Exploring racial politics, personal history and critical reception: Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949)
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Published Version
Date
2013
Authors
Young, Gwenda
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
Published Version
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at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, newspaper clippings from a wide range of national and regional press, and unpublished interviews, this article explores how the complexities and contradictions that are central to Clarence Brown’s film version of Intruder in the Dust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.
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Keywords
Clarence Brown , Race , Tension , Ambiguous
Citation
Young, G. (2013) 'Exploring racial politics, personal history and critical reception: Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949)', Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 6. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.6.04