#sikeston

I’m sharing this 2007 article I wrote on Roger Corman’s The Intruder for The Kansas City Star.

DVD gives a fresh look at 45-year-old film shot in Missouri’s Bootheel.

BY DAN LYBARGER SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Roger Stout was in several scenes with William Shatner in Roger Corman’s “The Intruder,” shot in the Bootheel of Missouri in the 1960s. BUENA VISTA HOME ENTERTAINMENT

Shot in Missouri’s Bootheel and released 45 years ago this summer, “The Intruder” was a groundbreaking look at the civil rights struggle.

The film, which was recently released in a special DVD edition, was produced and directed by Roger Corman,“The King of the Bs,” and starred a then-unknown 30-year-old stage and television actor from Montreal named William Shatner.

Despite earning respectful reviews and a Special Citation at the Venice Film Festival, “The Intruder” opened to a limp release in New York in 1962 and languished in the drive-in circuit for years under various titles — “Shame,” “The Stranger” and “I Hate Your Guts!” among them.

The fact that the film was made at all was miraculous. Hollywood studios refused to back it, and Shatner and Corman received threats during filming.

“We got some death threats, yes indeed,” Shatner said from his office in L.A. “I had an escape route out of the bathroom of this cheap motel I was in. This cheap motel had behind it a cornfield, and I was going to jump out behind the window and hide in the cornfield.”

The film was adapted from the 1958 novel by “Twilight Zone” writer Charles Beaumont. He based the story on real-life white supremacist John Kasper of New Jersey, whose actions in 1956 in Clinton, Tenn., led to riots.

Shatner plays a racist named Adam Cramer, who roars into a Southern town on the eve of school desegregation. Cramer instigates a series of riots and attacks on residents who stand in his way, including the local newspaper editor (Frank Maxwell). The movie’s unique instigator’s-eye view of racism made studios and filmgoers uncomfortable.

Former Corman collaborator and biographer Beverly Gray said “The Intruder” was the most gutsy film Corman ever made.

“It was a movie certainly made out of his own proudly held liberal convictions about the evils of racism,” she said. “And yet it certainly is not ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ or something where the good guy is the hero. It’s about a protagonist who’s really scary and dangerous. It’s an interesting way to go about making a point.”

Nicknamed the “Prince of Profit” for his highly entertaining, low-budget movies, Corman and his brother Gene had to pay for “The Intruder” by mortgaging their homes.

“I’d been rejected by every place I had submitted it,” Corman said. “It was surprising because I had never had a picture that had failed, and almost any other idea I would come up with, provided it was within a budget range, they automatically accepted.”

The Corman brothers had to find a location that could pass for the Deep South. The Missouri towns of Sikeston, Charleston and East Prairie seemed ideal.

“So I thought, ‘If I go there, I’ll be in the South, people will have Southern accents, but I’ll be under the laws of a Midwestern state,’ ” Corman said. “So I took a location scouting trip, and indeed people did have Southern accents, and I had the look of a Southern town. And I thought I might have a little more protection from the law. It turned out I had no protection from the law whatsoever.”

Michael Jensen, the longtime publisher and editor of the Sikeston Standard-Democrat, was a teenager during the filming of “The Intruder.” Jensen said part of the reason the film encountered opposition in Sikeston and later Charleston is that it features a lynching scene reminiscent of a real incident that occurred in 1942.

Nonetheless, “The Intruder” was made with lots of local help in front of and behind the cameras. The beauty parlors helped actors with their hair, and local performers such as Phoebe Rowe and Katherine Smith held their own against Hollywood veterans such as Leo Gordon (“Riot in Cell Block 11”) and Robert Emhardt (the original “3:10 to Yuma”).

But Corman kept much of what he was doing secret. He showed locals an altered script while he and Shatner kept the only copies of the shooting script.

Roger Stout, now a teacher in St. Louis, was 16 years old during filming and can be seen in several scenes as one of Cramer’s supporters.