THE KLANSMAN (1974) ** ½

Some movies are worth watching solely on the strength of the cast.  The Klansman has a doozy.  Lee Marvin is the small-town sheriff in the pocket of The Ku Klux Klan who is torn between looking the other way and doing the right thing.  Richard Burton is the town recluse who speaks out against The Klan and helps organize demonstrations.  O.J. Simpson is a one-man black militant army.  Cameron Mitchell is a hateful racist deputy named Butt Cutt!!!  I mean how am I not going to watch it?

Directed by Terence Young, The Klansman is too ham-fisted to work as a drama and not exploitative enough to function as camp.  Young approaches the material as pulp, which is okay, I guess.  It’s overwrought and melodramatic, but it’s well-intentioned enough not to be totally offensive.  I don’t think anyone was exactly expecting a sensitive portrayal of race relations in the deep south in 1974, especially with a cast like this.  

I’m sure many will scoff at The Klansman for its clumsy attempts at making a “message”.  Even more will lambast it for its rampant insensitivity.  I for one sort of dug it.  I mean where else are you gonna see Cameron Mitchell and Richard Burton getting into a Kung Fu fight?  Folks, I live for moments like this.

Richard Burton, clearly drunk, and sometimes forgetting that his character has a limp, is a sight to behold.  Hollywood legend goes he and Marvin were so drunk during the filming that they don’t even remember meeting one another.  I can’t say it shows as much on Marvin (who coasts on cool intensity alone), but you can almost smell the vodka on Burton.  For his performance alone (and the aforementioned Kung Fu fight with Mitchell), I’d say The Klansman (which was co-written by the great Sam Fuller, who was furious his script was drastically rewritten) is worth watching.

AKA:  Ku Klux Klan.  AKA:  Atoka.  AKA:  KKK.  AKA:  The Burning Cross.