Lord, I miss Gene Hackman. This Civil Rights drama, a hyped-up telling of the real 1964 F.B.I. investigation ‘Down South’ after three Freedom Rider activists went missing (presumed dead), well-received, awarded, successful, later took a double hit. One trivial: historians uncomfortable with fictional/thriller liberties (as if this were unusual); and one that stuck a couple of decades on when the film became a prime example of White-Savior Syndrome*, stories with Black political & social issues treated as platforms to laud heroic White Folk, any Blacks in the cast kept to supporting roles. Neither issue exactly untrue, yet on its own terms, the pic remains an exciting, often exceptional work. Hackman’s on tremendous form as the seasoned F.B.I. agent with roots in the Deep South, ready, willing & able to play the White Supremacist field as it lays to get the job done, chaffing at much younger boss Willem Dafoe, an out-of-his-element/by-the-book technocrat FBI man. (It’s much the same dynamic Brian De Palma used the previous year for Sean Connery & Kevin Costner in THE UNTOUCHABLES.) With director Alan Parker and lenser Peter Biziou turning in probably their finest work capturing what was then a shockingly recent past of violent, proudly open racism (and other than the ‘openness,’ how much has really changed in that benighted State, still last or near last in so many social categories?) Mostly though, Lord, I miss Gene Hackman.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Fourth of five Oscar noms for Hackman in what was elsewise a surprisingly weak Best Actor field, he lost to Dustin Hoffman’s twitchings in RAIN MAN. Medical conditions always trump good acting at the Academy.
DOUBLE-BILL: *William Wyler’s little-known racially-charged final film, THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES so far ahead of the curve, it was already beginning to move past White-Savior Syndrome in 1970.
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