Czar Soonerov
3/3/2006, 04:16 PM
Pretty good flick. Gene Hackman gave a stellar performance.
The film's principal characters are two F.B.I. men sent down to fictional Jessup County, Miss. to look into the reported disappearance of the civil-rights workers. The leader of the two-man team is Ward (Willem Dafoe), a straight-backed, neatly pressed young agent who goes by the book. His partner, and the film's volatile center, is a not easily categorized fellow named Anderson (Gene Hackman) . A Mississippi redneck, as well as a former Mississippi county sheriff.
Anderson is one of those independently minded Southerners who confound all out-of-state preconceptions about Mississippi, or any other place in the supposedly solid South. (Another would be William Bradford Huie, the crusading Alabama-born-and-bred journalist, author of "Three Lives for Mississippi,, (1965), one of the first books about the Chaney-GoodmanSchwerner case.) The tensions that develop between Ward and Anderson are not entirely unpredictable. The film's resolution also depends on two rather unlikely character transformations. Yet nothing long deters the accumulating dramatic momentum as "Mississippi Burning'"I proceeds and as the defense of the good, psalm-singing, white Christian murderers unravels....
Mr. Hackman has possibly the best-written role of his career as scratchy, rumpled, down-home-talking redneck, who himself has murder heart. He is sensational.... "Mississippi Burning" is first rate.
The film's principal characters are two F.B.I. men sent down to fictional Jessup County, Miss. to look into the reported disappearance of the civil-rights workers. The leader of the two-man team is Ward (Willem Dafoe), a straight-backed, neatly pressed young agent who goes by the book. His partner, and the film's volatile center, is a not easily categorized fellow named Anderson (Gene Hackman) . A Mississippi redneck, as well as a former Mississippi county sheriff.
Anderson is one of those independently minded Southerners who confound all out-of-state preconceptions about Mississippi, or any other place in the supposedly solid South. (Another would be William Bradford Huie, the crusading Alabama-born-and-bred journalist, author of "Three Lives for Mississippi,, (1965), one of the first books about the Chaney-GoodmanSchwerner case.) The tensions that develop between Ward and Anderson are not entirely unpredictable. The film's resolution also depends on two rather unlikely character transformations. Yet nothing long deters the accumulating dramatic momentum as "Mississippi Burning'"I proceeds and as the defense of the good, psalm-singing, white Christian murderers unravels....
Mr. Hackman has possibly the best-written role of his career as scratchy, rumpled, down-home-talking redneck, who himself has murder heart. He is sensational.... "Mississippi Burning" is first rate.