“The law was against me all the way”: how taking on America’s racial prejudice gave Roger Corman his first flop
The entire point of Roger Corman making movies in the way that he did was to turn low-risk investments into high-reward productions, which in turn established him as the reigning and undisputed king of B-tier cinema.
His influence stretched far and wide beyond that, though, with Corman becoming one of the most important figures in the history of American filmmaking. His career may have been defined by cheap genre flicks made on a shoestring, but the impact he made on the industry was enormous.
There is a mind-blowing list of legends, icons, Academy Award-winners, acclaimed auteurs, and all-time greats of stage and screen who cut their teeth under Corman’s stewardship. One of the unsung benefits for the many rookies he welcomed under his wing was that their pictures were always guaranteed to turn a profit.
Corman’s methodology was so thrifty and effective that anything he sent out to cinemas would end up in the black, but all good runs must come to an end eventually. He specialised in quick, easy, cheap and cheerful action flicks, thrillers, horrors, and noirs, but when he tackled relevant and timely socio-political themes, The Intruder ended up as the first flop he’d ever backed.
It’s easy to see why, with the racially charged drama released in May 1962 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and several years prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 effectively outlawed segregation in the United States.
The narrative follows a pristinely dressed and charismatic snake oil salesman played by a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, who breezes into the southern town of Caxton to stir up racist sentiments in the local population on the cusp of the local high school becoming desegregated.
Whereas before, the townspeople were willing to begrudgingly accept a change in the law they couldn’t argue with, Shatner’s Adam Cramer whips them up into a frenzy. He holds an incendiary racist speech in front of the town hall, burns a cross in a Black neighbourhood, and incites violence against Caxton’s Black residents. It was shocking for the time and a boundary-pushing picture, but Corman faced plenty of pushback.
Shooting on location in Mississippi, Corman revealed how “we had tremendous problems during production because we were shooting in the south, specifically because I wanted the accents to be authentic.” Unsurprisingly, many locals weren’t best pleased with a movie dealing so overtly with racism to be shooting on their doorstep, an issue which extended to the local authorities.
“I chose the northern portion of the south, feeling that I would have a little more protection from the law,” the producer and director admitted to the British Film Institute. “But the law was against me all the way.” Fortunately, Corman and his crew “surmounted the problems” The Intruder faced, but the end result was “the first film I ever made that lost money.”
Even though it was made of a typically modest and hugely Corman-esque sum of just $90,000, thanks to its potentially inflammatory content, The Intruders struggled to find wide theatrical distribution. Corman ended up taking on that burden himself, and those additional expenses tipped the film into the red.
He wanted to make it because he was “very much against the southern segregation laws, so I picked a subject I believed in and made it accordingly.” The downside is that despite a warm critical reception, The Intruders was the first commercial bust of his professional life.
Corman had made his name entertaining crowds with unabashedly entertaining genre flicks, but when he made his first-ever “socially relevant picture,” audiences weren’t willing to bite. “It was almost as if I was lecturing to the public,” he reflected. “I’d forgotten momentarily that films are partially – or perhaps primarily – an entertainment.”
It’s ironic that Corman’s first time abandoning his own ethos coincided with his first fiscal disappointment. Still, The Intruder was a trailblazer in its own way by tackling America’s lingering racial prejudices head-on and from a filmmaker, nobody would have expected to be the one leading the charge, no less.
