(1988) Director Costa-Gavras and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas's suspenseful drama, with score by Bill Conti, is one of at least three feature films based on the 1984 assassination of controversial KOA talk-radio host Alan Berg in Denver. Recently the neo-Nazi, home-grown-terrorist gunman who killed Berg, Bruce Pierce, 56, died of natural causes in the Allenwood Federal Correction Camp, PA, while serving a 252-year sentence.

Following the murder of Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini), a contentiously polemical Jewish talk-radio host in Chicago, with "ZOG" (Zionist Occupation Government) spray-painted onto his car beside his body, first-time-undercover FBI agent Catherine Weaver (Debra Winger) - posing as Katie Phillips, a combine-tractor driver from Texas - investigates wheat farmer, widower, and former US Marine hero (in Vietnam) Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger), who resides with his mother Gladys and two young children, Joey and Rachel.

The FBI suspects Simmons of involvement with the Sons of Liberty, a white-supremacist group; his wife left him and died under suspicious circumstances. As he drives past a billboard of Kraus, Gary says to Katie: "I miss that guy." When conservative candidate Jack Carpenter appears on TV, calling for a "return to America," Gary expresses mild disdain for politicians. After a dinner meal with Katie present, Gary compliments his mother's desert: "Best white cake in the whole white world."

He takes Katie along with his family to the Fourth of July celebration, introducing her to his friends, with fireworks and romance lighting up the night. In a meeting with her boss (and one-time lover) Michael Carnes (John Heard) and other agents, Catherine offers an opinion that Simmons isn't a racist and of her assignment being a wild-goose chase: "He named his dog after Ronald Reagan."

Back in the Illinois farmland in church with Gary, she hears Rev Russell Johnson preach: "We are the sons of Abel … chosen people." In love and wanting to reveal his true self to Katie, and to find out if she's the right woman for him, he takes her night hunting with his pals - a sort of most-dangerous game - in which a black man ("They ain't people," says Gary: "They're mud people") is given a pistol with ten bullets and a 30-second start before the white predators begin their pursuit.

When she begs not to go back, admitting that her instincts were wrong and that she's "off-balance," Michael insists (not without some jealous measure of wanting to punish her) on her resuming the job to find evidence of who murdered Kraus: "You have to go back in."

Taking up her role again, she's told that Wesley John Bond (Ted Levine), a veteran of the movement just released from prison enlisting with the gang, thinks she's a grasshopper (an infiltrator); not convinced because of his emotional involvement, Gary continues to share with Katie his deep connection and commitment to the cause, showing her on his computer the national organization's network of affiliated groups. She accompanies Gary, the kids (both indoctrinated in the hateful philosophy), and others - such as Shorty, (John Mahoney) who'd lost his farm and his son in Vietnam, telling her: "You gotta do what you gotta do" - to a training camp with a KKK ceremony of burning crosses, military maneuvers, target practice, etc.

A subplot of the election, in which Gary's former USMC commanding officer Bobby Flynn (Jeffrey DeMunn) is Campbell's campaign manager, takes on surprising significance as Gary's group plans the next big hit.

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