Movie Title

The Intruder was not only Roger Corman’s most daring and unusual film, but a unique movie in the history of cinema, as one of the few theatrical feature films to deal with school desegregation in the South. William Shatner gives the performance of a lifetime as Adam Cramer, a sly, rabble-rousing racist who travels the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, fomenting protests and riots and organizing white citizens groups with himself at their head. By turns quietly soft-spoken and boldly charismatic, Cramer arrives in a small town where the local white high school is about to get its first black students and manipulates the men, women, and students around him, quietly taking control of the debate and the agenda, and turning a tense situation into a riot. He’s opposed by Frank Maxwell, playing a local newspaper editor who pays a terrible price for his thoughtful and reasonable nature, Jeanne Cooper as a woman whom he tried to seduce, and Leo V. Gordon (in a rare benevolent role) as her husband, a working man without a lot of patience for rabble-rousers. In the end, after maiming one man and nearly killing another, Cramer is stopped when he is exposed for what he is ? weak and pathetic when confronted directly. The film was shot on-location in the South despite the active opposition of local authorities and threats from members of the Ku Klux Klan, and once finished, Corman discovered that there was hardly a theater anywhere in America that was willing to play it, because the movie’s subject was so incendiary. Thus, The Intruder became just about the only movie Corman ever made that lost money, and was much more widely seen in Europe, where it was greeted simply as a bold, unusual, and well-made film.