One of the boldest American films of the post-war period to tackle homegrown fascism, The Burning Cross was the first anti-Klan film to explicitly depict Black Americans as victims of organized KKK terror on screen.
This little-known and rarely screened thriller was banned by censor boards in Virginia and Detroit upon its release in 1947. Johnny Larimer (Henry Daniels Jr.) is a newly discharged World War II veteran unable to re-adjust to life in his small hometown, when he falls in with a local white supremacist group called the “American Only Association.”
The film’s depiction of how racist rhetoric culminates in violence, and how voter suppression, corporate grift, and political corruption quickly metastasize to supplant democratic rule and law and order, is clear-eyed and squarely on point. As groundbreaking as the film was, it was not without compromise. An on-screen prologue from the original production, returned to the film in this new restoration, suggests that the Klan was founded by “men of good intentions” who were betrayed by a corrupt, greedy few.
East Coast premiere of new restoration. Q&A with Brandeis University professor Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood & Hitler and the new book How Film Became History.
+ More... - Less...290 Harvard St
Brookline, MA 02446
$15.00 senior
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