Awards presented March 23, 1950
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
After studying acting in Chicago, Jagger came west, where he made his film debut opposite Mary Astor in a 1929 silent, The Woman From Hell. For the next decade he made frequent appearances in minor films, but in 1940 landed the title role in Brigham Young, which starred Tyrone Power. The part gave him substantial name recognition, and while he was never a leading man, he had a significant mainstream career as a supporting player in movies and on television for the next four decades. His last appearance was a guest shot on the TV series "St. Elsewhere" in 1985, six years before his death at the age of eighty-seven. His part in Twelve O'Clock High as a major under the command of an army air force general played by Gregory Peck earned him his sole Oscar nomination and win.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Juano Hernandez |
Hernandez plays Lucas Beauchamp, a black man accused of killing a white man in a rural Mississippi county, and targeted by a gathering mob eager to lynch him. But he has a defender in a white teenager, Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.), who proves that Lucas is innocent.
Intruder in the Dust is not one of William Faulkner's better novels, but its film adaptation is one of Hollywood's great neglected movies. Directed by Clarence Brown, a Hollywood veteran who earned five Oscar nominations without winning, from a screenplay by Ben Maddow that shows signs of close collaboration with Faulkner, and filmed by Robert Surtees in Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi, it's a movie without major stars, but a beautifully chosen cast of supporting players: David Brian as Gavin Stevens, Chick's lawyer uncle who has to be persuaded to defend Lucas; Elizabeth Patterson as the indomitable Miss Haversham, the elderly spinster who stands off the mob at the jailhouse door; Porter Hall as the dead man's father; Will Geer as the county sheriff; and the citizens of Oxford and Lafayette County, Faulkner's Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha. But the standout in the cast is Hernandez, who was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Brazil and the Caribbean before moving to the United States. He was an acrobat and a boxer, performed in vaudeville and on radio and studied Shakespeare to improve his English diction, and made his Broadway debut in the chorus of the 1927 production of
Show Boat. In the 1930s he appeared in several films by the pioneering black director Oscar Micheaux that were made for primarily African-American audiences.
Intruder was his first mainstream film, and he continued his career, sometimes playing Indians or Polynesians, in films and TV through the 1960s. He appeared in another Faulkner adaptation,
The Reivers, in 1969, and made his last appearance in
They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970, the year of his death.
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| Lawyer Gavin Stevens (David Brian) speaks with Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) in his jail cell |
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| Hernandez and Brian in Intruder in the Dust |
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| Chick (Claude Jarman Jr.) falls into a frozen creek while out hunting with Aleck (Elzie Emanuel), and is rescued by Lucas (Hernandez), who takes him to his cabin while his clothes dry. Chick tries to pay Lucas, who proudly refuses. |
WHEN WE WERE EXTRAS from
Joe York on
Vimeo. A documentary about the Oxford citizens who appeared in
Intruder in the Dust
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