Before I got ready to go out to see the fireworks on July 4, I had a day to kill.On principle, I usually don’t work on Federal holidays, so I watched a free version of the little-known 1988 film, Betrayed, on YouTube.I knew loosely that it was about an FBI agent trying to catch a white supremacist suspected of a hate crime, a perfect film for this day and this political environment.
At the beginning of the film, we see what it looks like a conventional movie courtship between a pair of farmers, played by Debra Winger and Tom Berenger.What we learn about 30 minutes in is that Winger’s character is an undercover FBI agent who’s been assigned to find the killer of a Jewish radio host.Berenger is suspected of leading a white supremacist group that’s responsible for the murder.
When we meet Berenger, he seems like a very nice person, a down-home “family man” with a dead wife and a daughter he’s raising on his own.Yet I knew going in he was the leader of the group.Throughout the film, Winger is trapped between her job and the fact that she might just be falling in love with him.
Here’s where the pro-single part comes in.A lesser film might have Berenger mending his racist ways to be the Winger character, who is appalled after a particularly disturbing sequence where he and his racist buddies hunt a black man for sport in the woods before killing him.But he doesn’t change.I was bothered by the fact that she would be inclined to go back to him after witnessing that side of him, along with the fact that he takes her to a camp where “soldiers” train their children to shoot Blacks and Jews.We do see the “human” side of these supremacists; most were taken in by that cult when in vulnerable states.Not much different from what’s happening in the US in 2025, IMHO.
That said, Winger does a nice job of playing a complex, conflicted character, and at the end, she has to shoot Berenger after he finds out her true identity.The look he gives her before she does this is an epitome of the movie’s title.There’s also a backstory involving a past romance between her and her supervisor, and thankfully, that doesn’t come to fruition.The movie does end with her visiting Berenger’s daughter, with whom she developed a nice bond.