Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman star as FBI agents who crack a 1964 conspiracy of racist murderers – without any help from the activists who played such a vital role at this time

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Director: Alan Parker

Entertainment grade: B

History grade: D–

On 21 June 1964, one black and two white civil rights activists disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The FBI codenamed the case Miburn – short for Mississippi Burning.

Crime

The three activists – in real life, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, though they are not named in the film – are driving, tailed by several cars. When they stop, they are murdered and their bodies hidden by a mob of white men connected to the Ku Klux Klan. Later, the FBI turn up, in the fictionalised forms of spiky white liberal intellectual Agent Ward (Willem Dafoe) and rough-around-the-edges white liberal anti-intellectual Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman). Viewers may erroneously conclude that the FBI...