02 June 2008

"The Intruder" Or, Captain Kirk Goes Race-Baiting

In light of some of the race-baiting that has been going on between some partisans in the Clinton and Obama camps in the last two months or so, I think it's only entirely appropriate to exhibit this YouTube clip of the trailer for the 1962 Roger Corman film, "The Intruder", which starred William Shatner as Adam Cramer, a young agitator for the far-right "Patrick Henry Society"(probably based by the film's screenwriter, Charles Beaumont, who adapted it from his novel, on the John Birch Society), who arrives in the fictional, small southern town of Caxton, where he starts agitating the townsfolk against school integration, and, at least for a while, has his way, in more ways than one.

This film is one of the very few Roger Corman films that ever lost money at the box office, and, in fact, was subsequently re-released under a few different titles, such as "Shame" and "I Hate Your Guts!!".

Have only seen the trailer, which, along with scenes from the film, are available on YouTube, as well as from the Internet Archive, under the title "Shame", but it looks pretty good to me, thus far.

Have down-loaded the Internet Archive version, and will include the web page address after the clip, so you can go there, and either view or down-load it for yourselves.

Anyhow, here comes the clip.












Now, as for where you can find "The Intruder" or "Shame" on the Internet Archive site, here's the page address, http://www.archive.org/details/shame_ .


If you want to find out more about the film and its origins, here are the IMDB and Wikipedia page addresses devoted to it, at, respectively, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055019/combinedcomment, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intruder_%281962_film%29.

You can also find a video trailer for "The Intruder", with commentary on the film, at its page on Trailers From Hell at http://www.trailersfromhell.com/trailers/56?auto=1, and, if you want to buy the DVD of the flick, you can go to Roger Corman: The Official DVD Website at http://video.movies.go.com/rogercorman/coll_special.htmlintruder, and order it from there.


Yes, American society and culture have changed considerably since "The Intruder" was first released 46 years ago, but, in some very fundamental ways, especially regarding race and its role, there is still a very long way to go.

Be seeing you.

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