JOSE GUERRERO DEEPFOCUS MOVIE

And yet the film seems dizzyingly unpredictable. The basic plot follows their investigation, somewhat ineffective as a whodunnit since there's only really one suspect.

A young boy who has formed an uneasy friendship with the proud man tries to clear him, with the help of his skeptical lawyer uncle and a local widow. A dignified black man is held in the town jail, charged with murdering a local redneck.

All this enhances immeasurably the story. Robert Surtees's photography is stark and deep-focus, enabling Brown to cover his action quickly in few shots. It's largely shot on location in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner's home town. The film has no stars and virtually no music. The structures imposed on Brown when he wanted to make his dream project-a limited budget and schedule-seem to have conspired to liberate him and to intensify the movie's best qualities. As it was, his career survived for six more films in the next three years, but they were to be more conventional genre fair, leaving Intruder in the Dust as a sole slice of nail-biting heightened realism in Brown's oeuvre. Set in a small town, but eschewing ruthlessly the sentimentality of the popular Andy Hardy series, based on a novel by William Faulkner, but disarmingly faithful to the dark side of Faulkner's vision (a tight, intense script by the soon-to-be blacklisted Ben Maddow), the film is stark, unpredictable and uncomfortable in ways that would seem to get Brown drummed out of the dream factory for life.

JOSE GUERRERO DEEPFOCUS MOVIE

Intruder in the Dust was made as part of MGM's anniversary output, which also included Siodmak's The Great Sinner, a movie which exemplifies the MGM approach to art, at both its best and worst-expensive, tasteful, based on a great book or classy true story but completely unfaithful to it (in this case both the life of Dostoevsky and his novel The Gambler), packed with glamorous stars and exotic art direction.īy contrast, Brown's film hardly seems like something Louis B. It's like a beautiful tracking shot, only Joan and the camera stand still and the world tracks past.Īs excellent as Brown's glossy studio artistry was, it pales somewhat compared to the surprising masterpiece that appears out of left field in 1949. 1931's Possessed, with Joan C., is particularly impressive, a fluid early talkie with pre-code sass, class consciousness, glitz and glamour, and a famous shot where a train slowly glides past a yearning Joan, each compartment featuring illuminated scenes of the urban sophistication she craves.

Clarence Brown made a long and successful career, after getting his start taking over The Last of the Mohicans from Maurice Touneur in 1920 (see last Thursday's article), as a director of MGM romantic melodrama, scoring several notable successes with Garbo and Crawford.

Jose guerrero deepfocus