A powder keg of racial tensions is ignited in a small Alabama town when a black man is accused of raping a white woman. The lurid tale is played out against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and features lead performances by Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou) as the town sheriff taxed with keeping the peace, and Richard Burton (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as the liberal-minded landowner who finds himself caught in the middle of a heated war involving the town and the Ku Klux Klan.