Most of my familiarity with Roger Corman lies with his output as a producer of nil-budget genre pictures. Therefore, when I found out that William Shatner toplined a Corman-directed movie about racism in the American Deep South of the 1960s, I expected to experience a crass, even exploitative, story. Boy, I was dead wrong--and glad of it.

Contrary to prevailing assumptions about critics, we actually find it pleasantly surprising to be wrong, especially when a movie that was expected to be bad turns out to be great. The Intruder is a small work, but it is tense and unflinchingly honest about an ugly part of American history.

Only recently has Shatner received mainstream praise for his abilities as an actor, but his work as Denny Crane on The Practice and Boston Legal is exactly the kind of hammy crap that Shatner-haters accused him of cooking back when he played Star Trek’s James Tiberius Kirk. His performance in The Intruder reveals how charming, charismatic, forceful, and resonant he was in his prime. Here, Shatner is one of the most-convincing demagogues I’ve seen in a narrative film.

Shatner plays Adam Cramer, a racist white man who goes to a Southern town to incite violent resistance to school integration. As Corman surrounded his leads with real racist townspeople, the movie cackles with disturbingly authentic energy. The movie also features very ugly language, from vile, racist slurs to white-supremacy propagandizing.

Corman released The Intruder on DVD back when his New Concorde company was still distributing his productions on home video. Now, Corman has a deal with Buena Vista (i.e. Disney), with the Mouse House re-releasing his movies on DVD. I find it hilariously ironic that the risk-adverse Magic Kingdom is distributing a movie filled with racial epithets, especially since Buena Vista has steadfastly refused to issue Song of the South on DVD in the United States. To be fair, one should realize that The Intruder is NOT a racist work. Rather, it is anti-prejudice with a raw immediacy that genteel big-studio features like Gentleman’s Agreement are unable to convey.

David McCoy