A bit delayed here, but while I happened to post a review of a Roger Corman-produced film two days before his death, I couldn’t not honor the man by reviewing at least one of his self-directed works, and one of the sharpest and most prescient early ’60s films to diagnose America’s ills to boot.

In the final analysis, Roger Corman was really only interested in making a buck cheaply and quickly. He was a particularly vulgar variation of the termite artist, to use Manny Farber’s term, scratching immediately and injudiciously at any and all crevices that had opened up in society’s façade. He could make a womb, and a few dollars, in any space where the world no longer seemed comfortable. Usually, that meant selling audiences on astrological terror or cosmic instability, on the pleasures of momentarily acknowledging the diabolical awfulness lurking beneath the most domestic of exteriors. With 1962’s The Intruder, Corman did something most Hollywood directors then balked at. He looked directly at the fault lines in modern America, casting America’s favorite future explorer of the final frontier as a demonic embodiment of what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics and what others would go on to call “demonology”: that inimitable ability to assume and mark others, particularly racialized others, as outsiders in need of an exorcism.

On principle, Corman was willing to do almost anything to make money, but many of his films capture the same strange outsider energy of filmmakers like Herk Harvey, fugitives from cinematic corporations working right at the moment where the Classical Hollywood studio system was collapsing. In these directors, we arguably sense the democratic potential of the medium. It is perhaps deeply ironic, then, that Roger Corman’s desire to sell anything for a profit, even the evils of racism, brought us 1962’s The Intruder, a film that viciously skewers the democracy of the masses and that casts as its central character a truly vile, desperate, pathetic man whose crime is that he wants to make a buck by stoking the masses and manipulating the rifts in the world around him.

This is an exploitation film by an exploiter about an exploiter, then, which makes Corman’s exploitative drive documentarian in a double sense. The need to exploit the zeitgeist necessarily meant that one had to have their proverbial finger on society’s pulse, and The Intruder certainly has more to say about American racism than, say, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or even In the Heat of the Night, more “prestigious” works with a studio pedigree and a studio’s clammy standoffishness with regard to the issues they confront. While those films begin with a black “intruder” contesting the sanctity of white society, Corman’s intruder is a white knight from out of the shadows. He arrives in black-and-white, an opaque man riding into frame in a bus, looking out at a landscape with sublime unknowability. The film throws us for a loop immediately by presenting the unnamed “protagonist” as a nice and seemingly generous soul, the film’s bait and switch on the path to forcing us, as one character remarks, to “face ourselves.”

William Shatner’s presence as this protagonist, Adam Cramer, and Charles Beaumont’s book forming the backdrop of a self-adapted screenplay, suggests an episode of The Twilight Zone, and like Shatner’s own episode “Nick of Time,” he wanders into a nondescript town with apparently backward, superstitious beliefs that nearly spell the death of him. The difference is that while the Twilight Zone episode figures the beliefs as markers of the past better lost on the way-station of modernity, here they are figured as distinctly modern phenomena that all too easily find a home in the present. The Intruder was inspired by a story involving a Northern man stoking the fire of racial animus in a Tennessee town because he understood how easy it would be to use that fear as an opportunity to assert his own power, to become what Shatner’s character in this film calls “a great man.” This is a quest that has no problem adapting itself to the furious now.

Shatner is perfect for the roll, exuding oily, ingratiating charisma, and the ease with which he slithers his way into the film says something about the way in which television promised to be the pulse of the people, in which artifice was a backbone of mid-century social relations and a tool to be weaponized for many purposes. The film immediately indexes the character’s hucksterish sensibility as he play-acts with a gun, before a match-cut between a fake shot and a soda fountain running intimates a slippery marker of mid-century Americana poised between guilt and innocence, ready to slide from one to the other. The character initially frames himself as from L.A., a Hollywood salesman, and Shatner’s visage seems to sell anything when a camera is up against him, from an ominous uncertainty to a cunning, smarmy expression, an effortless marker of the ease with which he commands the cinema to his liking. When Cramer shows up in the town’s African American community via taxi, he is shadowed like the devil himself, a white knight as a dark harbinger. Soon enough, he says he’s from D.C. Hollywood has become government, both sorcerers of the “collective will of the people.”

Corman the director is also working to his strengths here, conjuring several broad, brazen visual analogies that charge the film with a kinetic energy to match its fiery temper. When Shatner’s character remarks “never underestimate the value of a jail cell. Remember Socrates, Lenin, Hitler,” Corman has already visually suggested that the very court of law that is supposed to absolve America of its sins is really a prison, one that enslaves us to purely legal remedies for change. And when a black family tries to leave the town, Corman brilliantly stages the white mob like a zombie invasion, living people dead in their ideologies. Or a man who loses his eye as a price for seeing the light. Or, as Shatner remarks that “lynchings” are old fashioned, as Corman shoots a fiery cross next to a distinctly modern neon store sign that says “cut-rate.”

While Shatner, like populism, is both a force and a void in the film, Corman himself is surprisingly deft with the ambiguities of the town’s various populations. He finds internal tension and strife within the collective strivings of the black community, from the younger brother teasing his older brother who has to go to “the white school tomorrow” to the older uncle who worries that forced integration will cause some of them to “get killed,” whereas the town preacher demands not “muscle and pride” strength but the “man” strength of “meekness” and spiritual love, suggesting individual lives entangled with wider collective hopes and dreams.

On the white side of town, Beaumont’s screenplay limns the fractal form white anxiety can take. Ruth McDaniel’s (Katherine Smith) father chastises her husband, newspaper editor Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), for his lack of “gumption” in the face of a “great big black flood,” the film recognizing how organic metaphors justify the perception of emergent threats that are omnipresent, even when they are off-screen. The film catches this in the casual way in which race as a matter of fact flows into most every conversation but isn’t necessarily the focus or center of it in the film, often a background violence always ready to erupt. The film also intimates the limits of even progressive whiteness. Other characters, like Tom, emphasize their own law-abiding nature, molding themselves into Atticus Finch-like postures, asking things like “what’s the trouble here” even though they aren’t especially committed to progressive change or activist government. This is a constitutionalist anti-racism, a privileging of what he perceives as America’s divine mission of cosmic decency that defends the nation as a potential beacon of hope and growth, and it cannot quite countenance how deep the violence of American racism lies, nor how complicit it is in other forms of control and oppression.

It is in this final sense that Corman’s brazen film is a documentary in a second way. In its portrait of an industrious soul making a name for himself through enterprising efficiency and interpersonal know-how, Adam Cramer is also an odd facsimile, or dark mirror, of Corman himself, a man who mobilizes the tensions of the very system he was manipulating to serve his own interests. Indeed, when Corman invited many of the Southern town’s inhabitants to the courthouse to serve as extras for a scene where Cramer performs a speech there, Corman wasn’t only swarming the white masses to participate in a deviously critical display of popular charisma but turning Cramer’s own method in on itself. There’s no way around this: the mechanisms that Cramer uses to orchestrate the white masses are Corman’s tools for engineering a critique of them, the confidence act of a smooth operator willing to transmute any hole in a system’s cracks into an opportunity for personal success. The tension at the heart of the film is thus capitalism’s conundrum, the problem of popular culture writ large, the fundamental query of America’s multi-hundred-million mass and the channels that sell visions, for good or ill, to them. Corman, rest his soul, may not have always consciously recognized this problem as a problem, but he understood it better than just about anyone.

Score: 8/10