Last night we watched “The Intruder,” a film from 1961 starring William Shatner and directed by Roger Corman. I was really unprepared for how amazing it was. I figured with that combo (Shatner/Corman) it would be offbeat but a bit tawdy. I was wrong.

Shatner plays Adam Cramer, a man from Los Angeles who arrives in the small Southern town of Caxton. The town is about to comply with the court-ordered intigration of the local high school. Cramer is a member of a shadowy organization called The Patrick Henry Society, and he’s in Caxton to stir up racial hatred, inciting the whites in the town to fight the intigration.

This is a film that dared to go where NO other films of that era did. “In The Heat of the Night” is a fine film, but even though it it was made 5 years after “The Intruder” it seems tame by comparision. “The Intruder” unflinchingly shows mob violence, a cross burning, a church bombing, even a black man accused of raping a white woman. It’s everything that “Mississippi Burning” tried to be but wasn’t. You couldn’t even make this film TODAY. The film industry is far too timid about offending people and wouldn’t want to show this ugly truth.

The film was shot in a mere 3 weeks on location in the South under reccurring threats of violence, and that tension ends up on screen. Most of the cast were local non-professionals and that realism is dynamic. Shatner turns in the best performance by him that I’ve ever seen. And the script is very tightly written. This was obviously a labor of love for Roger Corman, who financed the film himself (with help from his brother) and even took out a second mortagage on his house to get it made. In an interview he said, “This was the first film of mine that ever lost money … but it didn’t lose too much money.”

It’s an important film which deserves to be much more widely seen.