The Intruder was Roger Corman's attempt to be topical and socially significant in 1962 with the Civil Rights movement. The man should have stuck to what he knew best, be entertaining.

That's sad because The Intruder had some possibilities and William Shatner wasted a great performance as a racist demagogue. FOr those who want to see Captain Kirk before he became the noble explorer of where no man had gone before, this is your chance. Shatner's anything, but noble in The Intruder.

The film is in a small town in the deep south which is finally going to be integrating its schools as per the Supreme Court. Shatner comes to town and starts to whip up the latent sullen racism underneath the town's surface. He recruits leading citizen Robert Emhardt to his cause, but newspaper editor Frank Maxwell is not such an easy sell. Maxwell has a daughter about to enter high school herself so the impending racial crisis hits him right at home.

Shatner's also stirring a little domestic crisis of his own by moving in on Leo Gordon's nymphomaniac wife Jeanne Cooper while Leo the salesman is on a business trip. I guess Corman figured if civil rights didn't bring them in at the box office a little infidelity and a steamy sex scene never fails.

Well it did fail actually, but mainly because of a muddled script, some unbelievable characters and a bad ending I won't reveal lest people be tempted to see Captain Kirk. I'm still trying to figure out whether Shatner was an advance man for the John Birch Society or the Christian Crusade of Reverend Billy James Hargis. His Patrick Henry Society which he represents in the film seems an amalgam of both.

Unless you're determined, this is one film of William Shatner's that beat be left unexplored.

William Shatner gets off the bus in the small southern town and rents a room at the hotel. He's open and friendly, and talks to just about all the people downtown, all of whom are White, and isn't it terrible that they're integrating the schools. Soon he's holding mass open meetings in which he talks about facts and how integration will mongrelize the country, which is just what the communists want. They're funding it through a Jewish front, and he has proof.....

With a screenplay by Charles Beaumont from his own novel, Roger Corman tries his hand at making a socially conscious film about racial hatred. It's almost a spell-binding effort by William Shatner. It was also a very rare flop by Corman, and he blamed Shatner for it; on one reissue, it was retitled I HATE YOUR GUTS

There's a Rodgers & Hammerstein song from SOUTH PACIFIC that insists "you have to be taught to hate and fear." That's not true. We hate and fear the strange, the different, the other. It's not an intruder that makes us hate other people. It doesn't have to be drummed in our dear little ear. We do it because we don't understand it and therefore it might be a threat. And until we come to accept that this meanness, this anger, this hatred isn't an intruder, it's us talking to ourselves, then we can't do a darned thing about it.

This is an amazing film--and what's even more amazing is that it isn't seen as a classic today, as it's one of the best films on race Hollywood has ever made. Unlike many of the more recent films on racism, what I loved about THE INTRUDER is that it is not sanitized in the least--with intense language and horrible mob behavior that make this film terrific.

The film is a lot like combining ELMER GANTRY with a film about racism. William Shatner is the Gantry-like man who comes to town with the express purpose of stirring up the hatred of the White masses towards the Blacks--coinciding with a court order to desegregate the schools. Why he is doing this is never explained, but you know that Shatner is a man with no scruples whatsoever and he seems to enjoy sowing evil and dissension. As for the town, they respond pretty much like you'd expect. A lynch-mob mentality develops and the crowd is looking ugly. At this point, the film comes to an emotional boil--leading to a wonderful climactic finale.

So why did I like the film so much? Well, one reason is that it proved that given a strong and competent director (Roger Corman),Shatner is a good actor and his bigger than life style works well. Mr. Shatner without such strong guidance is a bad thing indeed, as evidenced by films such as IMPULSE (directed by schlock film director William Grefe). Second, Corman really was not afraid to shock the viewer and did not pull any punches. Unlike many other films about race, this one repeatedly used "bad language" (i.e., I must call it this because IMDb does not allow such words on their site--even if it includes mentioning the title of a movie with one of these "bad words" in it). Because of this, it exposed racism for the ugly beast that it is---warts and all. All too often, films take a sanitized view of racism, but in THE INTRUDER it's as ugly and vicious as you can find. I appreciate this because racism is ugly and vicious...duh. Finally, because it is a Corman production from his ultra-low budget era, it was made with minimal expense using exceptional character actors. Because of this, it's like a textbook example of great film making for less money--with a wonderful script, acting and direction.

Sadly, when this movie came out, it was one of the only Corman films that lost money. Well, you can't blame anyone for this--it was simply too far ahead of its time and the country was not yet ready for it. It's a shame, as apparently Mr. Corman blamed Shatner for the failure of the film--it was no one's fault. Because of this, it needs to be seen and appreciated as a great allegorical film that was unjustly ignored.

Also, in an odd observation, I noticed that Roger Corman was listed as 'Rodger Corman' in the credits. This possibly makes this the only film in which the director's name is misspelled. And, if this review piques your curiosity, the film is in the public domain and can be downloaded and watched for free at sites such as archive.org or other public domain sites.