Exploring Racial Politics, Personal History and Critical Reception: Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Gwenda Young
Abstract:Using archival sources from the Clarence Brown Archive at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, newspaper clippings from a wide range of national and regional press, and unpublished interviews, this article explores how the complexities and contradictions that are central to Clarence Brown’s film version of Intruder in the Dust (1949)—complexities that, arguably, make this film the most ambiguous of all the “race issue” films released in 1949—are mirrored in the director’s own deeply divided attitude to race and to the South. These tensions also surface in the critical reception of the film in the white press, and perhaps more tellingly, in the black press of 1949. The notion that this was a film generally acclaimed in the black press can be challenged, or at the very least nuanced, through a closer examination of newspaper archives, which, in turn, reveals some of the divisions within black intellectual circles of the late 1940s.
