The Klansman (also known as Burning Cross)[3] is a 1974 American drama film based on the 1967 book of the same name by William Bradford Huie.

It was directed by Terence Young and starred Lee Marvin, Richard Burton, Cameron Mitchell, Lola Falana, Luciana Paluzzi, David Huddleston, Linda Evans and O. J. Simpson in his film debut.

[4] In a small town in the South, Sheriff Track Bascomb breaks up a crowd of hillbilly white men molesting a black woman.

In addition, his best friend since school days is Breck Stancill: a rich landowner who sympathizes with the Civil Rights movement.

Later, the town's relative tranquility is threatened when a young white woman, Nancy Poteet, is sexually assaulted and beaten by a black man.

Witnessing his friend's torture and death, Garth swears vengeance and embarks on a one-man terror campaign against the Klan and their supporters.

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.

Originally TV director Don Stewart was meant to direct and Chuck Connors was going to star as the sheriff.

In a bit of stunt casting, he hired Luciana Paluzzi, who had played Bond villain Fiona Volpe in Thunderball, as Trixie in this film.

"[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.

"[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.

"[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.

[21] At the last minute, one of the investors failed to come up with the money so Marvin and Burton were not paid their full salary and Paramount put a lien on the film.

[6] Fuller said he later met Terence Young when both were members of the Festival du Film Policier de Cognac.

[9] 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 come 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.

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.

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.