If there was one adjective in my head when I first went into Clarence Brown's 1949 adaptation of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, it most certainly was NOT 'quiet.' The story of an elderly black man named Lucas Beauchamp who was wrongly arrested under the charge of killing a white man in 1940s Mississippi, I was fully expecting this to be an over-dramatic racial melodrama complete with bombastic speeches on civil rights and racism. Well, the film certainly is a racial melodrama. And it does have its fair share of dramatic speeches. But this is a very, very quiet film. It's not a slow film, mind you. This is a film of tense, whispered dialogue, pregnant silences, and weighty glares. As Beauchamp enlists the aid of two local teenagers and an old woman to find the evidence that he is innocent, the surrounding community is swallowed in a veil of suspense and tension. Come midnight, there will be a lynching. Everybody knows it. The townsfolk know it, the two teenagers know it, the old woman knows it, and Beauchamp knows it. Everybody is just waiting for the right time to fulfill their roles. And in the interim...silence. Deathly silence. Suffocating silence. Brown's skillful direction creates one of the most palatable atmospheres of dread and apprehension in late 1940s American cinema. It breathes life into what could have been a very predictable melodrama. A word, too, about the aforementioned old woman. For the last part of the film she holds off a mob of lynchers for hours by sitting in the front of the jailhouse and knitting. At one point a lyncher douses the floor around her with gasoline and lights a match. Unperturbed, she sweetly asks him to move out of the sun so she can resume her knitting. This, my friends, is an act of badassery that makes Atticus Finch's legendary vigil seem flaccid in comparison.
8/10
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