Rainbow with Egg Underneath and an Elephant

Mississippi Burning

INDEX
Rolling Stone
Blitz Magazine
The Face
Time Magazine
Time Magazine - Gene Hackman Article
Q Magazine
Video Review

THE BURNING TRUTH
Director Alan Parker's latest movie tries to tell it like it was in Mississippi in 1964
ROLLING STONE
November 1988
by JEFFREY RESSNER

SITTING AT A DESK IN HIS Hollywood office, director Alan Parker riffles through a high stack of post-card-size photographs that depict the shame and sorrow of two decades. There are black-and-white photos of the assassination of Martin Luther King, a "coloreds only" water fountain in the Deep South, the riot that occurred when student James Meredith risked his life to integrate the University of Mississippi. But the most striking photo is one of a blazing cross erected by the Ku Klux Klan. Images like that one have been seen in movies since The Birth of a Nation, in 1915. Now the infamous icon is a recurring symbol in Parker's forthcoming film Mississippi Burning, a fictionalized account of an FBI probe into the murder of three young civil-rights activists during the long hot summer of 1964.

Parker, an Englishman whose previous films include Angel Heart and Midnight Express, says he used those Sixties snapshots as visual cue cards while making the movie. "I suppose they were to remind me of what happened, to give me a sense of the climate of the times," he says.

"In my office down in Mississippi, I couldn't even see the walls because so many of these photographs were hung up. If it drips a little into me, then maybe when I come to put it on film, it can be a little more truthful."

Although based on a true incident - the murder of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, in Philadelphia, Mississippi - Mississippi Burning is centered on the relationship between two fictional FBI agents sent to investigate the racially motivated killings. Gene Hackman plays Rupert Anderson, a good-ol'-boy ex-sheriff who has overcome his family's prejudice Willem Dafoe played Allen Ward, an idealistic young Ivy Leaguer placed in charge of the investigation. The film derives much of its energy from the heated arguments between the two agents.

By all accounts, Mississippi Burning is the result of some heated offscreen confrontations as well. The forty-four-year-old Parker and Chris Gerolmo, a thirty-five-year-old screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for Miles from Home, clashed over the film's script. "I have a reputation for being extremely difficult," says Parker. "But only one person can be in control of a movie, and I happen to believe that's the director."

Parker, who was brought into the project by Orion Pictures, says Gerolmo's original script "kind of glossed over the actual events and political climate of the times." He overhauled the script, adding some dialogue and strong social commentary. "I think I made it a much tougher film than it was before," Parker says. "It's more realistic, and hopefully more truthful, than it might have been."

For his part, Gerolmo is hesitant to talk specifically about his disputes with Parker. In a recent Los Angeles Times story about the making of the film, he characterized Parker as "a real creep . . . very bombastic and ugly." Now, Gerolmo will say only, "Out of contention cometh the stuff." And in much the same way that the characters played by Hackman and Dafoe ultimately put their differences aside and solve the crime in the picture, Gerolmo has more or less come to terms with Parker's vision. He says he's proud to be associated with the film. "I think largely the structure remains the same. Almost every scene is the same, but what directors change, and have the prerogative to change, is the dialogue. Alan wanted to add to the screenplay that this was a film about the issues, so he put in more material and more discussion and more dialogue about civil rights."

"The script needed more political backbone," says Parker, "more reality."

Parker's desire for authenticity extended beyond revisions of the script. He spent months researching the murder of the three activists and the era in which it took place, collecting books, newspaper articles and, of course, his stack of photographs of the violence that accompanied the effort to integrate the South.

"You can see a photograph that you absolutely know ends up as inspiration for an image you see on film," he says. "It's never specific; it's just a feeling you get. I can do a folder of photographs that can give me a film."

Many of Parker's photos - and many scenes in Mississippi Burning - vividly portray nocturnal crimes, including lynchings and the torching of churches and homes. According to Parker, shooting scenes at night was essential in evoking a realistic sense of terror. "Everybody is so conditioned and so programmed to the crap on American television where everything is lit up like a supermarket," he says. "But life's not like that - life takes place half in the daytime and half in the nighttime."

Instead of shooting the interior scenes on sets, Parker found his way into shacks owned by poor blacks in Mississippi. (In a memo to the set designers and others working on Mississippi Burning, he spoke out against the manufactured style of Steven Spielberg's film The Color Purple, calling it "unrealistic and precious . . . a Hallmark card version of history ... sanitized ... to be avoided at all costs.")

Parker and his crew also insisted on shooting only in Mississippi and Alabama. Because the movie champions civil rights, there was some concern that there might be problems in these backwoods areas, but Mississippi welcomed the money brought in by the $15 million production, and aside from some small incidents ("KKK" was painted out-side a church used in the movie), the film-makers say things ran smoothly.

"On the surface, they received us with open arms," Parker says "I also think it's true that if you scratch the surface of many people down there, you will still see bigotry. Having said that, it seems fair not just to point fingers at people from Mississippi and Alabama. If you scratch the surface of most people who seemingly have liberal points of view, there is racism."

Set for release in a few theaters this month and opening nationwide early next year, Mississippi Burning is the first major film about the civil-rights crusade in years. It also leads a pack of films on the subject: Heart of Dixie, starring Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen and Phoebe Cates, focuses on the integration of an Alabama college in 1963, The Stick Wife features Jessica Lange as the wife of a Klansman; and Into Selma is a circa-1965 love story about a boy from a Northern college who follows a girl to the racially troubled Alabama city. Warner Bros. is even developing a script called Mississippi Summer, about the lives of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney.

"There is perhaps some sense of political change in this country," Parker says, framed by the Confederate flag that hangs behind his desk, "a sensibility that's not been here in the last eight years. There seems like there's some wind of change, although it's not blowing very strong, towards more serious films. A lot of it is due to the incestuous nature of Hollywood on the worst end, and at the best end it has to do with Hollywood's maybe facing up to the fact that they have a lot more responsibility than just turning out films that chase the buck."

back to the top

MISSISSIPPI BURNING
Mississippi Burning is Alan Parker's powerful new thriller, based on truth, about the murder of three civil rights workers in the American deep south in 1964. Hugh Morley reviews the film, which opens here in April; Alan Parker then describes the making of the film, with extracts from his production diary.
BLITZ
1989
HUGH MORLEY

With its opening image - a gleaming silver water fountain under a sign reading WHITES alongside a broken-down porcelain wash basin labelled COLOREDS - Mississippi Burning promises to pull no punches.

From the bones of the real-life murder in 1964 of three Civil Rights workers - two white and one black - who were lynched by the Klan while on their way to organise black voter registration, Parker has fashioned a tautly controlled thriller of the first degree. No deadly dull polemic, the film whips along at an astonishing pace.

Much as he did in Angel Heart, Parker has skilfully captured the watery colors and dishevelled squalor of the tumbledown South. But this time it is diseased with the vicious mindlessness of rate hatred. Churches are torched, blacks are hanged and entire congregations are sickeningly beaten in the unremittingly graphic depiction of a white

community struggling to protect its supremacist heritage. "They only left me a nigger ... But at least I shot me a nigger" sneers one Klansman in the opening lynch scene.

It is Gene Hackman, as a Southern-born FBI agent heading the search, who comes closest to explaining the twisted motivation for this savage cruelty, telling his starched play-by-the-rules superior (Willem Dafoe) how his own racist father used to justify it "If you ain't better than a nigger who are you better than?" The FBI agents run up against a wall of silence from a black community too scared to talk and whites consumed with hatred. When Dafoe's platoon of cleancut FBI city boys fails to make progress he agrees to discard the rulebook and play by Hackman's dirty tactics.

In reality after three fruitless years the FBI finally got their break by paying a witness a reported $30,000 to divulge the location of the bodies. In Parker's version the FBI eventually get their leads by turning the Klan's violence against them threatening members with vigilante-style hanging and castration.

As the first film to tackle such a sensitive period in American history Mississippi Burning has inevitably stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy in the US. While many critics have lauded it as an unerringly tight racial thriller, others have castigated it as a liberal buddy movie merely another example - like Cry Freedom and A World Apart - of the black man's tale seen through the white man's eyes. Most of the vitriol has been aimed at the fad that the FBI agents are portrayed as the film's white heroes. While no one doubts that the FBI were capable of such 'dirty' tactics few believe that they would use them in the cause of racial justice. FBI boss J Edgar Hoover was notoriously slow in reacting to racially tinged cases and made no secret of his belief that both Martin Luther King and the whole Civil Rights movement were part of a communist plot.

Moreover black critics have been angered by the way black characters play such a minimal role in the proceedings. Aside from one boy who testifies against the Klan and a black FBI man (of which in the Sixties there were, in fact, none) the black community is depicted as being too cowed to fight back. As one writer for the New York Times put it the film purports to chronicle an episode in the black struggle for human rights, but instead becomes a fanfare for white liberals who struggle mightily on behalf of the disenfranchised.

Parker has reacted angrily to these criticisms arguing - not unfairly perhaps - that any such inaccuracies were made in order to bludgeon the film's subject matter through the usual Hollywood controversy filter and to create on audience.

Either way it is undoubtedly significant that the first filmmaker brave enough to tackle such a touchy period of American history should not be an American. And considering that it took Hollywood umpteen films ranging from The Green Berets to Rambo to arrive anywhere near Platoon's balanced portrayal of Vietnam, Parker's film has in one go pushed the Sixties civil rights issue into prominence more effectively than anyone might ever have expected.

Extracts from Alan Parker's production diary

I was first sent Chris Gerolmo's draft script of Mississippi Burning by Mike Medavoy of Orion Pictures in September of 1987. I had spent four months, after finishing Angel Heart, newly settled in Los Angeles, trying to write but mostly distracted by the weekly submissions as they arrived, like clockwork, in their seductive brown envelopes. I counted up that I'd read ninety-one scripts before being introduced to Mississippi Burning. (Many have since been made and mostly they were in areas that didn't interest me.) The power of the opening murder scene and the possibilities that the subsequent story offered me drew me to it immediately. It's rare that projects developed in the Hollywood system have any potential for social or political comment and the accessibility of the fictionalised story that Chris had constructed possibly had allowed this one to slip through. Orion arranged for me to meet with Fred Zollo who had developed the original draft with Chris.

With the thought of all the work ahead, I went off to Japan as a juror for the Tokyo Film Festival. Whilst I was there I got an excited call from my producer Bob Colesberry, who had begun researching the background to our film and was eager to share the mountain of material with me. Returning to the States, I also met with Gene Hackman who, although passionate about the subject matter, was also keen to know where our new script could eventually take us.

In New York I began immersing myself in Colesberry's research materials and news film of the period and events. Seeing the scratchy black-and-white footage at CBS - much of it unused outtakes - only underlined the responsibility we all had to the film we would eventually make. Also, it was clear that I had much to learn. After all, in 1964 I was in England, a long way from the turmoil of Mississippi and the American Civil Rights struggle. In the working-class area of North London where I was born and grew up (now ethnically extremely mixed) the racial problems of the last twenty years had not yet erupted, although the seeds were being sown. Class bigotry and economic inequalities were very much part of my life and something about which I felt very strongly.

Bob Colesberry's first insistence was that we should both visit Mississippi and walk the ground where many of the actual events had taken place. The original draft of the script had already fictionalised many of these events but the truth was where the inspiration and spirit of the eventual film had to come from. With the help of an armful of maps and newspaper cuttings, Colesberry located the dusty back road where the Civil Rights workers Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney had been shot. The two of us stood on the actual murder spot for a few minutes in silence, realising that true life, and death, are so much more important than movies.

Chris Gerolmo had written two drafts of the script before I became involved and we began working together on a new draft closer to the film I wanted to make.

As we reached the end of December we had managed to criss-cross, in dangerously small planes, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi visiting the many location possibilities offered up by the ever-growing location department. By the time we eventually settled on our locations, we would have scouted over 300 small towns in eight states, and, although I tried to keep my mind open in order to make a judgement on the best locations, truthfully I felt that we had to be in Mississippi. The more time I spent there, looking and talking to people, it was hard to imagine filming anywhere else. But Colesberry continued to cast our net as wide as possible and exhaust all the possibilities. If you don't look, you don't find. And sometimes you have to keep looking just to realise that you've found it already.

The small town we needed to create for the film was more difficult to find than I imagined. It had to be cinematically interesting, accurate to the period and place, but also convenient as a base for a crew of a hundred.

Back in New York our location offices had been set up and once again I seemed to be unpacking and setting up for the gypsy life we have to lead. As always, the production and art departments expanded overnight and every day I seemed to be shaking hands with another new person.

Juliet Taylor and Howard Feuer were my casting directors and the long process of casting was well under way. Gene Hackman had been set and one meeting with Willem Dafoe in Los Angeles was enough for me to know that he would be an excellent buttoned-down Ward to Hackman's renegade Anderson. Their chemistry together is all-important, and the forward energy of our narrative was firmly placed on their shoulders. Although from very different backgrounds, both Gene and Willem had paid their dues as actors and, at the risk of lapsing into turgid hyperbole, working with the two of them together proved to be as enjoyable and rewarding an experience as I have ever had as a director.

By the end of the year I had been able to incorporate two folders full of notes into my final shooting script, which I delivered to Orion on January 4th. By now, it would be clear to everyone the film I wanted to make.

January and back to the South. The small town we needed at the heart of our story was still proving elusive. In all, the script now called for sixty-two different locations, many of which I had found close to the city of Jackson. In Canton, Mississippi, whilst suspiciously scouting the back streets Bob Colesberry and I were followed and stopped by the local Sheriff - an eerie reminder of the beginnings of our story. At the side of the road with shaking hands, we pathetically offered our Directors' Guild cards as proof of identity. Fortunately, the sheriff was a good deal more amenable than his counterparts twenty-four years ago might have been. He was also black.

Apart from casting in New York and Los Angeles, we were also casting in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Orlando, New Orleans, Raleigh and Nashville. Gradually the rogues' gallery that covered two walls of my office was beginning to take shape as the faces that looked down at me started to match the characters I had in my head and the characters from the Sixties photographs that completely covered the remaining two walls.

Colesberry had decided that if we couldn't settle on our small town at this point he should base our operation out of Jackson, as I was determined to stay in Mississippi, and he was confident that the major part of our filming could be effectively done from there. Once more, the backroom army moved to new production offices, this time to the Holiday Inn in downtown Jackson. Our location department had now grown so large they could have fielded their own football team. Our most difficult search was for disused churches or, to be more accurate, disused churches that the owners would be kind enough to let us burn down. Also we had at least thirty of our other sixty-two locations still to find.

At the Jackson Armory we had arranged an 'open call', advertising on the radio and in the local newspapers for anyone - just anyone who wanted to be in a movie. Nearly 2,000 turned up and were dutifully photographed and ushered through the filtering process, allowing me to read with as many people as possible. As always you hope to find someone special for a speaking part (the interviewees in the film were all found this way), but mostly it enables the background extras to be sifted through so that no one appears in the film who I haven't seen or approved. The theory being that there's no such thing as a 'crowd' scene because at the end of a long lens, in close-up, any individual becomes a principal and this process enabled us to build up the most characterful and believable background for the film.

The last month of preparation and the usual frenzy of last-minute preparation and the thousand questions a director has to answer. Each special effect to go through, from fire to rain; each period car and truck be chosen; each costume, shirt and pair of boots to be checked, each prop, from a dog house to a broken picture frame, to be looked at; each pistol and shotgun to be approved; each wallpaper sample and shop front to be selected; each dog, cow and pig to be considered; each stunt to be choreographed; and the shooting crew and actors hadn't even arrived yet.

Undoubtedly, the more answers you get right at this point, the better the film will be. I don't think there's a director working who doesn't admit it's a percentage game. Colesberry and I also met with Lanny McBride, a local music teacher, who advised us on the gospel music used in the film. Bob and I spent many hours at Lanny's church as her choir ran through the many options she had suggested. I've seen many music teachers at work, during Fame and afterwards, and I never saw a better one than Lanny. At the end of one evening we all stood in a circle holding hands as one of the choir members led the group in prayer and prayed for "this director and producer and their film". Neither Colesberry nor I are overly religious, but it was difficult not to be touched by their sincerity. Certainly it's the first time any of my films has ever had such an auspicious and reverent beginning.

* * * * * *

March 7th. First day of Principal Photography. By way of punishing ourselves unnecessarily, we had decided to shoot the many night scenes first. Our first night's filming involved burning down our first church, not once but twice. There was a flurry of controlled (I think controlled) panic after the first shots (with three cameras) as the FX and art departments directed the puzzled local fireman to the heart of the blaze. In an hour we were ready to go through the process once again. This time until the church had finally burned to the ground. The burnt church at Mount Zion was the beginning of our story and it was fitting that it was our first scene. Everyone stood there silently, mesmerised by the flames as they devoured the little church - strange voyeurs to a movie charade that in reality would have been impossible to watch.

March 8. The motel scene with Gene and Willem. This was tough on Gene as we'd only just begun filming and suddenly he had to deliver probably the most difficult monologue in the film, where he tells the story of his own father's deep-rooted racist attitudes in answer to Willem's question, "Where does it come from, all this hatred?" The black underclass had always been there as a pathetic comforter to the poor whites - there was always someone worse off than they were. The threat of black political equality (and possible economic equality) is obviously not the only explanation for the bigotry, but an important one. It also served to explain much of Anderson's own attitudes. "Where does that leave you?" asks Ward. Anderson answers, "With an old man so full of hate, he didn't know that being poor was what was killing him."

March 10. Another church to be burned. We had built a small cemetery at the front of this old wooden parish church, once known as St Paul's, as I wanted to give each church its own identity. The church had become derelict many years before, when the fields had ceased to be worked and the locals had moved away from this remote corner as they were forced to find work elsewhere. At the height of the fire, the heat began to suck the moisture from the ground, enveloping the old church and the cemetery in an eerie mist, and it was hard to imagine that the 'prop' graves weren't real.

March 11. At night in a pig farm for the scene where Hollis, the black boy from the diner, is chased and beaten by three of the conspirators. The animals' dreadful ramshackle, makeshift pens, nailed together with the flotsam of fifty years of farming on the poverty line, echoed the sadness of the farmer's own home.

March 12. We began shooting the murder scene at the front of the film. In many ways these three, almost anonymous (in our story) young men are the entire reason why we were all assembled there in the middle of a dark and damp Mississippi swamp. The cowardly murder is the starting point for our film and hence, perversely, for a moment, death becomes more relevant than life. Hopefully, one day someone will also make a film about the importance of these young men's lives.

March 21. The KKK beating of the congregation at Aaron and Vertis Williams' church. I tried to soften the brutality of this scene in my final cut - fading out the horror of the victims' screams, as Aaron might have done, as he knelt in prayer. In the final mix of the film, Lanny Spann, McBride's solo voice can be heard over the violence. Her honest simplicity, hopefully contrasts with the muted images onscreen.

March 22. The Morgue at the University Medical Centre. This was the actual location where the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were brought after their discovery in the earthen dam. Watching the black plastic body bags wheeled down that very same corridor reiterated the realities and, more importantly, our own responsibilities that lay beneath our fictional story.

March 23. Day into night shooting as we first shot the cotton field, with Hollis encaged in the wire trailer. It wasn't the ideal time of year to shoot the cotton in full bloom and so the cotton was dressed, plant by plant, by the entire crew, who volunteered to undertake such a mammoth task. The sight of our many white faces putting cotton back into a cotton field seemed to me at the time an ironic cultural reversal of history.

March 24. Found us at Raymond Airfield for Agent Monk's departure. We had choreographed the scene so that the whole scene could be shot in one, allowing Gene and Willem to build up a head of steam with their performances (and to get the sequence in the can before both of our actors died of pneumonia). The choreography of one-take scenes, in different planes, is always satisfying because it allows the actors to discover and create their own internal combustion on screen - instead of relying on the dexterity of the editing. In truth, this kind of shot can only be attempted with skilful actors, and in this I was fortunate. I wrote this scene because I felt that an important and dangerous shift in morality had taken place which had to be addressed and articulated as Ward's by-the-book, principled approach is abandoned and he reluctantly acquiesces to Anderson's street pragmatism.

March 25. One of the major characters hangs himself. I'd originally written a much longer speech from Ward than appears in the finished film. I wanted to sum up all of our complicity in racist attitudes to try and leave the audience with the thought (and maybe guilt) that racism isn't unique to a bunch of rednecks in Mississippi twenty-four years ago. It's just as prevalent today. Maybe more so. Maybe more in the North than in the South. And we're all involved. More of this later.

March 28. Back to working in the daylight as we shoot the barbershop scenes. The film's sixty-two locations were spread out all over Mississippi but mostly within striking distance of Jackson. So we got used to many hours on bumpy roads. Our barbershop, however, was a two-block walk from our hotel. It had changed very little over the years, smelling of pomade, tobacco and sweat. In between takes, we had to gently discourage the owner from attempting to shave his regulars as he had done every Monday for the last thirty years. It's not good for continuity, we told him. Thirty years seemed like pretty good continuity to him.

Mayor: "You like baseball, Mr Anderson."

Anderson: "Yeah, it's the only game where a black man can wave a stick at a white man without starting a riot."

April 1. April Fool's Day found us in the small courthouse in the town of Vaiden. We had scouted more than 200 courthouses and as I stood there, trying to figure out my shots, looking at the buckled benches, faded, peeling paint and the yellow cigarette-stained glass in the windows, I wondered why we had looked so hard. But locations had to smell right as well as look right, and this mouldy, dilapidated building smelt like it had seen many courtroom scenes similar to the one we were about to create. The courtroom was held together by rusty sagging steel rods, and as the 120 extras, with freshly trimmed and coiffed hair, piled in, we wondered if this might possibly be the last trial the old building would ever see as the walls creaked and trembled from the combined weight of the cast and crew. The scene, in many ways, is a subplot to our main narrative, but I felt it necessary, in that it helped to underline the difficulty of securing convictions from the often politically biased judiciary of the time.

April 5. The aftermath of the burning of Vertis Williams' farm. Not for the first time, I had to shoot a scene amongst decaying animal carcasses (Birdy). These ones were courtesy of the local abattoir and the cloud of flies were courtesy of the Mississippi countryside. The scene emphasises Ward and Anderson's growing frustration with their lack of progress, with one another, and their own complicity in the mounting violence.

April 7. The black 'hamlet'. The location for the exterior of Obie Walker's mother's house was pretty well as we'd found it. The cluster of pathetic shacks were, for the most part, still lived in and not for the first time I felt more than a little guilt in making films where our hamburger-munching army invades the real lives of people living in abject poverty and all we see is a 'great location'. It's a continual moral dilemma between illusion and reality. Is it more valid on film because it's real? Or does it really matter to an audience brought up on idealised, sanitised cardboard movie sets? I'll leave that to wiser heads than mine to explain.

April 8. At the same location we filmed the interior at the home of the elderly couple, Hattie and Mose, at the beginning of Ward and Anderson's investigation. Once again in a room which no art director could have created (we'd added only the picture of Christ on the wall), we filmed Hattie (Gladys Greer), who said she'd never even been to a movie, let alone acted in one. Her truth isn't directed, just filmed.

April 9. In Vicksburg for the funeral eulogy and procession. We had scoured Mississippi for the right church and cemetery and had found them both here in the old town of Vicksburg which has jealously clung to its past and place in history (where more "genuine cannon balls" were on sale than were fired in the entire Civil War). Frankie Faison, who delivers the eulogy in the church, repeated his angry speech many times to the assembled (black) congregation, who were naturally as moved as were we, white faces crouched behind our cameras once again experiencing more than a little guilt. The funeral procession was shot in the nearby streets as Willem, a lone white face, marched in silence with the black mourners, flanked by the apathetic and hostile white police force.

April 12. Gene walks into the 'Social Club' for his confrontation with Frank Bailey and Deputy Pell (Brad Dourif). Watching Gene at work in this scene made me realise how lucky I was to work with him. There aren't many actors who understand, as he does, how to block, pace and play a scene, and his instant dissection of the work at hand with a minimum of 'actory' bullshit was a revelation throughout the film. I know I promised no movie publicity puke but I sincerely believe that working with him would be how it might have been working with Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart. When you've done sixty-odd films, as he has, great films and awful films, good directors and lousy directors, and you've still been good in all of them, you have to have something special. And he does. I can't say I ever became 'pals' with him - he retains his privacy and distance from everyone - but I never stopped watching him and marvelling at secrets that so few actors seem to have uncovered. If this sounds like bullshit, it's what I believe. Warren Beatty said to me, before we started, that Gene was the finest American movie actor, and I happen to agree with him.

April 15. Swamps. Once more we are knee deep in the murky Mississippi waters as the Navy and FBI search for three men, pursued by the hungry media circus. Our 200 extras had been cast locally and trod a good deal more carefully than the crew. After all, they knew what might be lurking beneath the surface, even if the crew didn't.

April 16. Choctaw Village. Once more we were up to our knees in rubber waders in a Mississippi swamp. We'd built the Indian Village from scratch in a week using old photographs as reference and it looked like it had been there for as long as the Choctaws. As the FBI agents stepped into the murky waters the looks of disgust and fear (Mississippi swamps are not uninhabited) were not part of their acting. Or as Gene remarked, "Do you remember when they used to do these scenes on the backlot at MGM?" He also took great delight in pointing out a sleeping alligator downstream who, so far at least, had not shown a great interest in members of the Screen Actors Guild.

April 20/21. Hospital. Back in Vicksburg at a disused convent where we had dressed our hospital sets. I had reconstructed these scenes to take advantage of the building's corridor and staircase and add more dynamics to those scenes. It was also Fran McDormand's first work on the film playing Mrs Pell - three hours in the make-up trailer and then lying in bed, asleep all night. A nice day to start on a movie. The exterior was shot in one long take as Gene and Willem fight on the hood of the car, leading to Ward's change of heart as to how he has conducted the investigations. We shot this long scene many times as Willem's face gradually became numb from Gene's slaps and Gene's cheek became red from having the barrel of Willem's gun thrust into it. I printed only the one take. The last one.

April 23. Citizen's Council Rally. This was the biggest scene in our film from the point of view of logistics. Ironically, for a director, large crowd scenes are often easier to shoot than two people in a room. I or everyone else, especially Colesberry, the very scale of the night's filming was a nightmare seven hundred and fifty extras in period costume, two hundred period cars, ten buses, thirty trucks, a hundred crew and police and, fittingly, borrowed circus tents in which to feed everyone. All night long the local extras, ankle deep in the wet grass, never stopped smiling.

April 2. The company moves to Alabama. Seventy-five crew; thirty trucks; a mountain of props and costumes The entire movie circus.

April 28. One principle reason for moving to Alabama was the town of Lafayette which ironically was so 'perfect' that our construction and art departments had spent the last six weeks trying to make it how we really wanted it! Even sleepy Lafayette, one of these small towns nudged into nowhere by newly built highways that had passed them by, had changed subtly and considerably in twenty years and our work was to put it back to exactly as it was in 1964. Or at least how we thought it was. Even after a month of hard labour it still wasn't ready so we bought ourselves a little time by shooting the first confrontation between our Agents and the Deputy at Pell's house, where we are also introduced the film to Mrs Pell.

May 2. Protest Riot. I had included this scene to emphasise the growing black frustration at the inability to secure convictions in Mississippi courts also serves as an echo of similar incidents of violence that were occurring in other parts of the country and, in a way I felt, showed the black minority asserting themselves For a moment at least not just passive victims.

May 4. Beauty Parlour, Night. What I thought would be one of our most difficult scenes - as Mrs Pell gives Anderson the vital information of the whereabouts of the bodies - actually went very smoothly. Fran and Gene made it very easy for me. At the end of the day, we also filmed the other half of Gene and Willem watching Pell and Stuckey release the black boy, Obie, from jail. After fourteen hours of filming, we are all tired and Gene explodes after I ask for another take. This is the only time Gene and l had any cross words in three months of highly emotional pressure filming and so it's instantly forgotten.

May 5. A difficult day as we shoot Mrs Pell's house being trashed after her disclosures and Fran being beaten up by her husband. An ugly scene and not pleasurable to shoot. Often, filming is playing charades whilst burning dollar bills and at other times, on certain scenes, it's easy to believe, whilst shooting, that the illusion of reality is actually real in itself. I remember doing similar violent scenes in Midnight Express where the whole crew was affected by the day's work and the hotel bar is fuller than usual in the evening.

May 6/7. Town Square. The KKK arrive in town (Anderson "Klan. No pointed hats, but plenty of pointy heads") We also shoot Cowen being picked up in his shoe repair shop. The tiny store had certainly not changed in twenty years, maybe even forty years, and it's one set that the art department couldn't take credit for.

May 9. Civil Rights Procession We tried to re-create here the black-and-white footage Colesberry and I had sat through back in November. The scene hopefully shows the irony of Deputy Pell, with his knowledge of the murders, calmly directing traffic and the ugliness of the other deputies snatching the tiny American flags from the hands of the young black marchers. Against this backdrop, Mrs Pell silently and painfully begins to give information to Anderson.

May 13. Movie Theatre. We had to put back the old movie theatre to how it was or, probably more accurately how we would have liked it to have been. When we first found it, the interior had been gutted and was being used as a store for tractor tyres - which sadly what it became again immediately after we'd finished filming. I'm afraid the good people of Lafayette who appeared in our film will have an hour's drive if they want to see themselves in Mississippi Burning. The black-and-white footage of the KKK racism speech being watched by the FBI was a scratchy, flickering reminder that the hideous reality was far worse than our fiction.

May 14. Our final scenes, where the cameraman is beaten up by Frank Bailey. I'd written this scene also from black-and-white CBS News film outtakes - probably unshown at the time because they showed the cameraman with blood streaming from his cut eye, a sight thought unacceptable for television viewers in their living rooms. Bob Colesberry, who took off his immaculate producer's hat for a moment, had volunteered to play the cameraman. Having the daylights kicked out of you by Michael Roker - who was acting, as always, on full throttle - is as great a sacrifice as I could ask of my producer.

The final 'production reports' I am using as memory jog for these notes says we completed principle photography a day-and-a-half ahead of schedule, which is testament to the best crew and actors I've probably ever had. The same call sheet also has a note that says "Set Decorator, Jim Erickson, was attacked by six vicious dogs and bitten by one. The owner was present and the dog has had shots".

Last words in the concluding scene of Mississippi Burning, the camera pans across a Mississippi cemetery and comes to rest on the grave of the young black Civil Rights worker murdered in our opening sequence. Our grave is the grave of an anonymous individual, a character in a fiction. A film. A movie. But James Chaney, murdered with Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, is buried in Meridian and his grave has also been desecrated; his headstone, and his memory smashed by ignorance and cowardice. The broken stones were dumped in a nearby ditch. His grave is still there in a forgotten corner of a hard-to-find East Mississippi cemetery. Still unmarked I'd written 1964, NOT FORGOTTEN on our film headstone. Just a movie prop in a movie struggle.

Our heroes are still white. And in truth, the film would probably never have been made if they weren't. This is a reflection of our society, not the film industry. But with all of its possible flaws and shortcomings, I hope our film can help provoke thought and allow other films to be made, because the struggle still continues. I wrote a speech for Willem in his concluding scene as one of the characters hangs at the end of a short rope. I didn't include all of it in my final cut because we thought it to be preachy and probably it only articulated again all that I'd said, or was trying to say, in the previous two hours of film. It was a hard cut to make, so I'll include it now

Bird: "Why did he do it? He wasn't in on it. He wasn't even Klan"

Ward: "Oh, he's guilty. Anyone's guilty who watches this happen and pretends it's not. All of them. Every governor or senator who allows the hate to fester to gather a few votes. Every college kid who ever laughed at a racist joke. Everyone who ever chewed their tongue when they should have spoken up. Mr Mayor is guilty alright. As guilty as the lunatics who pull the triggers. Maybe we all are"

back to the top

BURNING ISSUE
Based on the real-life murder of three men in 1964, Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning could be to the civil rights era what Platoon was to Vietnam: a vehicle by which Americans come to terms with an unhappy chapter in their history. But the film has opened to a storm of controversy. Can a British director grasp the complexities of southern racism? More importantly has the truth been distorted in the movie making process??
THE FACE
1988
by SETH CAGIN
Alan Parker is nervous. That's not unusual for a director awaiting reactions to a new film, but Parker had special concern as he prepared Mississippi Burning for release. This movie is drawn from the true story of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chancy, three civil rights workers who disappeared in Mississippi in 1964, and were later found to have been murdered by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob acting in collusion with the law. Their deaths, and the huge FBI investigation that followed, effected a turning point in the civil rights struggle of the early Sixties. Forcing change upon Mississippi, then the nation's most ruthlessly segregationist state, these events ultimately helped end legalized discrimination against black people throughout the American South.

Because it delves into so sensitive a chapter of American history, Mississippi Burning cannot pretend to be an ordinary Hollywood thriller. It presumes too much. Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney died as martyrs in a conflict that nearly tore the us apart. Their brutal deaths meant something to millions of people.

Parker knew all this before he made Mississippi Burning. The subject's sensitivity was certainly part of the appeal when he agreed to the project, presenting an ambitious film-maker with the chance to work with material more substantial than the usual Hollywood dross. As for the potential for controversy, that was a plus: it would sell tickets. But even Parker has been shocked by the storm that eventually greeted the film in the US. Large quantities of tickets have indeed been sold, but the director has also been loudly and widely reviled for seriously distorting, degrading, and misunderstanding a crucial chapter in recent American history.

I arranged to meet with Parker prior to the film's premiere. A couple of hours before I was due to see a rough cut of the movie, he called. As the co-author of We Are Not Afraid, a recent US non-fiction book about the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney case, I have a more than casual knowledge of his film's subject, and Parker wanted to make certain I understood that Mississippi Burning was always intended as fiction.

Perhaps so, but it also explicitly draws on a true and celebrated case, dealing with painful and recent history in the style of a docudrama. And Orion Pictures' marketing campaign - featuring the slogan, "1964: When America Was At War With Itself" - places a bright spotlight on the film's historical and social significance.

Two years ago, the same company's shrewd marketing made Oliver Stone's Platoon the focus of a genuine cultural happening, the film's success suggesting America's readiness to finally come to terms with the trauma of Vietnam. The gamble with Mississippi Burning is that the country is now willing to revisit the civil rights years.

To intensify emotions, the world premiere was held in the Mississippi state capital of Jackson, hosted by Governor Ray Mabus, whose state film commission provided services to the movie during production.

"The film was going to be made and seen whether we worked with them or not," the Governor explained. "The one chance we have is to use the. film to show how much Mississippi has changed. I am fervently hoping people will not equate what they see in the film with present-day Mississippi."

As for the film's backers, it hardly mattered whether it provoked Mississippians to a sense of remorse for the reign of terror their state so recently permitted or indignant rage that it needlessly reopens old wounds. Clearly, Parker and Orion hoped to have it both ways. Awakening memories of a true event and the potent sensitivities surrounding it, at the same time they employed the prerogatives of fiction for dramatic purposes. This formula was bound to strike a nerve, and from a strictly commer-cial standpoint at least, it was shrewd.

Alan Parker has been down this road before. His first international hit Midnight Express, was an adaptation of a book by Billy Hayes, a young American tourist imprisoned for attempting to cross the Turkish border with hashish strapped to his belly. Though it was actually Parker's second feature (after the gangster musical Bugsy Malone), Midnight Express introduced a brilliant new sensibility to the cinema. The film was graphic and emotionally blunt, intense and slick, a riveting account of a young man's systematic degradation in a barbaric jail.

It was also noisily controversial. The Turkish government banned the film and denounced it at the United Nations. Critics seized on the many discrepancies between Hayes' non-fiction book and Parker's movie - the shocking climax, for instance, in which Hayes finally attacks one of his tormentor guards and, in sensuous slow motion, actually bites off his tongue. It was powerful stuff, but pure fiction, applauded by audiences who made the film a $60 million hit, but lambasted by those who sensed Parker's willingness to go to any lengths for an effect. Midnight Express, some said, was xenophobic, sado-masochistic, exploitative - just plain nasty filmmaking.

In his work since, which includes Fame, Shoot The Moon, Birdy and Angel Heart, Parker has continued to display an exceptional talent for powerfully kinetic filmmaking, along with a propensity for impact over nuance. As he prepared Mississippi Burning for release, the looming question was what he would do with the civil rights movement. Could a major episode of recent American history withstand the same degree of dramatic license that admittedly helped make Midnight Express so compelling? The civil rights movement - an almost sacred chapter in US history, full of passion and conflict, high ideals and terrible violence - was a delicate subject indeed for a director never known for his delicacy.

MISSISSIPPI BURNING OPENS on a dark rural highway as the three civil rights workers - two white men and a black man - are chased down by a caravan of cars. Though the three men are plainly nervous, the driver pulls over when the lead clips on a flashing red police light. But this is no routine traffic citation. An officer, his face lost in darkness, utters a few obscenities, then an accomplice puts a gun to the driver's head and pulls the trigger. We hear several more gunshots, some uneasy laughter, and a Southern drawl: "You didn't leave me nothin' but a nigger, but at least I killed me a nigger."

The scene is staged with all of Parker's flair, and it's horrifying, capped by the haunting line of dialogue no screenwriter could have dreamed up. Klansman James Jordan said it on the night of June 21, 1964, according to the signed confession of another member of the lynch mob that killed Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.

In other respects, the episode departs slightly from the historical record. Chaney, not Schwerner, was driving the Ford station wagon, and the three men were actually removed to a more secluded spot before they were shot. But Parker has certainly captured the essential, bone-chilling terror of that night.

The film's focus then shifts to two FBI agents assigned to the case. Agent Rupert Anderson, played by Gene Hackman, is the native Mississippian, a redneck culturally akin to the Klansmen; Agent Alan Ward, played by Willem Dafoe, is the outsider sent by the Kennedy Justice Department to head up the investigation. Naturally, these two are at each other's throats from the start. The acting is good, maybe even better than good, but it's difficult to say because, for me, their story seems simply irrelevant. Their old cop-versus-young-cop routine has nothing at all to do with what Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney died for, nothing to do with Mississippi in 1964.

Furthermore, the film's depiction of their methods is a serious distortion of the truth. The FBI certainly played tough in Mississippi. It broke the Ku Klux Klan in much the same way that it broke the American Communist Party - by infiltrating the ranks and recruiting informants: 44 days after the three civil rights workers disappeared, agents found their bodies buried deep within a cattle pond dam, thanks to an unidentified informant who accepted a $30,000 reward for the information. (In the movie, the informant is a Klansman's unhappy wife, a device that conveniently provides Agent Anderson with a love interest.)

The FBI subsequently discovered who had committed the murders by obtaining confessions from two of the men who had been present in the 19-man lynch party. But agents never physically assaulted Klansmen or terrorized confessions out of them, as they do in the movie. Mississippi Burning even has the FBI kidnapping suspected Klansmen, threatening to castrate one man and lynch another.

Who could have imagined that of all the participants in this drama - the victims and their families, their colleagues in the civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and the white Mississippians who openly supported the Klan - Mississippi Burning would slander the FBI ?

It is true what the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover showed little sympathy for the civil rights movement in the South. Many agents were Southerners who clearly sided with segregationists, and there had been numerous racial incidents before this one that the Bureau failed to investigate properly.

This time, however, largely because two of the missing men were white, Hoover committed his agents to finding them and, after their bodies were discovered, to bringing the murderers to justice. This is precisely why the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney case was so significant: it brought the FBI into Mississippi in force, presenting the first real challenge to the local law and government officials who carried out or condoned much of the violence against blacks and civil rights workers. The massive FBI presence in Mississippi, starting in that summer of 1964, is what turned the state around.

The film's suggestion that the FBI resorted to dirty, un-American tactics to defeat the Klan not only distorts the truth, but feeds directly into a Klansman's favourite fantasy - glorifying his martyrdom and endorsing the Klan's preferred self-image as victims of a federal tyranny. This is how many white Mississippians would like to remember 1964: as a war in which both sides employed ruthless means, and their side lost only because it was outgunned and the other side played even dirtier. This is a dangerous fiction. I wouldn't be surprised if Mississippi Burning is popular with the racists it intends to condemn.

DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER, as long as the movie captures the essence of the story? The answer, I think, is yes. Four years ago, when Philip Dray and I began researching our book, we had little idea of Mississippi in 1964. We had started out to do a book about a famous murder we vaguely remembered, and then stumbled upon an astonishing fact. It was something we had heard but had never really grasped because it seemed so foreign to America: Mississippi was a terrorist state, maintained by bigots under the specious claim that the Constitution granted each state complete independence.

This was how blacks, and the whites who supported them, were beaten and jailed and murdered with impunity, and how blacks were denied the right to vote, thus eliminating any possibility for change.

This was a state where a black man who dared apply to an all-white university was summarily found insane and committed to a mental institution: where others were murdered after a mere attempt to register to vote: and where most blacks lived as share-croppers under conditions scarcely changed since the time of slavery.

As we learned of incident after incident of white terror, we developed a commensurate respect for the resourcefulness and bravery of the young black and white students who from 1961 began organizing protest and voter registration drives throughout Mississippi.

We also discovered that the period has left an enormous residue of unresolved bitterness. When I visited Jackson to promote the book last spring, I received calls at a radio talk show that could have been made in 1964. I was called "no better than a carpetbagger", a "profiteer", and was accused of slandering Mississippi while ignoring racism up North, in my own backyard, where I ought to have stayed.

Visiting Mississippi and gleaning the awful truth of what happened there was a sobering and shocking education. It occurred to me that going to modern Mississippi to poke about the past and look for ex-Klansmen and racists was rather like going to Germany in search of ex-Nazis.

Where were they? The answer, of course, is that they're everywhere and nowhere. What happened to Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney was in no sense a simple psychological crime. It was part of a political upheaval that affected virtually everyone in the state; the entire racist society was to blame.

Parker, whose political sensibility was honed in the quite different environment of working-class England, understands this, I think, and made an effort to reconcile his understanding with the demands of commercial movie-making.

"The civil rights movement made a strong impression on me," he says. It was the first time those of us who admired America from abroad saw that life wasn't perfect there. That even America suffered profound injustices."

This sense permeates Mississippi Burning, and it's where the film is true and important. That terrific title comes from the FBI's log name for the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney case, and referred to the firebombing of a small, black church the three men visited the day they were killed. Parker uses the title as a suggestion. His vision of Mississippi 1964 is of a hell on earth, where bright red and yellow flames continually lick an inky sky, consuming countless black lives. The film is full of terrifying violence by whites against blacks, and none of it is exaggerated.

But why, given the many legitimate conflicts the movie could explore, does Parker choose to displace most of its narrative onto the imagined rivalry of two FBI officers?

"That's a fair criticism," he concedes. "But Mississippi Burning was never meant to be a movie about the civil rights movement. I tried very hard to give it political integrity, but, without losing sight of the fact that this was a feature film, not a documentary, and to succeed it must reach and entertain millions of people. If it does that, hopefully it will provoke and educate them as well."

Parker is apparently quite sincere in his desire to test the limits of commercial Hollywood filmmaking. I doubt that he will mind coming off as the embattled director engaged in an uphill struggle to broaden the narrow constraints of the system. It's not an unflattering self-portrait, and with Mississippi Burning he may win that most elusive Hollywood prize: a prestige hit.

But is that enough? Isn't it a cop-out for a director to take credit for a movie's aspirations and best qualities while excusing its failings as concessions to popular taste? In the end Mississippi Burning is a film where you can be grateful for the good parts - the haunting sense of time and place, the compassion for black Mississippians, the memorial, however faint, to Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney - or you can admire the good parts and imagine the truly great movie that might have been.

back to the top

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine
Jan. 09, 1989
Mississippi Burning
SHOW BUSINESS, Page 56
Fire This Time
With incendiary drama and a lightning pace, Mississippi Burning illuminates an ugly chapter in American history -- and stokes a bitter debate
By Richard Corliss

A visitor to our community finds an old-fashioned welcome and a degree of friendliness that exists in no other place. . . Numerous lakes and ponds offer fine year-around fishing, and for the hunter Neshoba County is a paradise.

-- Chamber of Commerce brochure, Neshoba County, Miss., 1964

Wasn't that a time? Each year of the early 1960s brought new images of heroism and horror as the civil rights movement spread through the South like kudzu. 1960: four Negro students sit in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter. 1961: the Congress of Racial Equality inaugurates its Freedom Rides to integrate Southern bus terminals. 1962: in Oxford, Miss., James Meredith enters Ole Miss, its first black student since Reconstruction.

And then, in 1963, the white arm of racism strikes back. May: Birmingham public-safety commissioner "Bull" Connor turns his dogs and his fire hoses on demonstrators. June: in Jackson, Miss., Medgar Evers is murdered. September: four black children are killed in a Birmingham church bombing. The following summer promised the climax to a melodrama that would be scored to either We Shall Overcome or Mississippi Goddam.

Or both. In 1964 Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open, Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And on June 19 the U.S. Senate passed its landmark Civil Rights Bill. But two days later, three civil rights workers -- two Northern whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and a Southern black, James Chaney -- were arrested for speeding in Philadelphia, Miss., then jailed and later released into the night. They were never again seen alive.

For the next six weeks, FBI agents blanketed the area, quizzing the friendly folks of Neshoba County. Reporters from all over tested the residents' hospitality. Navy frogmen fished the lakes and ponds, searching for evidence of the local hunters' blood sport. In August, thanks to a $30,000 payoff to an informant, the FBI discovered the bodies in a new earth dam. Four months later, the Philadelphia sheriff, his deputy and 17 others were arrested, and in 1967 seven of the 19 (including the deputy but not his boss) were convicted of

conspiracy to murder.

Triumph and heartbreak abound in this story, but it has taken Hollywood nearly a quarter-century to put it on the big screen. Now it is here with a bang. Mississippi Burning, Orion Pictures' $15 million drama about the FBI's search for the murderers of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, has arrived with critical trumpets leading the way and bitter controversy in its wake. It has already won National Board of Review citations for best picture, best actor (Gene Hackman) and best supporting actress (Frances McDormand) -- prizes the film may duplicate on Academy Award night. For Mississippi Burning is made to Oscar's order: a white-heat yarn that illuminates, with fiery rhetoric at a lightning pace, one crucial chapter in American history.

Next week, when Mississippi Burning expands from nine theaters to more than 500, moviegoers will get to see what all the shouting is about. For more than two hours, director Alan Parker splatters grotesque and gorgeous images on his large canvas. Indomitable black preachers lead services in the charred husks of their churches. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan mass for a venomous camp meeting. And everywhere there is the blaze of torch-song tragedy as black schools and shacks crumble in the embers of the Klan's fury.

As the leader of the FBI team, Willem Dafoe (who played the martyred sergeant in Platoon and the humanist Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) is a stick of righteousness waiting to explode. But the movie also finds recesses where human dignity and compassion wait to be summoned. It is alert to the shifting emotional weight and moral responsibilities in any relationship, especially in the quiet interplay of Hackman and McDormand, two ordinary middle-aged people searching awkwardly to be of use to each other. Hackman caps a brilliant career here as an FBI agent that both J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King Jr. could love. He takes the measure of this film: a watchmaker's craftsmanship, a marathoner's doggedness. With every confident frame, Mississippi Burning announces itself as a big, bold bolt of rabble-rousin', rebel-razin' movie journalism.

Or is it just movie fantasy, and meretricious to boot? That is the source of a debate over the film's veracity and verism -- a controversy echoing the rumpus over The Last Temptation of Christ, but with politics, not theology, as the sticking point. Mississippi Burning is a fiction based on fact; it invents characters and bends the real-life plot; it colors in the silhouette of events with its own fanciful strokes and highlights. In focusing on the agents, Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo italicize the gumshoe heroism of white officials while downplaying the roles of black and white visionaries who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to help fashion a free America.

Thus the film has drawn accusations that it falsifies an era. "The film treats some of the most heroic people in black history as mere props in a morality play," says Vernon Jarrett, the only black on the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board. James Chaney's younger brother Ben, who was eleven in 1964 and is portrayed in the movie, finds the Mississippi mirror distorting: "The movie makes the FBI too good to be true. It is a dangerous movie because it could lead to complacency. Things haven't changed that much." Says David Halberstam, who covered the 1964 Freedom Summer for the New York Times: "Parker has taken a terribly moving and haunting story and he has betrayed it, turned it into a Martin-and-Lewis slapstick between the two cops. It's a bad movie: `Mississippi False.' "

Parker dismisses all indictments: "Our film isn't about the civil rights movement. It's about why there was a need for a civil rights movement. And because it's a movie, I felt it had to be fictionalized. The two heroes in the story had to be white. That is a reflection of our society as much as of the film industry. At this point in time, it could not have been made any other way."

The charges are not trivial, and neither is the challenge. At issue is the freedom of a filmmaker -- or any artist -- to twist the facts as they are recalled, to shape the truth as it is perceived. May a movie libel the historical past? And has Mississippi Burning done so? Artistic liberty vs. social responsibility: the stakes are high. The memories are indelible. The battle lines are drawn.

Another battle film helped Mississippi Burning come to life. Two years ago Orion's Platoon ripped the scabs off the wound of Viet Nam, copped lots of Oscars and grossed close to $300 million worldwide. Any successful movie creates a new market, and studios -- especially Orion, which has a rep for taking chances on political pictures -- were soon scrambling for the next Platoon. Cynicism is served with a twist in Hollywood, and Mississippi Burning has taken its licks as a ready-made Big Issue blockbuster. Before its release, even Hackman gibed that its producers "looked at how much Platoon made and they went, `Yeah! What other causes can we make some money on?' "

Platoon was lucky. It dodged the bullets that Mississippi Burning has walked into. Nobody mistook it for a documentary. Few criticized it for ignoring or caricaturing the Vietnamese. Instead, Americans recognized and responded to the grandeur of its hallucinogenic fever. Platoon was crazy from the inside, a surrealist's scribbled message from hell. Parker's film is quite another thing: an outsider's report, not autobiography but psychodrama, with a texture as real as newsreel. And yet its plot skeleton bears similarities to Platoon. In both films, two strong men fight to establish American values in a hostile country, and to claim the soul of an innocent. In both films, the local nonwhites -- yellow or black -- are less a group of dramatic characters than a plot device, a shadow, a chorus, a landscape, an idea.

As Mississippi Burning opens, three civil rights workers ride through Jessup (Neshoba) County, avid to get out of town. Their station wagon is overtaken by some good ole boys in a pickup truck. Blam! Blam! Blam! Officially, the three are "missing." FBI agents Ward (Dafoe) and Anderson (Hackman) know otherwise. They might be from two different colleges -- say, Harvard and Hard Knocks. But they are both feds in a bad town, and they know what smells. The sheriff, for one. "You down here to help us solve our nigger problem?" he asks agreeably. No. They are there to wash some soiled linen: the bloodstained sheets of the local Klansmen, who almost certainly executed the young men for the crime of idealism.

Ward was in Oxford with James Meredith; he was shot in the shoulder for his protective pains. Yet he seems criminally naive about race relations in the South. In a luncheonette he quizzes a young black; that night the youth is tortured. Ward's way is to send his agents wading solemnly through a Jessup swamp in their dark gray suits, looking for all the world like a lost patrol of Blues Brothers. The result is only frustration and conflagration, as Negro churches, schools, shacks go up in flames. Anderson, a native Mississippian, nows how to talk to the natives: threaten the men, seduce the women. He will take a razor to the neck of Deputy Sheriff Pell (Brad Dourif). He will take flowers to Mrs. Pell (McDormand), who functions as the town's guilty conscience. Her husband ignores and abuses her; now she has the chance to shackle him in the handcuffs of her hatred.

This is one of Mississippi Burning's two main fictional conceits: that the FBI broke the case in part by locating not the fear and greed of a Klan informant, but the flinty, vindictive soul of Southern integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene invariably gooses a cheer out of its audience -- almost a rebel yell. But its grizzly machismo represents an '80s-movie solution to a '60s for-real enigma: Dirty Harry beats dirty laundry.

That is not so far from screenwriter Gerolmo's original conception, more than four years ago, of Mississippi Burning: a political parable with western overtones, perhaps to star William Hurt and Clint Eastwood. "Hurt would represent the idealistic approach, and Eastwood the violent response," says Gerolmo, 35. "The film would be similar to John Ford's 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It's a movie that asks some serious questions about using violence in the name of the law." Initially then, Gerolmo might have meant the FBI's terrorist tactics to be seen critically, or at least ambivalently. But he must have known that American movie audiences want the thrill without the filigree. He must also remember the famous advice from a newspaperman in Liberty Valance, which sums up the approach Mississippi Burning would take to Mississippi history: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Gerolmo took the idea to his friend Frederick Zollo, an off-Broadway producer-director, who sold it to Orion. Several directors were proposed -- Milos Forman, John Schlesinger --before Orion suggested Alan Parker, 44. His films (Midnight Express, Fame, Birdy) resist classification by content, but in style they are as easy to spot as a fist in your face. Bang on! That is both Parker's strength and limitation, which has the dervish precision of the ace London commercials director he once was. But he had never made a film with such daunting logistics as this one.

"I knew the moment I read it," he says, "that it was a powerful story. What I did was to strengthen the social and political point of view, strengthen the characters, strengthen the overall quality of the film." And once shooting started, Parker took over, as a director will. The Writers Guild strike required that Gerolmo absent himself from the set; Parker apparently concurred in that ruling. Gerolmo's final arbitration: "The screenplay is mine, but the movie is

Alan's. That's the way the world works out here."

Parker's great challenge was making the world of his movie work in Mississippi. He and co-producer Robert Colesberry stalked 300 towns as likely locations, with the director impishly yelling, "Alabama Burning?" "Georgia Burning?" "Arkansas Burning?" But he selected Mississippi -- to the delight of the state film commission, which was willing to display its old racist scowl in implicit contrast to its fresh new face of many colors.

The director's previous movie, Angel Heart, was set in the Louisiana '50s and boasted a gallery of fine black faces. Now he was moving forward a decade and north a few hundred miles; the demands for local color were just as stringent. "Alan wanted real Southern black faces," recalls location casting director Shari Rhodes, "or a British director's idea of what a Southern face looks like. Pretty people need not apply." Rhodes was looking for dark skin, strong bone structure, "dignity." She visited nursing homes, prowled the streets of black neighborhoods and hired homeless men for walk-ons. She had studied photographs of civil rights marchers and wanted similar faces -- "people who had been dragged off bar stools. All their faces said, `I have been through some pain.' "

One Sunday Rhodes and Colesberry went to a small church in Jackson. "We were the only white faces in the whole church," she recalls. "At the end of the service, the deacon stood up and said, `We have some politicians who would like to say a few words to you.' Everybody looked at us, and we shook our heads. `You mean you're not politicians? Then praise the Lord!' And the whole church started laughing." The choir and its soloist, Lannie Spann McBride, perform the film's final funeral anthem.

In a way, the filmmakers were politicians: they would be using the new Mississippi to depict the old. Mostly, the shooting proceeded without incident. Sometimes, though, old images must have haunted the older townsfolk. One day Colesberry spotted one of the crew's pickup trucks toting a huge Klan cross through town and had the driver cover it up. During the ten-week shoot, derelict churches and other structures were set ablaze; production paused while the ashes cooled down. One evening the company assembled to film the burning of a local black church, which had been bought and would be rebuilt to the congregation's specifications. "It was freezing that night," recalls Bob Penny, who played the role of one of the white conspirators, "and it was frightening. As the church burned, you could literally hear the silence of the people. At one point Parker shouted out his usual `Don't act! Stop acting!,' and I said, `I ain't acting -- I'm scared!'"

Hackman and Dafoe kept a respectful distance, as befit their roles. Dafoe snuggled into his character, "an idealist who changes in the face of violence. One of the things that attracted me to Ward was that I believed him. I believe there were idealists like him in politics, the FBI and the Justice Department. The film is in part a meditation on what's happened to that kind of idealism." Hackman stayed busy tapping memories of Danville, Ill. "Growing up in a Midwestern small town," he explains, "helped me identify with Anderson. I felt as if I'd seen enough of those kinds of guys. I knew the territory -- the way a small-town sheriff operates."

Maybe, though, things have changed since Hackman's boyhood -- at least in

the South. Not long ago, Mississippians were killed for showing their faces and speaking up. Last spring, though, Mississippians were paid to do the same things for Burning. For some viewers, the film's most moving line will be found in the closing credits: "We would especially like to thank Governor Ray Mabus . . . and the people of Mississippi . . . for their kind cooperation in the making of this film."

Once every 20 years or so, Hollywood sets a film in Mississippi and explores the race problem in a big way: Intruder in the Dust (1949), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Mississippi Burning now. At other times it is content to play Rip van Winkle. If Parker's film is taking so much heat now, the reason is partly that U.S. filmmakers have stayed away in droves from the front lines of racial controversy. Ironically, the few Hollywood films that do investigate a smoldering political issue tend to be directed by foreigners. "American filmmakers love making escapist films," Parker says. "They never worry that they should be trying something else. So they haven't fought to make serious films, and the studios haven't made them, and American audiences have been educated to avoid them. It's not that these directors are seduced by the system. They are the system."

It has ever been thus. During the 1964 freedom marches and race murders, America could be seen tearing itself apart at the soul -- on TV, that is. On the big screen, Edwardian England was all the rage, in 1964's top hit (Mary Poppins) and top Oscar winner (My Fair Lady). While whites killed blacks in the South, and blacks torched their ghettos in the North, moviemakers wrangled with knottier dilemmas. Had Elvis finally run out of resort locations for his musical travelogues? Would Doris Day ever lose her virginity?

So Hollywood's few significant forays into the Magnolia State are worth a peek. The first look should be the longest. Intruder in the Dust, based on William Faulkner's novel and filmed in Oxford, dared to elicit the white viewer's admiration for a defiantly dignified -- in those days the word was uppity -- black man named Lucas (Juano Hernandez) accused of killing a white. Like Mississippi Burning, Intruder ends with a finger-pointing speech: "Lucas wasn't in trouble," says a white lawyer. "We were." But its lasting touch is in its portrayal of a black who refuses to play either martyr or Tom; in the war between the races, Lucas is a very conscientious objector. "He's got to admit he's a nigger," a townsman truculently insists. "Then maybe we will accept him as he seems to intend to be accepted."

One turbulent generation later, in In the Heat of the Night, a black detective showed up in Mississippi (stunt-doubled by Illinois) and refused to admit that he was anything but Sidney Poitier. This Oscar-winning film prefigured the antagonistic-buddy configuration of Mississippi Burning and a quillion other cop movies: a blustering Southern lawman (Rod Steiger) learns to respect, and win the respect of, a wily straight arrow from the North. The difference, though, is telling. Three years after Philadelphia, a movie could send a black man to Mississippi to solve a white crime. But not 24 years after.

Which is not to force old molds, noble or otherwise, on Mississippi Burning. It is simply to agree with Parker that the film is as much a reflection of attitudes in today's Hollywood, and in the rest of America, as it is a window on the 1964 South. In last year's presidential campaign, blacks were once again America's invisible men. Faced with the electorate's comfortable cynicism, Democrats chose not to evoke sympathy for the poor black (hence the virtual disappearance of Jesse Jackson), while Republicans chose to exploit fear of the rapacious black (hence the toxic stardom of Willie Horton). Why should Hollywood be more progressive than Peoria? Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy are two of the past decade's biggest stars, but they are still only comic relief. In serious films the minority presence is fainter than it was two and three decades ago, when Poitier was the only black king in the pack.

Hollywood is not a place but a state of mind. A filmmaker need not shop on Rodeo Drive to be influenced by the current social conservatism. Two recent British films, Cry Freedom and A World Apart, took deadly aim at South Africa's apartheid; yet their heroes were white. In Mississippi Burning too, the drama arises from a white's discovery of injustice toward black people. The hero is someone with whom the white audience can identify, someone with something to lose, someone who suffers only by his compassion for the afflicted. By this rule, every picture about blacks becomes a metaphor for the white man's burden. And the black man's burden is to be a supplicant to Superman, or Bleeding-Heartman. Or, this time around, Hackman.

Unhappy the movie industry that needs to invent white heroes and suppress black ones. Unhappier still the people who demand that one film -- in this case, Mississippi Burning -- be every film. Their anger is understandable. A lot of people have lived this tale as if it were the novel of their own lives. They have waited a long time for the movie version. And like the readers of any novel, each claimant has already "filmed" his own ideal version of the Philadelphia story. But a movie is not a hologram; its images and meaning cannot change as they are viewed from various angles and special interests.

This movie is full of enough facts to make the viewer suspicious, and enough distortions to be the truth. Maybe it is every bit as unfair to the FBI, which pursued the case vigorously and effectively, as it is to Freedom Riders. But whose truth is it anyway? Every film -- or every biography or news report or memory -- is distorted, if only by one's perceptions. To create art is to pour fact into form; and sometimes the form shapes the facts. William Randolph Hearst never said "Rosebud," and Evita Peron didn't sing pop, and Richard III was probably a swell guy, no matter how Shakespeare libeled him. This is what artists do: shape ideas and grudges and emotions into words and sounds and pictures. They see "historical accuracy" as a creature of ideological fashion. Artists take the long view; they figure their visions can outlast political revisionism.

Mississippi Burning is rooted as firmly in film history as it is in social history. It takes its cue not so much from the buddy films as from Warner Bros melodramas of the '30s, like Black Legion and They Won't Forget, which seized some social-issue headlines and fit them into brisk, dynamic fiction. It is movie journalism: tabloid with a master touch. And the master, the suave manipulator, is Alan Parker. By avocation he is a caricaturist, and by vocation too. He chooses gross faces, grand subjects, base motives, all for immediate impact. The redneck conspirators are drawn as goofy genetic trash: there's not a three-digit IQ in the lot, not a chin in a carload. These are not bad men -- they're baaaad guys. And the blacks are better than good; their faces reveal them as martyrs, sanctified by centuries of suffering. Caricature is a fine dramatic tradition, when you have two hours to tell a story and a million things to say and show.

What Parker hopes to show moviegoers of 1989 is a fable about 1964 -- perhaps the very last historical moment when most American whites could see Southern blacks purely as righteous rebels for a just cause. The picture may hold even truer today. Reactionary whites may not want blacks in their schools, neighborhoods or jobs, but they can feel empathy for the film's heroic Negroes. For Parker, that Mississippi summer represented "the beginning of political consciousness, not just in the South or in America, but in the whole world." Can Mississippi Burning help raise that consciousness once again, even as it has already raised old hackles? Perhaps not. But even that frail hope makes Parker's determination to go hunting and fishing in Neshoba County worth the trip.

Copyright (c) TIME Magazine, 1995 TIME Inc. Magazine Company; (c) 1995 SoftKey Multimedia, Inc.

back to the top

MISSISSIPPI BURNING (18)
(Alan Parker)
Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand, Brad Dourif
Q-REVIEW SECTION
April 1988
by ANTHONY QUINN

Alan Parker's new film has been preceded, like his last, Angel Heart, by so much ballyhoo that many will feel they have seen it before it even hits the screen. Mississippi Burning is set in the summer of 1964, and opens with a fictional reconstruction of the murder of three young civil rights workers - James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner - by Ku Klux Klansmen. This incident proved to be the catalyst that marked the end of resistance to integration in the state of Mississippi, but you wouldn't guess this connection from anything in Parker's film.

Mississippi Burning isn't really about the civil rights movement at all. That slice of history is simply a backdrop (a frequently gruesome and terrifying one to boot) in the same way that the trappings of voodoo and Southern Gothic furnished an exotic frame in Angel Heart, Parker's dramatic focus here is the pair of FBI men who come down to investigate the disappearance of the three activists, and the way their different backgrounds spark off a conflict in method. The black population are stranded on the margins of the movie, intimidated, hounded, even lynched, and not one of them emerges as a distinct character. We see them cowering in a diner, marching in protest, mourning at a funeral, but they are no more the subject of this film than were the black artists and musicians in Coppola's The Cotton Club, where Richard Gere occupied centre stage. There is something rotten in the state of Hollywood when Parker has to admit in his production notes, "Our heroes are still white ... in truth, the film would probably never have been made if they weren't".

The heroes in question are Agent Anderson (Hackman) and Agent Ward (Dafoe). Hackman plays a cynical, chuckling loner, a Southern man alienated from his own people but one who understands their instincts. Dafoe, looking a model of Kennedy-era earnestness, is a bespectacled straight arrow transferred from the Justice Department, who believes that a full-scale military search will solve the problem. Anderson knows that this will turn their brief into a media circus, and instead ferrets out some crucial information from Mrs. Pell (McDormand), wife of the deputy sheriff. When she is beaten up by her husband for betraying the whereabouts of the murdered boys, Anderson at last confronts Ward with the need to fight the Klan with the same savagery and cunning. Are we to suppose that the director is pointing a moral here?

There is plenty to feel ambivalent about in Mississippi Burning. On the one hand, it s technically slick and evokes a keen sense of place and mood - you can almost smell the hatred. Acting honours go to Hackman, who is superb, and his scenes with McDormand are played with affecting restraint. On the other, you don't even have to be clued on the film's many factual inaccuracies and exaggerations to sense that Parker has fudged a whole era of history; it must take some nerve to cast a story about the black civil rights struggle as a white buddy movie.

back to the top

Hackman: A Capper for a Craftsman
TIME - The Weekly Newsmagazine
Jan. 09, 1989
Mississippi Burning
SHOW BUSINESS, Page 62
Rumpled and lumbering, with a line of patter as weary as his smile, agent Rupert Anderson looks miscast as a male Mata Hari. Yet here he stands in Mrs. Pell's hallway, romancing the sad beautician in hopes of securing testimony against her husband. It seems a cruel bit of FBI sleuthing -- until Anderson steals a glance at her hair. The glance passes as quick as guilt and as long as longing. From it we learn that Anderson knows more about women than we thought, and feels more for this woman than he should.

This privileged moment from Mississippi Burning comes courtesy of Gene Hackman, the movies' modern Spencer Tracy. "Gene is a colossally subtle actor," says director Alan Parker. "He knows what not to do. Like Tracy, he doesn't talk about what he does; he just does it." Hackman, 57, has America's face, a body that has absorbed its share of life's shocks, a heart that has taken a licking and keeps on ticking. He can play the stern father or the doting uncle, a bad cop or a top sergeant, your best friend or the man you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. As agent Anderson, Hackman plays what he is: the average Joe's best image of himself.

Hackman thinks of himself as a craftsman in an honored, perhaps vanishing tradition. "All of us," he says, "from ditchdiggers to bus drivers to shoe salesmen, have a need to create something. I'm blessed that I found a profession that lets me do so. Once in a while, a piece of artistry flows by me or through me, but it's a mistake to think of myself as `artistic.' It looks relaxed, easy, but I work very hard."

No lie there: he must spend more time acting than Michael Caine put together. This fall, five Hackman films were released. "I'll take what's offered me," he says, "as long as it falls into certain parameters. I'm not going for the home run every time." Sometimes Hackman has hit bunt singles in a movie resume as long as a Chicago Cubs season. Yet he projects such solid authority that not even junk can embarrass him. "I actually think I've been lucky," says the star who can't say no. "Working constantly not only keeps me sharp, but relieves me of the responsibility of having to perform up to a certain level if I had been waiting for the `right' role."

Hackman learned a lot, the hard way, before he ever stepped in front of the camera. His father, a newspaper pressman in Danville, Ill., beat young Gene. "Though he left town when I was 13," Hackman recalls, "he'd drift back periodically to disrupt things. I was so shy that I never dated in high school. Sexual frustration, plus my unwillingness to live up to my mother's expectations or to be a father to my younger brother, gave me more than enough reasons to get out of town and join the Marines." His lone consolations were a doting grandmother -- "a great gal, a storyteller, a sanctuary" -- and the movies. "When I'd walk out of the theater, I knew I was really Errol Flynn or James Cagney. And kids from disturbed environments visualize what they feel is the perfect life. Through acting they can realize their fantasies, recover their lost dreams."

They must have seemed pipe dreams at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Hackman took acting classes in the mid-'50s; the school voted him, and fellow student Dustin Hoffman, Least Likely to Succeed. A decade of small parts and menial jobs kept him going until 1964, when he scored in the Broadway comedy Any Wednesday. Three years later he made a screen impact in Bonnie and Clyde, and Hackman could finally support his wife Faye and three children from his actor's earnings. The couple were divorced in 1985, after 30 years of marriage. "Acting is a selfish profession," he says. "You have to be selfish with your time, your demeanor, your thoughts, and hope the people around you won't suffer too much."

Of his 50 pictures, Hackman rates six as really good: Bonnie and Clyde (Buck Barrow, Clyde's elder brother), The French Connection (an Oscar as New York cop Popeye Doyle), Scarecrow (on the road with Al Pacino), The Conversation (Francis Coppola's study of a lonely surveillance expert), Under Fire (as a TIME correspondent in Nicaragua) and Mississippi Burning. His FBI agent bears traces of early Hackmen. Anderson, like Buck Barrow, repeats favorite anecdotes and plays dumber than he is; like Popeye, he wears stumpy ties and catches bad guys on his own obsessive terms. And at the end of each sentence you hear the Hackman laugh: nervous, infectious, conspiratorial and, at bottom, lethal.

Hackman can laugh all the way to the bank; at almost $2 million a picture, the money adds up. But even a workaholic must hear the ticking of a gold watch in his future. "There's a big part of me that wants to quit," he says, "and I'm listening more and more to that voice. But I tried pulling back before, after Superman in 1978, and found out there wasn't much else I was suited for." That's O.K. Hackman's job -- and his capstone role as Anderson -- fits him as snugly as the gray suits on the firm body, as perfectly as the mantle of Spencer Tracy.

back to the top

Mississippi: Still Burning After All These Years
Gene Hackman vs Amerikkka's most wanted
MISSISSIPPI BURNING
Director Alan Parker
Starring Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Brad Dourif, Frances McDormand
(Virgin)
by IAN McCANN

TWO FBI AGENTS ARE SENT DOWN TO Mississippi from the 'queer assed north" that is Washington DC to investigate the disappearance of three kids, one black, two white. It is 1964 and America is in the grip of the social unrest of the nascent civil rights movement. The two white kids were not Mississipians, they too were from the north, civil-rights seeking college kids. Right from the start of the film you know their police/Ku Klux Klan-created fate, an English director using the American whodunnit technique of giving the viewer the answer at the beginning and then letting you watch the cops work it out. Except this is no normal whodunnit: the soft-option of the crime story is not the point here at all. Mississippi Burning is a political entertainment to rank with anything from Hollywood in the past ten years.

In another typical crime story stroke, we're presented with a variant on the Mr Nice & Mr Nasty scenario, with Hackman as the Mississippian FBI agent Anderson returned to roots, telling his superior Ward (Dafoe) how things are done in the south and even ironically singing a Ku Klux Klan song as they first drive into town.

Although it is reasonably clear that Anderson/Hackman will eventually reveal exactly which side he is on, there is a certain ambivalence maintained for the first half of the movie. Ward, the college-taught, by-the-book agent, starts off as a kind of Clark Kent and then turns into an unwilling Harry Callaghan. The dissent between the two gives the movie its drive.

Ward calls in half the US army to dredge a swamp against Anderson's advice, and this brings the media in and inflames the situation between the Ku Klux Klan and the black community. Suddenly the small town is swamped with what the local Klansmen regard as amoral northern invaders, and things turn very ugly indeed, with black families burnt out of their homes, church congregations beaten, farm animals cooked prematurely and a limited amount of black retaliation.

Anderson's local knowledge leads him to question the wife of the local deputy/leading Klan thug, alluringly played by Frances McDormand. When she finally succumbs to his charms, her husband puts her into hospital. Ward hates Anderson's methods, and an inevitable confrontation between the FBI agents leads to Ward holding a gun to Anderson's face. Everyone in town is burning, not just the buildings. The question is, will the locals close ranks altogether, with the entire town laid waste, or will the Klan be rounded up for good?

While hardly a landmark political movie, Mississippi Burning is totally gripping, socially-aware entertainment. There are faults: the depiction of the poor whites at a Klan rally makes them look uniformly ugly, a propaganda move worthy of a lesser movie; the predominance of male characters when it would have been nice to see Mrs Pell's reasons for betraying her husband made a little clearer; the black characters seem shadowy outlines compared to the main protagonists; whether Anderson would really have gotten away with squeezing the balls of a local hardman in the local illegal bar seems unlikely. But these are quibbles.

Peter Biziou's photography is stunning, Alan Parker keeps the plot shifting apace so that at no point do you realise that two hours is passing, and both Hackman and Dafoe are, of course, excellent.

For a display of redneck vileness, there are several characters to match previous horrors to be found in The Heat Of The Night and A Touch Of Evil. Brad Dourif as Deputy Pell in particular, has the sort of eyeball-boggling racist skull it would be a pleasure to crack.

Just as impressive on the reduced scale of a TV screen as it is in the cinema, Mississippi Burning is one modern movie no home should be without.

One question remains: now that the south is generally reckoned to be ahead of the north in the racial harmony stakes, where - apart from the arthouse posturings of Spike Lee - is a moneyed film-maker willing to confront today's race wars?

back to the top