SnoopyStyle A leftist Chicago radio shock jock is murdered. FBI agent Catherine Weaver (Debra Winger) goes undercover as combine operator Katie Phillips to get close to farmer Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger). He seems to be a regular family man disgruntled with the state of the world. However, his family connections and suspicions about several deaths led agent Michael Carnes (John Heard) to send his girlfriend Weaver on her first undercover investigation.I love this world of right wing racists. It's a world of families and regular folks. Gary is also angry at Nazis and right wing politicians. He's the regular folks type left behind by the society. In the present, they are Trump supporters. It has a couple of solid actors and an engrossing premise. It is a longer movie and there are a couple of missteps. The great premise keeps the story compelling.

seymourblack-1 "Betrayed" begins with a brutal assassination in Chicago and then focuses on a budding romance in a small town in the American Midwest. Although initially, there's no obvious connection between the assassination and the romance, the story that explains the link is full of surprises as it reveals the existence of a huge political conspiracy and the fact that neither of the lovers are quite who they appear to be.Undercover FBI Agent Cathy Weaver (Debra Winger) is assigned to investigate the killing of a controversial radio talk-show host and moves to a Corn Belt town as one of a team of combine drivers who undertake contract work during the wheat harvest. When she meets handsome local farmer Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger) and his family, she starts to fall in love with him and can't believe that this charming widower could possibly be implicated in the crime she's investigating. When she shares her views with her boss Mike Carnes (John Heard), he isn't convinced and orders her to keep working on the case.As the couple become closer, Gary wants Cathy (who poses as Katie Phillips) to know everything about his life because the fact that his first wife didn't, was part of the reason why they eventually went their separate ways. He tells her he's going to take her out on a hunt but, to her horror, when they get to the night-time location where they meet the rest of the hunting group, she discovers that the prey is a black man who's given a gun with 10 bullets and is then hunted down like an animal. After enduring this traumatic experience, Cathy goes on to discover that Gary is a member of a well-organised national white supremacist organisation that's committed to overthrowing the government and that his hatred of black people, Jews and gays is also shared by his entire family.Mike Carnes was Cathy's previous lover and his insistence that she continues with her undercover work leads to her participating in a bank robbery and a Ku Klux Klan meeting while she continues to gather the evidence that her boss is determined she must find. Her predicament becomes increasingly unbearable and makes her question her loyalties between Gary, who obviously thinks the world of her and her FBI boss who seems determined to make her life a living hell.The characters in "Betrayed" are interesting and well fleshed out. Cathy is inexperienced as an FBI agent and as an orphan, is seduced as much by Gary's idyllic family life as she is by the man himself. Gary is a decorated Vietnam veteran, a committed churchgoer and a clean-cut family man who appears to be ultra-respectable but is in fact, content to participate in acts of criminality and extreme violence in order to support the aims of the anti-government terrorist organisation that he supports. Debra Winger and Tom Berenger are both absolutely convincing in their roles and John Heard's also very good as Cathy's autocratic boss whose actions seem to be motivated by his own personal agenda as much as his official responsibilities."Betrayed" is powerful, provocative and shocking and contains passages that are deeply disturbing. The technique of very gradually revealing the full horror behind the events depicted at the beginning of the movie is extremely effective but would have made even more of an impact if the pacing had been sharper during some sequences. Overall however, this movie packs a real punch and leaves a lasting impression.

tieman64 A shock jockey radio host is murdered. The FBI believes a white supremacist group of Midwestern farmers to be responsible. Agent Cathy Weaver, played by actress Debra Winger, is assigned to infiltrate the gang. She does so, and soon finds herself faking a love affair with Tom Berenger, a Vietnam veteran, widower, farmer and leader of one of the white supremacist "terror" cells.The film's premise is interesting and appropriately disturbing, but like most of director Costa Gavras' Hollywood films, can't maintain its highs. On the plus side, the film plays some interesting morality games. Consider this: the film's racists are humanised and we're invited into their private lives and families, whilst the FBI are shown to be as isolated, narrow minded, compartmentalized and goal oriented as the white supremacists. The end result is that Gavras suggests that the country as a whole has arranged itself into hermetically sealed compartments, arranged around class, politics, race, religion and ethnicity, each section claiming absolute and exclusive humanity. In other words, isolation and social alienation create attitudes of inhospitality, racism and hatred. The Cathy Weaver character tries to resolve this by rejecting both the FBI and the white supremacists and by adopting Tom Berenger's children as her own. She essentially represents the healing balm of maternal love, teaching kindness and understanding to the kids of tomorrow.In terms of flaws, the film plays several scenes too heavily for shock value. This is the result of the notoriously crass screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Many of the film's far right leaning xenophobes are likewise big caricatural lunatics and the film's high concept plot is at times unrealistic.Some of the film's "shocks" nevertheless do work well, Gavras taming Eszterhas' sensationalism with subtle truths. Scenes in which parent's indoctrinate their kids are creepy, the "holiday camp for white supremacists" sequence is haunting and the film's KKK rallies and midnight hunting parties (guess what they're hunting) have visceral effect. There's also something downright unsettling about little kids matter-of-factly saying the N word. The fact that many of the white supremacists are veterans who fought in Vietnam, opens up some interesting avenues, linking state sanctioned, government approved racism with Berenger's group, who call themselves ZOG ("The Zionist Occupation Government"). ZOG fly under no political flag, but their political assassinations and ethnic cleansings have idealistic overtones typical of various dark national "policies". Gavras draws numerous parallels between the FBI and ZOG's underground network of cells and high tech "agents".7.9/10 – Some of the best moments in Gavras' filmography are in this film, but one too heavily senses the soul sucking presence of Hollywood's and Joe Eszterhas' vampiric fangs. Gavras is striving for a kind of nervous intimacy, whilst Eszterhas relies heavily on Hollywood formula, his script taking interesting material in all the wrong directions. Like many directors (Hal Ashby, Coppola, Altman, Hill, etc), Gavras struggled once the 80s hit.Worth one viewing.

merklekranz "Betrayed" is really a movie of underdeveloped, mostly unlikable, characters. Other than Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, we know next to nothing about everyone else. Sure, John Heard alludes to a past relationship with Winger, but really all he does is complain about a lack of evidence. Between a few shockingly evil events, there is way too much repetitive relationship nonsense, which makes the film seem overly long. The ending is a real stretch, as Beringer's cat and mouse game with the now unmasked F.B.I. agent, should have clued him that she just might try and get the drop on him. Overall the movie becomes tedious, and is not recommended, except for Tom Berenger's performance. - MERK