The movies have never quite been sure how seriously to take the Ku Klux Klan. Is it a terrorist organisation, or a glorified frat society for resentful losers who like dressing up in silly costumes? Over the decades, cinema has given us both versions, and a few more besides.

Incredible as its truth-based story is, Spike Lee’s latest joint BlacKkKlansman is not the first time an African American has infiltrated the KKK in the movies. In Ted V Mikels’s 1966 trashsploitationer The Black Klansman (AKA I Cross the Colour Line), a light-skinned black jazz musician goes undercover to bring down Alabama racists (although technically the hero is played by a white actor, Richard Gilden). In 1974, OJ Simpson donned the pointy hood to mete out revenge in The Klansman; while Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder also gatecrash the baddies’ gang in Mel Brooks’s satirical western Blazing Saddles.

The movies bear their own responsibility for the KKK in the first place, of course: specifically DW Griffiths’s notorious The Birth of a Nation, which gave the virtually defunct Klan of the 1910s a fresh creation myth, a blockbuster recruitment film, and some new ritual suggestions (the movie popularised cross-burning). Hollywood has been trying to atone ever since. On the one hand, we have had serious dramas on Klan-inflicted violence, such as Mississippi Burning, A Time to Kill and last year’s Mudbound. We have also had more fanciful action movies in which the heroes vanquish the Klan. The Klansman (which starred Richard Burton and Lee Marvin) was one; 1976 blaxploitation flick Brotherhood of Death another (three black Vietnam vets take up arms against the KKK); and 1966 spaghetti western Django yet another (Franco Nero singlehandedly guns down a Klan-like Confederate mob).

Post-civil rights era, though, the enfeebled Klan moved into the realms of ridicule. It wasn’t just Blazing Saddles: the KKK were the butt of the joke in 80s comedies Fletch Lives and Porky’s II, plus Richard Pryor’s Bustin’ Loose and The Toy. George Clooney and co stumble into a Klan lynching that’s choreographed like a Busby Berkeley number in O Brother Where Art Thou? And in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, an amateurish Klan posse argue over the restrictiveness of their home-made hoods.

Perhaps, though, it is time to stop laughing again. BlacKkKlansman ridicules the 1970s Klan’s paranoia and stupidity, but ends with sobering documentary footage of torch-bearing racists marching last year in Charlottesville, with no need for hoods, and former Klan bigwig David Duke once again being taken seriously. Does ridicule defuse extremism, or could it be that the Klan’s humiliation has fuelled resentment? Should we laugh or cry? BlacKkKlansman suggests both, which seems about right.



BlacKkKlansman is in UK cinemas from 24 August