The Intruder / I Hate Your Guts (1961, released 1962 Roger Corman)

Corman made his first deeply felt serious political / social film all on location in Missouri. It was shown at the Venice Film Festival, received awards and rave reviews, and "it was my first commercial failure after thirty successes"!

Charles Beaumont adapted his own neatly plotted novel, which Roger summarises here. "A rabble-rousing white supremacist named Cramer [William Shatner, playing it like a car salesman] arrives from Washington and insinuates himself into the town's drowsy life; he flirts with the newspaper editor's daughter, Ella [Beverly Lundsford]; seduces the lonely wife of a salesman named Sam Griffin [Leo Gordon, writer of Wasp Woman, Cry Baby Killer and The Terror]; makes bigoted speeches and incites violent acts against town blacks and liberals. A black minister dies in a church bomb blast. The local editor [Frank Maxwell, much on American TV we would have watched as kids], a staunch integrationist, is half-blinded by racist thugs. Cramer tells Ella that her father will be killed unless she falsely accuses a black high school student [non-professional high school student Charles Barnes] of raping her. She does, and soon a lynch mob strings the helpless student to a swing outside the school. But Griffin shows up in time to humiliate Cramer and save the student, having persuaded Ella to expose Cramer's tactics. The town [and the corrupt big shot Robert Emhardt] abandons Cramer, leaving him powerless."

It was a dangerous shoot. They received threatening messages. The crowd who came in as extras in Shatner's address from the court house thought he was playing the good guy; so did the locals in the diner scene. The most cooperative lot were the KKK guys who 'didn't need much to get into character'. The final lynch mob scene was shot in three different school locations in one day after the police threatened them to leave town.

It stands up really well. It's well directed and very topical and hard hitting and is still powerful, moves along well. Shatner is still a little cheesy here and there but it's probably his best film.

We saw it under the alternative title.

Source: 'How I Made 100 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime' (a somewhat misleading title!) by Roger Corman.