The Klansman

In a small town in the South, Sheriff Track Bascomb breaks up a crowd of hillbilly White men molesting a Black woman. Owing his election to the racist power structure that runs the community, Bascomb arrests no one. But his decision is also based on the fact that he loves the town he grew up in and just wants to keep the peace. Besides, his best friend since school days is Breck Stencill, a rich landowner who sympathizes with the Civil Rights movement. Despite their political differences, however, the bond shared by Bascomb and Stencill remains strong.

Later, the town's relative tranquility is threatened when a young White woman, Nancy Poteet, is sexually assaulted and beaten by a Black man. Sheriff Bascomb tries to find the guilty party while Ku Klux Klan members – including Bascomb's deputy, Butt Cutt Cates – take matters into their own hands. They board a truck and drive to a rural bar frequented by Blacks. They chase after two men outside, one of whom is Garth. Garth escapes but his companion is captured, castrated, and shotgunned by the Klan. Witnessing his friend's torture and death, Garth swears vengeance and embarks on a one-man terror campaign against the Klan and their supporters.

Loretta Sykes, a Black woman who grew up in the town, returns home. She is approached by members of the civil rights movement. Together, they try to get Breck Stancill involved. One evening, Loretta is abducted by Deputy Cates and his Klan allies. In order to atone for the assault on Nancy Poteet, it is decided that one of them should rape Loretta. So violent is the act that she almost bleeds to death. As a result, what Sheriff Bascomb tried to prevent from the very beginning now boils to the surface, and an all-out race war threatens to rip his town apart.

• Lee Marvin as Sheriff Track Bascomb
• Richard Burton as Breck Stancill
• Cameron Mitchell as Butt Cutt Cates
• O. J. Simpson as Garth
• Lola Falana as Loretta Sykes
• David Huddleston as Mayor Hardy Riddle
• Linda Evans as Nancy Poteet
• Luciana Paluzzi as Trixie
• David Ladd as Flagg
• John Alderson as Vernon Hodo
• John Pearce as Taggart
• Virgil Frye as Johnson
• Larry Williams as Lightning Rod
• Jean Bell as Mary Anne

The novel was published in 1967. Film rights were purchased by the Robert Leder Company for $100,000. Originally TV director Don Stewart was meant to direct and Chuck Connors was going to star as the sheriff.[5]

Film rights were bought by a black film producer, William D. Alexander, who formed a company, The Movie People, to make the film[6] and reportedly spent a year putting it together. Bill Schiffrin who sometimes acted as Sam Fuller's agent[7] said he put the film together. The first draft of the script was done by Sam Fuller. It was rewritten by Millard Kaufman.[8] Schiffrin says Kaufman "distorted" much of what Fuller wrote. "I wanted Fuller", he said.[6]

Schiffrin says Terence Young was hired as director at the insistence of the European investors.[6] Young was best known for his work on the James Bond films. In a bit of stunt casting, he hired Luciana Paluzzi, who had played Bond villain Fiona Volpe in Thunderball, as Trixie in this film. The studio had American Joanna Moore dub in Paluzzi's lines. Schiffrin says he wanted Moore to play Paluzzi's role originally. "I never thought an Italian should play a Southern girl."[6]

"The day Young was hired I should've left the show", said Schiffrin. "Four times during filming I wasn't speaking to Young."[6] Fuller claimed Paramount had a prior commitment with Italian partners as a payback for a prior deal and when Young came on the film Fuller walked off the project[9]

Alexander obtained a $1 million guarantee from Paramount. The rest was raised from various banks and tax shelters in the US and Europe.[6]

Richard Burton was to be paid $40,000 a week for ten weeks work plus a percentage. Lee Marvin got 10% of the profits.[6]

Although Simpson appeared in an unreleased 1973 film called Why?, this film marks his acting debut.[10]

Filming took place in Oroville,[11] California, just outside Sacramento. Burton and wife Elizabeth Taylor stayed in a rented house in town.[12] "It's enchanting here", Burton told the press during filming. "It reminds me of my old valley in Wales."[2]

Richard Burton allegedly drank so much alcohol during the making of this film that many of his scenes had to be shot with him seated or lying down, due to his inability to stand. In some scenes, he appears to slur his words or speak incoherently.[13] Burton later said that he could not remember making the film. Simpson said "There would be times when he couldn’t move".[14] Marvin was also a heavy drinker at this time, to the point where Burton claimed in a 1977 interview that when the two men ran into each other at a party years later neither could remember working together. At the time of the film, Burton was suffering from depression and sciatica, both debilitating conditions. His use of alcohol during the film was to kill the pain from those conditions. Later, Burton attributed Marvin to saving his life. "I wouldn't have survived without Marvin," he told the actor and writer Michael Munn. Lee Marvin saw that Burton "was drinking not for pleasure of it but because he had a great need, and I doubt he knew what that was himself. Maybe it was for Elizabeth. But whatever it was, he was in pain, and he drank to kill that pain. I used to do it too."[15]

Burton gave a young girl in town, Kim Dinucci, a $450 diamond ring and arranged for her to get a small walk-on part in the film as Lee Marvin's daughter. This made national news.[2][16]

When Burton was filming the death scene, he was lying on the set when the director said that the make-up artist had prepared him well for the scene, only for the artist to remark that he had not done anything. Terence Young brought a doctor in to examine him when it was determined that he was dying. He was rushed to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica with a temperature of 104 degrees and both kidneys on the point of collapse. He was suffering from influenza and tracheo-bronchitis. He would remain in the hospital for six weeks.[17]

Burton went to the hospital after filming and was treated for bronchitis.[18] While he was staying there it was announced Burton and Taylor would be getting divorced.[19][20]

Walter Schiffrin later said Burton should not have been paid "at all considering the performance he gave. He was... drinking three quarts a day. He didn't know what town he was in let alone what film". Schiffrin says that, in contrast, Lee Marvin "was highly helpful throughout the shooting".[6] Simpson said that despite being incapacitated, Burton "could change the meaning of a scene with just his voice. I studied that. We used to play a game: try to ignore Richard Burton when he's talking. It's impossible".[14]

Aldo Tonti, the cinematographer who had worked on Reflections in a Golden Eye, was also the cinematographer on this film, though he was not credited.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a thoroughly clumsy adaptation of William Bradford Huie's novel", adding that the filmmakers "effectively defuse the very real drama by so lovingly depicting the horrors that one comes to suspect their motives. As the movie progresses, the events comes to seem less and less urgent and particular to a specific time and place, and more and more like the automatic responses to the demands of cheap, easy melodrama."[22] Arthur D. Murphy of Variety declared it "a perfect example of screen trash that almost invites derision ... There's not a shred of quality, dignity, relevance or impact in this yahoo-oriented bunk".[23] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one star out of four and called it "a tawdry rip-off of a half-dozen films: In the Heat of the Night, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, tick ... tick ... tick ... what's amazing about this drivel is that Lee Marvin and Richard Burton lent their talents to it. They must have been offered a very sweet deal, because The Klansman is pure demagogery [sic?]".[24] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times slammed the film as "one of those sleazy, exploitative, incompetent pieces of motion picture waste which makes you suddenly unsure that film reviewing is a fit occupation for a grown man ... If any frame of the film carried a convincing sense of the real tensions, fears, hatreds and tempers of the rural American South you might be able to forgive some of the rest. But the acting is so amateurish in the lesser roles as to be comical and the dialogue in the major roles is unplayable."[25] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it "the sort of film that raises only academic questions. Could the original source, a novel by William Bradford Huie, have been as terrible as the movie? Probably not, but it must have given the screenwriters, Millard Kaufman and Sam Fuller, a few ugly situations to kick around, like a castration and a pair of interracial rapes and a shootout with the Ku Klux Klan, and they've proceeded to kick them around like champion Hollywood hacks, leaning hard on the exploitation elements and reducing characterization and social analysis, if there were any, to a bare minimum".[26]

Alexander, Young and Burton were meant to make a film with Robert Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling called Jackpot but it was never made.[6]

• List of American films of 1974
• O.J.: Made in America

• The Klansman at IMDb
• The Klansman at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Klansman is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
• Nathan Rabin's review of the film