Mississippi Burning
Morons massacre minorities in Mississippi, Mulders mount manhunt, mortified locals maim more, motherfuckers must rot in jail.
Civil Rights activists are murdered by the Klan, but since two of them are white Ivy League students, the FBI mounts a giant operation to catch the perpetrators, which turn out to be the Klansmen heading the Sheriff department and local business owners. At first, they go by-the-book, but when that gets them nowhere, they pull out all the stops and resort to illegal methods.
This seems a very interesting piece of alternate history. They do mention Hoover though Martin Luther King and the like were just a bunch of commies in disguise, but their actions speak otherwise. The FBI is portrayed as the saviour of black people in the South, coming down in their Chevy Impalas to restore justice and vanquish over the Klan.
Apparently, in the real deal, with those hundreds of guys patrolling the swamps more bodies were found of other activists murdered a month before.
The local Klansmen are played by Stephen Tobolowsky (what the hell, casting people?), Brad Dourif (that’s more like it) and the local mayor, not directly involved with the Klan is R. Lee Ermey (perfect). The good Hoover boys are Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, which could make for a terrifying buddy cop film or a The French Connection sequel. Kevin Dunn is a lieutenant, which always confuses me because the first time I saw him was on Veep and I always keep expecting streams of insults from hist mouth. Gene Hackman is in his element here, playing the southerner sheriff that left for greener pastures. Frances McDormand is the wife of the murderer, but she won’t just elope with Hackman, after his husband is busted and his house wrecked she remains in her home, accepting her sad fate.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.