Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Here we go again. Exploiting white America's ignorance of historic racial oppression, Hollywood casts a spotlight on the rich but neglected story of the black struggle for equal rights. As has happened with every popular work on the subject, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Roots, Mississippi Burning evokes a gasp of horrified discovery from many whites who act as if they are learning about the viciousness of slavery and segregation for the very first time. Unfortunately, the film does little to deepen the knowledge of its audience. Though its producers say the movie is fictional, they so artfully...
From its opening sequence, Burning convincingly recaptures the racial dread of 1964 Mississippi. But the verisimilitude is soon sacrificed for a bogus conclusion: that to protect the rights of blacks, the Federal Government sank to the same level of lawless terror occupied by the Ku Klux Klan. To the extent they appear at all, blacks are portrayed as ineffectual victims, helplessly waiting for the "Kennedy boys" to set them free. In due course, that is just what happens, as the FBI cracks the case by brutally intimidating a white witness...
...defense of black rights that it would resort to vigilantism to promote them. That contention is laughable to civil rights veterans of the early 1960s, who pleaded with the bureau to take a more active role in protecting blacks. Only two weeks before the murders, a delegation of Mississippi activists journeyed to Washington to implore federal officials to protect the civil rights workers who were flocking into the state for the Freedom Summer. Yet despite repeated appeals to the FBI and Justice Department on the night the three civil rights workers disappeared, nearby agents did not arrive in Philadelphia until...
Only after the murders provoked a national outcry did the FBI enter Mississippi in force and begin a massive effort to undermine the Klan. Until then Director J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that the bureau was a strictly investigative agency forced FBI agents to invest far more energy in busting stolen car rings and foiling bank robberies than in probing even the most flagrant depredations against blacks. In 1961 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights suggested that since the bureau was often so closely linked to Southern law-enforcement officials, another group might take over the handling of civil rights...