Word: fbi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...