God's Littered Acre

By JAY COCKS

THE KLANSMAN

Directed by TERENCE YOUNG Screenplay by MILLARD KAUFMAN and SAMUEL FULLER

Dark doings down South. For one thing, quite a few women in the small town of Ellen ton, Ala., are susceptible to rape. When the Ellenton citizens are not raping, they are running straight through the whole bloody catalogue of violence--punch-outs, castrations and murders. Ellenton is so thoroughly rotten that not even the Jaycees come out of hiding.

Only Sheriff Big Track Bascomb (Lee Marvin) has the gumption to stick his head out the window--generally the one on the side of his patrol car, in which he tours the county trying to keep the high crimes to a minimum. Breck Stancill (Richard Burton) knows a little better. A Southern aristocrat gone to seed, he usually stays inside his house on top of Stancill's Mountain, spending his days mostly by swilling Ballantine's Scotch and remembering a forebear who was strung up by the townspeople for being soft on slavery. Stancill lets blacks live on his mountain rent free, but he is hardly a fighting liberal. Nevertheless, he sure riles the good old boys, especially Butt Cutt Gates (Cameron Mitchell).

All these chickens come home to roost when a young black man called Garth (O.J. Simpson) witnesses a friend's murder at the hands of rabid Ku Kluxers and goes out for revenge. Stancill is finally forced to forsake his bleary detachment. At the climax the corpses sure pile up.

There are a couple of well-known names among the credits. One of the scriptwriters is Millard Kaufman, who wrote Bad Day at Black Rock. His partner is Samuel Fuller, a sort of American-primitive film maker (The Steel Helmet, The Naked Kiss) beloved of film noir aficionados. Director Terence Young has a few James Bond movies like From Russia with Love and Thunderball to his credit. Maybe these names were all rented for the occasion, as camouflage. The evidence on-screen strongly suggests that The Klansman was made pseudonymously by the Snopes family, trying to cash in on the cracker-violence genre pioneered by Walking Tall. Come to think of it though, The Klansman lacks that certain Snopesian gusto. All it has is a drag-tail rankness. .Jay Cocks

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