All reviews of the film, A TIME TO KILL, that I have read, are scathing
put-downs of the movie, and rightly so. This is truly a film that had
tremendous potential to make an important statement about racisim in our
country in our time. Instead, it is a highly predictatble, pretentious
parody of a film about racism in our country in our time.

A TIME TO KILL tells the story of Carl Lee Hailey, a black man living in
Canton, Mississippi, who kills two white rednecks that raped and beat his
10 year old daughter. More to the point, it is the story of Hailey's trial
for the murder of these two white viscious bigots, and the story of
Hailey's attorney, Jake Brigance, who takes the case for Hailey's defense
at the risk of his life and the lives of all he holds dear.

As the movie begins its first sequence, we see the two young racists riding
thorugh the black section of town, drinking, insulting the local black
population, and destroying the property of the blacks. All this is done
with impugnity while the blacks remain fearfully silent in the face of all
this disrespect and destruction. We are supposed to believe that in the
late 1980s, a community of black people, even such a community in the midst
of Mississippi, would simply put up with such abuse, and suffer in
silence.

Continuing on the wild spree, the two young hoodlums are driving along a
deserted back road when they spy the young black girl walking alone,
carrying groceries home. They stop their truck, grab her, and rape and beat
her mercilessly, driving off without the least trace of fear that they
will be punished.

However, the police immediately figure out who the perpertrators are. They
are arrested and are being taken for theior arrainment. It is at this point
that the girl's father, Carl Lee Hailey, rushes into the court house with
an automatic rifle and shoots them dead in front of a host of witnesses.
Hailey is arrested for murder and the we are into the meat of the story.

Young, white, good looking lawyer, Jake Brigance, takes the case and pleads
Hailey inncocent by reason of temporary insanity at the timne of the
shooting. At this point in the film, we are introduced to a host of
legal volunteers, all of them superfluous to the story. They include a
female liberal Northern law student who does NOT have any romance with
Jake, an aging drunk law professor, and a divorce lawyer buddy of Jake's.

During the course of the trial, Jake has to put up with efforts by the KKK
to stop him from defense of Hailey. He also has to put up with an
unsympathetic wife (who in the end, comes around to seeing how great the
cause is and how wonderfull, after all, her husband is).

In the midst of the trial, we are also introduced to a group of folks who
wish to get Jake off the case and replace him with a more "appropriate"
attorney. This group consists of the local minister, members of NAACP,
including a Northern lawyer who is portrayed in the worst stereotypical
fashion, or, as Mayor Koch correctly describes in his own review, as a
"smirking, unfeeling Jew bent on turning the trial into a show."  This
group of would be more proper defense people are depicted as real "outside
agitators". The point the film is attempting to make here is that since the
awful racist violence stems from this benighted Mississippi community,
salvation is to arise from the same place, in the form of Jake, so that
there can be some sort of congruence in righting the wrong.

The ending of the film is higly predictable and very melodramatic. To me,
it was very unbelievable. Feel free to shell out $8 plus if you want to
see good actors badly used.

The film hosts an impressive cast, including the two Sutherlands, (Donald
and Kiefer), Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey, and Patrick
McGoohan. The music soundtrack and the cinematography are excellent.

New York
8-14-96