I remember watching ITV in 1981 and this film being trailed quite heavily to kickstart the station's Autumn season . In those days we only had three television stations and while THE KLANSMAN isn't blockbuster material on a par with GONE WITH THE WIND it did look quite exciting with Lee Marvin getting in to a battle with some nasty looking dudes wearing white bed sheets . For some unexplained reason it got pulled from the schedule just before broadcast never to be heard of again . Jumping forward to the internet era this film has something of a reputation of being rabidly racist and ill thought out and whatever message it is trying to send out is drowned in a explotitive sea of racist insults and violence . Not being put off by this I decided to seek it out to see if its notorious reputation is deserved . To be fair 1981 was another country where LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR was a fondly remembered situation comedy and we do live in more sensitive times . After seeing THE KLANSMAN I was slightly shocked as to why ITV bought the film or indeed how someone could make as recently as 1974 . This tells you how bad it is when viewed today in 2013
I'll defend it on the grounds it's not even intelligent enough to be classed as offensive because it's inept on every level of film making and is sometimes so bad I laughed out loud and gasped " WTF was that about " A white woman is raped and this raises racial tensions in a small Alabama town , the sort of small Alabama town that doesn't need any inciting incidents to cause racial tensions . Take this sensitive speech by the town mayor who looks like Jerry Falwell :
" I'll tell ya we're not gonna have any trouble from outside agitators , not while I'm mayor . I spoke to the grand dragon in Birmingham and he say's the Klan is gonna do nothing so we ain't gonna be bombing no churches [ Loud disappointed moans ]I'm the damn exalted Cyclops and what I mean is this none of us want a bunch of agitators , whores , punks , scum , atheists , perverts all controlled by the communists coming in here bothering our n--ggers " so I guess an excess of racism is also tied in with an excess of solecism .
By the way have I mentioned this town Mayor is relatively liberal and secular compared to most of the citizens of the county ? When the rape victim goes in to church she finds herself becoming part of the sermon as in " Get out , how can you push yourself on to good Christian folk when you have been in that n--ggers foul embraces ? " Remember this is a rape victim we're talking about whose husband has left her because of " working in the market cutting up pork chops in front of a lady who is dying to ask me what's it like having a wife who's been with a n--gger " . You do get the impression this might be a film along the lines of THE ETERNAL JEW on rednecks is directed by Malcolm X but don't worry because the main black character is played by OJ Simpson and he's as every bit as racist as the klansmen
One can perhaps understand ITV bought the film on the strength that it starred Lee Marvin and Richard Burton and thought " Oh two big names must be good " only to find out the film's content . Regardless of the content this wouldn't be a good enough reason to buy it . Marvin is merely okay but Burton ? Oh dear his performance is an all time low . It's said that he spends so many scenes either sitting down or lying down because he'd drank so much his legs had stopped working . It's not difficult to believe this as he mumbles , slurs his words and his accent moves from a Welsh brogue to an idiosyncratic accent all of its own . When Marvin and Burton characters discuss having a drink you can't help thinking there's a meta-fictional scene happening
I don't think I've ever seen a film like this before and I'm pretty firm that I won't be seeing anything like it again . It's incompetent on so many levels and yet it's one of those very , very few films that that almost lives up to the cliché as being so bad it's good . I say almost because there's nothing actually good about it but did manage to make me laugh while my jaw was on the ground and while it probably deserves 1/10 it is far funnier than BLAZING SADDLES even though that film was meant to be a comedy unlike this one
I'll defend it on the grounds it's not even intelligent enough to be classed as offensive because it's inept on every level of film making and is sometimes so bad I laughed out loud and gasped " WTF was that about " A white woman is raped and this raises racial tensions in a small Alabama town , the sort of small Alabama town that doesn't need any inciting incidents to cause racial tensions . Take this sensitive speech by the town mayor who looks like Jerry Falwell :
" I'll tell ya we're not gonna have any trouble from outside agitators , not while I'm mayor . I spoke to the grand dragon in Birmingham and he say's the Klan is gonna do nothing so we ain't gonna be bombing no churches [ Loud disappointed moans ]I'm the damn exalted Cyclops and what I mean is this none of us want a bunch of agitators , whores , punks , scum , atheists , perverts all controlled by the communists coming in here bothering our n--ggers " so I guess an excess of racism is also tied in with an excess of solecism .
By the way have I mentioned this town Mayor is relatively liberal and secular compared to most of the citizens of the county ? When the rape victim goes in to church she finds herself becoming part of the sermon as in " Get out , how can you push yourself on to good Christian folk when you have been in that n--ggers foul embraces ? " Remember this is a rape victim we're talking about whose husband has left her because of " working in the market cutting up pork chops in front of a lady who is dying to ask me what's it like having a wife who's been with a n--gger " . You do get the impression this might be a film along the lines of THE ETERNAL JEW on rednecks is directed by Malcolm X but don't worry because the main black character is played by OJ Simpson and he's as every bit as racist as the klansmen
One can perhaps understand ITV bought the film on the strength that it starred Lee Marvin and Richard Burton and thought " Oh two big names must be good " only to find out the film's content . Regardless of the content this wouldn't be a good enough reason to buy it . Marvin is merely okay but Burton ? Oh dear his performance is an all time low . It's said that he spends so many scenes either sitting down or lying down because he'd drank so much his legs had stopped working . It's not difficult to believe this as he mumbles , slurs his words and his accent moves from a Welsh brogue to an idiosyncratic accent all of its own . When Marvin and Burton characters discuss having a drink you can't help thinking there's a meta-fictional scene happening
I don't think I've ever seen a film like this before and I'm pretty firm that I won't be seeing anything like it again . It's incompetent on so many levels and yet it's one of those very , very few films that that almost lives up to the cliché as being so bad it's good . I say almost because there's nothing actually good about it but did manage to make me laugh while my jaw was on the ground and while it probably deserves 1/10 it is far funnier than BLAZING SADDLES even though that film was meant to be a comedy unlike this one