Fire This Time

By RICHARD CORLISS

A visitor to our community finds an old-fashioned welcome and a degree of friendliness that exists in no other place . . . Numerous lakes and ponds offer fine year-around fishing, and for the hunter Neshoba County is a paradise.

-- Chamber of Commerce brochure, Neshoba County, Miss., 1964

Wasn't that a time? Each year of the early 1960s brought new images of heroism and horror as the civil rights movement spread through the South like kudzu. 1960: four Negro students sit in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter. 1961: the Congress of Racial Equality inaugurates its Freedom Rides to integrate Southern bus terminals. 1962: in Oxford, Miss., James Meredith enters Ole Miss, its first black student since Reconstruction.

And then, in 1963, the white arm of racism strikes back. May: Birmingham public-safety commissioner "Bull" Connor turns his dogs and his fire hoses on demonstrators. June: in Jackson, Miss., Medgar Evers is murdered. September: four black children are killed in a Birmingham church bombing. The following summer promised the climax to a melodrama that would be scored to either We Shall Overcome or Mississippi Goddam.

Or both. In 1964 Arthur Ashe won the U.S. Open, Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And on June 19 the U.S. Senate passed its landmark Civil Rights Bill. But two days later, three civil rights workers -- two Northern whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and a Southern black, James Chaney -- were arrested for speeding in Philadelphia, Miss., then jailed and later released into the night. They were never again seen alive.

For the next six weeks, FBI agents blanketed the area, quizzing the friendly folks of Neshoba County. Reporters from all over tested the residents' hospitality. Navy frogmen fished the lakes and ponds, searching for evidence of the local hunters' blood sport. In August, thanks to a $30,000 payoff to an informant, the FBI discovered the bodies in a new earth dam. Four months later, the Philadelphia sheriff, his deputy and 17 others were arrested, and in 1967 seven of the 19 (including the deputy but not his boss) were convicted of conspiracy to murder.

Triumph and heartbreak abound in this story, but it has taken Hollywood nearly a quarter-century to put it on the big screen. Now it is here with a bang. Mississippi Burning, Orion Pictures' $15 million drama about the FBI's search for the murderers of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, has arrived with critical trumpets leading the way and bitter controversy in its wake. It has already won National Board of Review citations for best picture, best actor (Gene Hackman) and best supporting actress (Frances McDormand) -- prizes the film may duplicate on Academy Award night. For Mississippi Burning is made to Oscar's order: a white-heat yarn that illuminates, with fiery rhetoric at a lightning pace, one crucial chapter in American history.

Next week, when Mississippi Burning expands from nine theaters to more than 500, moviegoers will get to see what all the shouting is about. For more than two hours, director Alan Parker splatters grotesque and gorgeous images on his large canvas. Indomitable black preachers lead services in the charred husks of their churches. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan mass for a venomous camp meeting. And everywhere there is the blaze of torch-song tragedy as black schools and shacks crumble in the embers of the Klan's fury.

As the leader of the FBI team, Willem Dafoe (who played the martyred sergeant in Platoon and the humanist Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) is a stick of righteousness waiting to explode. But the movie also finds recesses where human dignity and compassion wait to be summoned. It is alert to the shifting emotional weight and moral responsibilities in any relationship, especially in the quiet interplay of Hackman and McDormand, two ordinary middle-aged people searching awkwardly to be of use to each other. Hackman caps a brilliant career here as an FBI agent that both J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King Jr. could love. He takes the measure of this film: a watchmaker's craftsmanship, a marathoner's doggedness. With every confident frame, Mississippi Burning announces itself as a big, bold bolt of rabble- rousin', rebel-razin' movie journalism.

Or is it just movie fantasy, and meretricious to boot? That is the source of a debate over the film's veracity and verism -- a controversy echoing the rumpus over The Last Temptation of Christ, but with politics, not theology, as the sticking point. Mississippi Burning is a fiction based on fact; it invents characters and bends the real-life plot; it colors in the silhouette of events with its own fanciful strokes and highlights. In focusing on the agents, Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo italicize the gumshoe heroism of white officials while downplaying the roles of black and white visionaries who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to help fashion a free America.

Thus the film has drawn accusations that it falsifies an era. "The film treats some of the most heroic people in black history as mere props in a morality play," says Vernon Jarrett, the only black on the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board. James Chaney's younger brother Ben, who was eleven in 1964 and is portrayed in the movie, finds the Mississippi mirror distorting: "The movie makes the FBI too good to be true. It is a dangerous movie because it could lead to complacency. Things haven't changed that much." Says David Halberstam, who covered the 1964 Freedom Summer for the New York Times: "Parker has taken a terribly moving and haunting story and he has betrayed it, turned it into a Martin-and-Lewis slapstick between the two cops. It's a bad movie: 'Mississippi False.' "

Parker dismisses all indictments: "Our film isn't about the civil rights movement. It's about why there was a need for a civil rights movement. And because it's a movie, I felt it had to be fictionalized. The two heroes in the story had to be white. That is a reflection of our society as much as of the film industry. At this point in time, it could not have been made any other way."

The charges are not trivial, and neither is the challenge. At issue is the freedom of a filmmaker -- or any artist -- to twist the facts as they are recalled, to shape the truth as it is perceived. May a movie libel the historical past? And has Mississippi Burning done so? Artistic liberty vs. social responsibility: the stakes are high. The memories are indelible. The battle lines are drawn.

Another battle film helped Mississippi Burning come to life. Two years ago Orion's Platoon ripped the scabs off the wound of Viet Nam, copped lots of Oscars and grossed close to $300 million worldwide. Any successful movie creates a new market, and studios -- especially Orion, which has a rep for taking chances on political pictures -- were soon scrambling for the next Platoon. Cynicism is served with a twist in Hollywood, and Mississippi Burning has taken its licks as a ready-made Big Issue blockbuster. Before its release, even Hackman gibed that its producers "looked at how much Platoon made and they went, 'Yeah! What other causes can we make some money on?' "

Platoon was lucky. It dodged the bullets that Mississippi Burning has walked into. Nobody mistook it for a documentary. Few criticized it for ignoring or caricaturing the Vietnamese. Instead, Americans recognized and responded to the grandeur of its hallucinogenic fever. Platoon was crazy from the inside, a surrealist's scribbled message from hell. Parker's film is quite another thing: an outsider's report, not autobiography but psychodrama, with a texture as real as newsreel. And yet its plot skeleton bears similarities to Platoon. In both films, two strong men fight to establish American values in a hostile country, and to claim the soul of an innocent. In both films, the local nonwhites -- yellow or black -- are less a group of dramatic characters than a plot device, a shadow, a chorus, a landscape, an idea.

As Mississippi Burning opens, three civil rights workers ride through Jessup (Neshoba) County, avid to get out of town. Their station wagon is overtaken by some good ole boys in a pickup truck. Blam! Blam! Blam! Officially, the three are "missing." FBI agents Ward (Dafoe) and Anderson (Hackman) know otherwise. They might be from two different colleges -- say, Harvard and Hard Knocks. But they are both feds in a bad town, and they know what smells. The sheriff, for one. "You down here to help us solve our nigger problem?" he asks agreeably. No. They are there to wash some soiled linen: the bloodstained sheets of the local Klansmen, who almost certainly executed the young men for the crime of idealism.

Ward was in Oxford with James Meredith; he was shot in the shoulder for his protective pains. Yet he seems criminally naive about race relations in the South. In a luncheonette he quizzes a young black; that night the youth is tortured. Ward's way is to send his agents wading solemnly through a Jessup swamp in their dark gray suits, looking for all the world like a lost patrol of Blues Brothers. The result is only frustration and conflagration, as Negro churches, schools, shacks go up in flames. Anderson, a native Mississippian, knows how to talk to the natives: threaten the men, seduce the women. He will take a razor to the neck of Deputy Sheriff Pell (Brad Dourif). He will take flowers to Mrs. Pell (McDormand), who functions as the town's guilty conscience. Her husband ignores and abuses her; now she has the chance to shackle him in the handcuffs of her hatred.

This is one of Mississippi Burning's two main fictional conceits: that the FBI broke the case in part by locating not the fear and greed of a Klan informant, but the flinty, vindictive soul of Southern integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene invariably gooses a cheer out of its audience -- almost a rebel yell. But its grizzly machismo represents an '80s-movie solution to a '60s for-real enigma: Dirty Harry beats dirty laundry.

That is not so far from screenwriter Gerolmo's original conception, more than four years ago, of Mississippi Burning: a political parable with western overtones, perhaps to star William Hurt and Clint Eastwood. "Hurt would represent the idealistic approach, and Eastwood the violent response," says Gerolmo, 35. "The film would be similar to John Ford's 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It's a movie that asks some serious questions about using violence in the name of the law." Initially then, Gerolmo might have meant the FBI's terrorist tactics to be seen critically, or at least ambivalently. But he must have known that American movie audiences want the thrill without the filigree. He must also remember the famous advice from a newspaperman in Liberty Valance, which sums up the approach Mississippi Burning would take to Mississippi history: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Gerolmo took the idea to his friend Frederick Zollo, an off-Broadway producer-director, who sold it to Orion. Several directors were proposed -- Milos Forman, John Schlesinger -- before Orion suggested Alan Parker, 44. His films (Midnight Express, Fame, Birdy) resist classification by content, but in style they are as easy to spot as a fist in your face. Bang on! That is both Parker's strength and limitation, which has the dervish precision of the ace London commercials director he once was. But he had never made a film with such daunting logistics as this one.

"I knew the moment I read it," he says, "that it was a powerful story. What I did was to strengthen the social and political point of view, strengthen the characters, strengthen the overall quality of the film." And once shooting started, Parker took over, as a director will. The Writers Guild strike required that Gerolmo absent himself from the set; Parker apparently concurred in that ruling. Gerolmo's final arbitration: "The screenplay is mine, but the movie is Alan's. That's the way the world works out here."

Parker's great challenge was making the world of his movie work in Mississippi. He and co-producer Robert Colesberry stalked 300 towns as likely locations, with the director impishly yelling, "Alabama Burning?" "Georgia Burning?" "Arkansas Burning?" But he selected Mississippi -- to the delight of the state film commission, which was willing to display its old racist scowl in implicit contrast to its fresh new face of many colors.

The director's previous movie, Angel Heart, was set in the Louisiana '50s and boasted a gallery of fine black faces. Now he was moving forward a decade and north a few hundred miles; the demands for local color were just as stringent. "Alan wanted real Southern black faces," recalls location casting director Shari Rhodes, "or a British director's idea of what a Southern face looks like. Pretty people need not apply." Rhodes was looking for dark skin, strong bone structure, "dignity." She visited nursing homes, prowled the streets of black neighborhoods and hired homeless men for walk-ons. She had studied photographs of civil rights marchers and wanted similar faces -- "people who had been dragged off bar stools. All their faces said, 'I have been through some pain.' "

One Sunday Rhodes and Colesberry went to a small church in Jackson. "We were the only white faces in the whole church," she recalls. "At the end of the service, the deacon stood up and said, 'We have some politicians who would like to say a few words to you.' Everybody looked at us, and we shook our heads. 'You mean you're not politicians? Then praise the Lord!' And the whole church started laughing." The choir and its soloist, Lannie Spann McBride, perform the film's final funeral anthem.

In a way, the filmmakers were politicians: they would be using the new Mississippi to depict the old. Mostly, the shooting proceeded without incident. Sometimes, though, old images must have haunted the older townsfolk. One day Colesberry spotted one of the crew's pickup trucks toting a huge Klan cross through town and had the driver cover it up. During the ten-week shoot, derelict churches and other structures were set ablaze; production paused while the ashes cooled down. One evening the company assembled to film the burning of a local black church, which had been bought and would be rebuilt to the congregation's specifications. "It was freezing that night," recalls Bob Penny, who played the role of one of the white conspirators, "and it was frightening. As the church burned, you could literally hear the silence of the people. At one point Parker shouted out his usual 'Don't act! Stop acting!,' and I said, 'I ain't acting -- I'm scared!' "

Hackman and Dafoe kept a respectful distance, as befit their roles. Dafoe snuggled into his character, "an idealist who changes in the face of violence. One of the things that attracted me to Ward was that I believed him. I believe there were idealists like him in politics, the FBI and the Justice Department. The film is in part a meditation on what's happened to that kind of idealism." Hackman stayed busy tapping memories of Danville, Ill. "Growing up in a Midwestern small town," he explains, "helped me identify with Anderson. I felt as if I'd seen enough of those kinds of guys. I knew the territory -- the way a small-town sheriff operates."

Maybe, though, things have changed since Hackman's boyhood -- at least in the South. Not long ago, Mississippians were killed for showing their faces and speaking up. Last spring, though, Mississippians were paid to do the same things for Burning. For some viewers, the film's most moving line will be found in the closing credits: "We would especially like to thank Governor Ray Mabus . . . and the people of Mississippi . . . for their kind cooperation in the making of this film."

Once every 20 years or so, Hollywood sets a film in Mississippi and explores the race problem in a big way: Intruder in the Dust (1949), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Mississippi Burning now. At other times it is content to play Rip van Winkle. If Parker's film is taking so much heat now, the reason is partly that U.S. filmmakers have stayed away in droves from the front lines of racial controversy. Ironically, the few Hollywood films that do investigate a smoldering political issue tend to be directed by foreigners. "American filmmakers love making escapist films," Parker says. "They never worry that they should be trying something else. So they haven't fought to make serious films, and the studios haven't made them, and American audiences have been educated to avoid them. It's not that these directors are seduced by the system. They are the system."

It has ever been thus. During the 1964 freedom marches and race murders, America could be seen tearing itself apart at the soul -- on TV, that is. On the big screen, Edwardian England was all the rage, in 1964's top hit (Mary Poppins) and top Oscar winner (My Fair Lady). While whites killed blacks in the South, and blacks torched their ghettos in the North, moviemakers wrangled with knottier dilemmas. Had Elvis finally run out of resort locations for his musical travelogues? Would Doris Day ever lose her virginity?

So Hollywood's few significant forays into the Magnolia State are worth a peek. The first look should be the longest. Intruder in the Dust, based on William Faulkner's novel and filmed in Oxford, dared to elicit the white viewer's admiration for a defiantly dignified -- in those days the word was uppity -- black man named Lucas (Juano Hernandez) accused of killing a white. Like Mississippi Burning, Intruder ends with a finger-pointing speech: "Lucas wasn't in trouble," says a white lawyer. "We were." But its lasting touch is in its portrayal of a black who refuses to play either martyr or Tom; in the war between the races, Lucas is a very conscientious objector. "He's got to admit he's a nigger," a townsman truculently insists. "Then maybe we will accept him as he seems to intend to be accepted."

One turbulent generation later, in In the Heat of the Night, a black detective showed up in Mississippi (stunt-doubled by Illinois) and refused to admit that he was anything but Sidney Poitier. This Oscar-winning film prefigured the antagonistic-buddy configuration of Mississippi Burning and a quillion other cop movies: a blustering Southern lawman (Rod Steiger) learns to respect, and win the respect of, a wily straight arrow from the North. The difference, though, is telling. Three years after Philadelphia, a movie could send a black man to Mississippi to solve a white crime. But not 24 years after.

Which is not to force old molds, noble or otherwise, on Mississippi Burning. It is simply to agree with Parker that the film is as much a reflection of attitudes in today's Hollywood, and in the rest of America, as it is a window on the 1964 South. In last year's presidential campaign, blacks were once again America's invisible men. Faced with the electorate's comfortable cynicism, Democrats chose not to evoke sympathy for the poor black (hence the virtual disappearance of Jesse Jackson), while Republicans chose to exploit fear of the rapacious black (hence the toxic stardom of Willie Horton). Why should Hollywood be more progressive than Peoria? Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy are two of the past decade's biggest stars, but they are still only comic relief. In serious films the minority presence is fainter than it was two and three decades ago, when Poitier was the only black king in the pack.

Hollywood is not a place but a state of mind. A filmmaker need not shop on Rodeo Drive to be influenced by the current social conservatism. Two recent British films, Cry Freedom and A World Apart, took deadly aim at South Africa's apartheid; yet their heroes were white. In Mississippi Burning too, the drama arises from a white's discovery of injustice toward black people. The hero is someone with whom the white audience can identify, someone with something to lose, someone who suffers only by his compassion for the afflicted. By this rule, every picture about blacks becomes a metaphor for the white man's burden. And the black man's burden is to be a supplicant to Superman, or Bleeding-Heartman. Or, this time around, Hackman.

Unhappy the movie industry that needs to invent white heroes and suppress black ones. Unhappier still the people who demand that one film -- in this case, Mississippi Burning -- be every film. Their anger is understandable. A lot of people have lived this tale as if it were the novel of their own lives. They have waited a long time for the movie version. And like the readers of any novel, each claimant has already "filmed" his own ideal version of the Philadelphia story. But a movie is not a hologram; its images and meaning cannot change as they are viewed from various angles and special interests.

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 '30s, 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. The picture may hold even truer today. Reactionary whites may not want blacks in their schools, neighborhoods or jobs, but they can feel empathy for the film's heroic Negroes. For Parker, that Mississippi summer represented "the beginning of political consciousness, not just in the South or in America, but in the whole world." Can Mississippi Burning help raise that consciousness once again, even as it has already raised old hackles? Perhaps not. But even that frail hope makes Parker's determination to go hunting and fishing in Neshoba County worth the trip.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles