It was a terrific movie -- Willem Dafoe, Gene Hackman, Frances McDormand, and Michael Rooker are great reading the phone book, but African-American audiences complained about how their folks were passive in the picture -- victims and not activists.
They had a point.
It had powerful imagery and the soundtrack with it matched...the slow pan as racists destroy a church, and Willem Dafoe mobilizing the power of the federal government by bringing in hordes of US Navy Sailors from the Millington Naval Air Station in Memphis to search the swamps for the bodies of the dead Civil Rights workers.
I've seen Hackman in many movies...I think this was his best work.
Agreed. Makes me want to see the movie again.
“The film’s portrayal of racist brutality, smugness, and acceptance of the ways things were”. I lived in the south. It’s the ways things are.
Thanks Lola
It was a terrific movie -- Willem Dafoe, Gene Hackman, Frances McDormand, and Michael Rooker are great reading the phone book, but African-American audiences complained about how their folks were passive in the picture -- victims and not activists.
They had a point.
It had powerful imagery and the soundtrack with it matched...the slow pan as racists destroy a church, and Willem Dafoe mobilizing the power of the federal government by bringing in hordes of US Navy Sailors from the Millington Naval Air Station in Memphis to search the swamps for the bodies of the dead Civil Rights workers.
I've seen Hackman in many movies...I think this was his best work.