"He Fed Their Fears And Turned Neighbor Against Neighbor!"
A man in a gleaming white suit comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration. He calls himself a social reformer. But what he does is stir up trouble--trouble he soon finds he can't control.
William Shatner
Adam Cramer
Frank Maxwell
Tom McDaniel
Beverly Lunsford
Ella McDaniel
Robert Emhardt
Verne Shipman
Leo Gordon
Sam Griffin
Charles Barnes
Joey Greene
Charles Beaumont
Mr. Paton
Katherine Smith
Ruth McDaniel
George Clayton Johnson
Phil West
A man in a gleaming white suit comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration. He calls himself a social reformer. But what he does is stir up trouble--trouble he soon finds he can't control.
There's a lot going for this film about prejudice. First of all, it begins with the status quo approach. The director has William Shatner enter a town, presumably as a protagonist, though he quickly changes into an antagonist. This may be copied from "Women of Dolwyn", where Richard Burton enters the same way, except his character was nowhere near as vile as the one Shatner portrays. There is a unique twist of casting. We expect Shatner to be the open minded one and Leo Gordon to be the closed mind of prejudice, but we get the reversal here. And that is the real charm of this film. I'm not sure people will get that charm a hundred years from now. However, I think they will get that feeling, because I think the director purposely chose Shatner and Gordon for their "presences" so to speak, to throw the audience off guard.
As uncomfortable as it is, I think it's a good movie. 'The Intruder' is basically your standard story of how dangerous mob mentality can be, especially when coupled with ready-made white supremacy. It is a bit white saviour-y, though I did like how Charles Barnes' Joey had his own moment in the face of adversity. I enjoyed (from an acting viewpoint, of course) the performances onscreen of Frank Maxwell and Leo Gordon, Robert Emhardt plays a bad guy well too. The most eye-catching member of the cast is obviously William Shatner, in one of his earliest film roles. He puts in a positive showing, the character is certainly, erm, interesting and I'll remember him.
In 1863, Mississippi farmer Newt Knight serves as a medic for the Confederate Army. Opposed to slavery, Knight would rather help the wounded than fight the Union. After his nephew dies in battle, Newt returns home to Jones County to safeguard his family but is soon branded an outlaw deserter. Forced to flee, he finds refuge with a group of runaway slaves hiding out in the swamps. Forging an alliance with the slaves and other farmers, Knight leads a rebellion that would forever change history.
Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.
In the post–World War II South, two families are pitted against a barbaric social hierarchy and an unrelenting landscape as they simultaneously fight the battle at home and the battle abroad.
African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie, the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi. After Tibbs proves not only his own innocence but that of another man, he joins forces with Gillespie to track down the real killer. Their investigation takes them through every social level of the town, with Tibbs making enemies as well as unlikely friends as he hunts for the truth.
Ku Klux Klansman Mike Burden opens the Redneck Shop and KKK museum in historic Laurens, SC. He subsequently falls in love with a single mother and, under her influence, quits the Klan and is taken in by an African American Reverend.
In civil rights era Montgomery, Alabama, Klansman's grandson Bob Zellner must choose which side of history to be on during the Movement. Defying his family and white Southern norms, he fought against social injustice, repression and violence to change the world around him
Raised in a poverty-stricken slum, a 16-year-old girl named Starr now attends a suburban prep school. After she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed best friend, she's torn between her two very different worlds as she tries to speak her truth.
A young lawyer defends a black man accused of murdering two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter, sparking a rebirth of the KKK.
Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.
Idealistic young attorney Adam Hall takes on the death row clemency case of his racist grandfather, Sam Cayhall, a former Ku Klux Klan member he has never met.