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Starring Gene
Hackman as Anderson and Willen Dafoe as Ward
Vertis tells the agents
about the KKK
Brad Dourif as Deputy.
Pell
Frances McDormand as Mrs. Pell
Director Alan Parker
The
three slain civil rights workers depicted in the film:
James Earl Chaney
The James Earl Chaney Foundation
"THERE
ARE THOSE WHO ARE ALIVE YET WILL
NEVER LIVE,THERE ARE THOSE WHO ARE DEAD YET WILL LIVE FOREVER,GREAT DEEDS
INSPIRE AND ENCOURAGE THE LIVING."
-- Inscription on the grave of James Earl Chaney
Comments
from James’ brother Ben Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Michael Schwerner
FBI posted for the
three missing civil rights workers
Edgar Ray
Killen in 1964 (AP Photo/Courtesy University of Missouri-Kansas City
School of Law)
Edgar Ray Killen at
trial, June 2005
Ruth Schwerner-Berner and Ben Chaney celebrate after Killen’s
conviction –click on photo for details
A book about the three civil rights workers
Books about the Civil
Rights Movement by Taylor Branch
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Mississippi
Burning
Directed
by Alan Parker (1988)
Starring Gene Hackman
Best
Cinematography: Peter Biziou
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Cast
Anderson Gene Hackman
Ward
Willem Dafoe
Mrs.
Pell
Frances McDormand
Dep.
Pell
Brad Dourif
Mayor
Tilman R. Lee Ermey
Sheriff Stuckey
Gailard Sartain
Townley Stephen
Tobolowsky
Frank
Bailey Michael Rooker
Lester Cowens Pruitt Taylor Vince
Agent
Monk Badja Djola
Agent
Bird Kevin Dunn
Produced by Frederick Zollo and Robert F. Colesberry
Written
by Chris Gerolmo
Edited
by Gerry Hambling
Photography
by Peter Biziou
Music by
Trevor Jones.
Running time: 128 minutes
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About the Actors
Gene
Hackman
Bio
for Hackman
More
on Hackman’s life and awards
Willem
Dafoe
Frances
McDormand
Hackman and the Academy Awards
Nominated for Supporting Actor 1967 : BONNIE AND CLYDE
Nominated for Supporting Actor 1970 : I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER
Actor 1971 : THE FRENCH CONNECTION
Nominated for Best Performance By an Actor in a Leading Role 1988 :
MISSISSIPPI
BURNING
Wins Best Performance
by an Actor in a Supporting Role 1992 : UNFORGIVEN
About the
Director
Alan
Parker Filmography
Index of Reviews
MRQ Reviews
Reviews of the Film
Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times
Desson Howe of The Washington Post
Rita Kempley of The Washington Post
Reviews and Notes
CinePad.Com
About the Film
Memorable
Quotes
Bibiliography of Materials
Information on the
Events (including a chronology): scrolled down the page
Popcorn Peacemaking site information on the film with
discussion questions
About the Original Trial
Chronology
Supreme Court Decision
Killen Trial, June 2005
TimesOnline
The Jackson Channel
CBS News
Killen Trial, Update August 2005
Killen’s Brother threatens to kill judge
Reviews
& Notes
Provided from
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/movie.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 8, 1988
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.
Vincent Canby
THE WASHINGTON POST
December
8, 1988
'Burning': Potent But Problematic
"Mississippi Burning" surveys the geography of racism, sheds light
on the dark night of the soul. Director Alan Parker stokes the inferno
with cruelty, hatred and charring crosses, then sifts the cold ashes
for clues. The mystery, ostensibly about the murder of three young
civil rights workers, is the inhumanity of man....
Parker, a director of breadth, not depth, never supplies the big answers, but
he does powerfully depict the climate of the Confederacy in the
"Freedom Summer" of 1964.
Mississippi Burning" offers an appalling litany of white supremacist
atrocities in the guise of a buddy detective thriller. Gene
Hackman gives a towering performance as Anderson, a former sheriff wise
to sleepy Southern streets, and Willem Dafoe is understated as Ward,
the principled straight arrow in charge of the FBI's search for three
missing civil rights workers.
Rita Kempley
THE NEW YORK
TIMES
January
8, 1989
"Mississippi
Burning": Generating Heat or Light?
Cinematic Segregation in a Story About Civil Rights
The weight of "Mississippi Burning's" distortions crushes truth
underfoot. The truths sacrificed here were moving ones that said
much about America.
The simple recounting of those days would make the hairs stand on end
on all but the iciest of necks. This story was savaged, it seems, in
service of a clearly reactionary and outmoded idea: that white Americans
would shudder at the idea of heroes not cast in their images.
Brent Staples
TIME MAGAZINE
January
9, 1989
Fire This Time; With incendiary drama and a lightning pace, Mississippi
Burning illuminates an ugly
chapter in American History -- and stokes a bitter debate.
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 1930s, 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.
Richard Corliss
THE NEW YORK TIMES
January
8, 1989
. . . . [Parker and Gerolmo] have created an unashamed, hugely effective if
slick melodrama of a brutality that does not, I am sure, overstate the
conditions. (Two years after the deaths of Chaney, Goodman and
Schwerner, but before the trial of the accused civil rights violators, Dr.
King visited Philadelphia,
Miss., and found it "a
terrible town, the worst I've seen.") At the center of the
film is the serviceable if not exactly inspired conflict between two very
different kinds of F.B.I. agents. Reduced to its superificial
esentials, "Mississippi Burning" is a buddy film. On the one
side is Ward (Willem Dafoe), the clean-cut, by-the book, ethical F.B.I. agent
from the North. On the other side is Anderson (Gene Hackman), a
renegade redneck Mississipian, himself a former county sheriff and a
man who is not above using dirty tricks in the cause of racial justice.
It is this character that is the film's philosophical undoing, as well as
it's remarkable dramatic core. . . .
Vincent Canby
THE NEW REPUBLIC
January
9, 1989
Docudrama is a dubious genre; something that pretends to be docudrama is even
more dubious. Mississippi Burning was patently based on the
murder of three civil rights workers in June 1964 -- a local black, James
Chaney, and two white Northerners, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner. Admittedly it would be difficult to make a film on that
subject and keep it more document than invention, but this film doesn't
try very hard. It wants praise for facing facts fearlessly without
being bound by them. A few lines, tucked in at the very end after the
long closing list of credits, tell us that Mississippi Burning is not
factual, that it was only suggested by the facts. This strategy
licensed the filmmakers-Chris Gerolmo, the writer,
Alan Parker, the director, Frederick Zollo and Robert F. Colesberry, the
producers-to lard the story with movie stuff in order to make it
"play". . . ..[t]e biggest surprise in the film is that the states
of Mississippi and Alabama cooperated in the making of
Mississippi Burning. of course the production put money in the pockets
of residents in the area-many of them are seen in the film-but I doubt
that this would have been decisive 24 years ago. Perhaps the
clearest sign of progress in race relations down there is that the location
shooting was done where it was.
Stanley
Kauffman
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
January
22, 1989
Where Mississippi Burned: Civil
rights film rekindles horrors of the state's past
The racial violence that erupted in this lumber-milling community 24 years
ago is like a festering wound that refuses to heal. . . .
"They (the film makers) just want to stir up trouble between the
races. It's all out of proportion," declares Lawrence
Rainey, the former Neshoba
County sheriff who was
exonerated of conspiracy charges in connection with the murders.
Disagreeing is the 1964 president of the Neshoba County
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. Jessie Gary considers the picture an important reminder
of the mistreatment blacks endured.
Hal Lipper
NEWSDAY
February
12, 1989
Winner,
Best Brouhaha; The fireworks over 'Mississippi Burning' have generated
unexpected publicity and a box office boost.
Will the controversy dampen the film's chances for an Oscar?
When the 1988 Academy Award nominations are announced at 5:30 a.m. Hollywood time Wednesday, "Mississippi
Burning" is likely to be one of the five nominees for best picture.
Gene Hackman's portrayal of a sometimes unscrupulous, southern-born FBI agent
is an equally good bet for best actor recognition.
Just how many other Oscars the film will be nominated for, or win, is
question making the rounds of studio executive suites. For if there
were nominations for the most battered and denounced picture of the
year, 11 Mississippi
Burning" would have no rivals.
For the 4,632 Motion Picture academy voters, the issue is whether a movie
should be judged on its own cinematic terms - was the script well-structured,
the directing forceful? -- or whether political outcry the movie sparks, the
impact of the movie on society, should also be taken into account. taking
real-world political considerations into account. An obviously
well-intentioned attempt to evoke the half-forgotten racial violence of the
"Freedom Summer" of 1964 in segregated Mississippi, the $ 14-million Orion
Pictures release has hardly won its makers the congratulations they expected
from veterans of that era's civil rights struggle.
Instead, the emotionally charged drama has been attacked as an inexcusable
twisting of history by Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond and other
well-known civil rights movement veterans and African-Americans.
NAACP executive director Benjamin L. Hooks said the film "reeks of
dishonesty, deception and fraud." Said Willis Edwards, president of the
NAACP's Hollywood-Beverly Hills chapter, "What I have a problem
with is the insulting way Orion would even attach its name to such
distorted history, causing pain."
Martin Kasindorf
THE WASHINGTON
POST
July 27, 1989
Mississippi Burning
In Alan Parker's revisionist thriller, the FBI comes to the rescue of the
civil rights movement while the black locals cower in the
background. Set in the summer of 1964, 11 Mississippi Burning" offers a
litany of KKK atrocities in the guise of a buddy detective mystery.
Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe costar as incompatible G-men -- a cagey good oll
boy and a principled straight arrow in charge of the FBI's search for
three missing civil rights workers. . .
.
Despite the towering performances of Hackman and McDormand, the movie's epic
visuals and Parker's good intentions, "Mississippi Burning" has a
bogus feel. Based on an actual case -- the murder of black activist
James Chaney and white colleagues Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner -- it's
the right story, but with the wrong heroes. There's this nagging
feeling that the story begins where it ought to have ended -- with the deaths
of the three young activists.
Rita Kempley, Hal Hinson, Joseph McLellan
LOS ANGELES TIMES
February
4, 1990
Another Case of Murder in Mississippi; TV Movie on the Killing of Three Civil
RightsWorkers In 1964 Tries to Fill In What "Mississippi Burning"
Left Out
The film was criticized for telling the story from a strictly white point of
view. Its black characters pretty much stood around, looking
stalwart and resolute but immobile, like the Indians in Old West
movies.
"A lot of excitement and a lot of blood and a lot of action,"
observed Ben Chaney Jr., 37, brother of James Chaney, "but it
didn't reflect the attitude of the people who were there at the time, and
that distorted history.". . .
Frederick Zollo, producer of "Mississippi Burning," said he
was "surprised about the enormous reaction." He
said the movie was intended as "a drama, as powerful as we could make
it, using the three murders as a backdrop to the study of racism in Neshoba County
(changed here to Jessup County) and in the larger view of America.
"I think we certainly succeeded in that respect. I think we
galvanized a nation, which a good movie should do. . . ."
Irv Letofsky
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