or a ceremony. Brown chooses to use Miss Habersham as a counter-point to the mob. When Crawford Gowrie comes with a can full of gasoline, she stands her ground and refuses to let him pass. Once it is clear that Crawford will not cross the line to kill an innocent woman, she turns her moral high ground on the crowd and shames them. This scene, missing from Faulkner's novel, is clearly an invention of the filmmakers. While Faulkner clearly intends for Miss Habersham to be a positive force in the story, in the film she becomes the embodiment of change in the Old Southern style.

Nevertheless, her admonition does little good. The mob remains, unwilling to leave until (finally) the sheriff arrives with Crawford Gowrie apprehended for the murder of his brother Vinson. (In the novel, Crawford commits suicide in the jail, but this is never explored in the film.) With the true murderer apprehended, the crowd disperses. Chick says to his uncle, "They ran," indicating that the mob was running in shame from Lucas. The uncle corrects his nephew and points out that the townspeople were running from themselves, making it clear that there was a lesson to be learned about mobs and the shame of mob mentality.

But in Faulkner's novel, the answer is less clear. When Chick admonishes the crowd for running, his uncle concludes with the phrase, "At least they were moving." Is Uncle Gavin stating that it was enough that the crowd dispersed, or was he indicating that they were beginning to see the errors of their ways and "moving" from their old ways of thinking? An optimist would certainly see the latter, although it is unclear just how much Faulkner is willing to believe the South can change.

As Miss Habersham drives off in her car at the end of the film, she says, "Let me know if you get into any more trouble" to which Uncle John replies that it was they (not Lucas) who were in trouble the whole time. The town (perhaps the South in general) was on the verge of making a great mistake because of blind racism.

Faulkner ends the novel with the business of bill paying as Lucas settles his debt, so that he is not indebted to any man. The film ends on a more positive note, making Lucas into a symbol of the black man striving for equality. Uncle John calls Lucas "the conscience of the town," to which Chick corrects him and calls him "the conscience of us all." Perhaps the filmmakers understood that bigotry and racism are not only found in the South.