Word: southernism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...THOSE SOUTHERN NIGHTS. Vietnamese officials may not admit it, but Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) has become the country's unofficial winter capital. Virtually the entire 14-man Politburo, including 75-year-old General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh, prefers the balmy climate of the former imperialist bastion to the damp cold of Hanoi, the capital, which is 700 miles to the north. But the old warriors are careful to maintain appearances: when they have to receive foreign ministers and issue government announcements, Politburo members return -- briefly -- to Hanoi...