The Thin Blue Line
This week's film is Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988). Morris recently won teh Academy Award for best documentary film for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Comments are welcome about either film.
Also, The Thin Blue Line may not be as easy to find as Citizen Kane, so be sure to attend one of the screenings.
Some trivia on Morris: he often directs commercials between documentary projects, and recently directed some of teh commercials for Apple's "Switch" campaign.
14 Comments:
I was floored during background research on this movie. There are some very passionate viewers that even go so far as the say that this movie is a riposte of those who are in support of the death penalty and boating not even Andrew Sarris can beat how this movie made the Texas judicial system reevaluate how they had handled the case. I hope this movie can live up to this excellent reviews of how this documentary uses cartoons and other such images to reenact what the actual witness are saying instead of a voiceover. This should get interesting….
I read that the documentary was intially supposed to focus on A Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist who was nicknamed Dr. Death. This was because he had a propencity for predicting that a criminal was going to kill again no matter what treatment they recieved. He would call them sociopaths who would ceratinly kill again. He seemed to always stand behind the decision to put the criminal to death.
I found that Dr. Grigson would testify as saying htat he was 100% sure that a criminal would commit a violent act in the future. He also testified to this without even interviewing the criminal. He was expelled from the Amercian Psychiatrics Assosciation in 1995. He seemed to be a family man known for his "charming demanor and absolute judgements"
This was, in my opinion, a raw documentary. It was rather morbid in its portrayal of law enforcement and of the law in Texas. The newspaper clippings, forensics reports, and the soundtrack that were interspersed among the footage of the interviews were quite effective in making the sheriff department, lawyers for the prosecution, and some of the press as unforgiving, and uncaring people with a one sided agenda. Probably the most disturbing aspect of the documentary was the music, which seemed to proceed monotinously, and unceasingly, giving the impression that something sinister was about to happen. I wish the footage and the story behind these characters, David Harris, and Randall Dale Adams would have proceeded at a faster pace, since it loses your attention after the first 40 minutes. They also did not go into depth into "Dr. Death", as much as I would have liked. I think his story would have made quite compelling documentary.
Thank god this movie was decent, because the last 2 were brutal. I thought this was a very well done documentary. I rather enjoy documentaries on The Discovery Channel and The History Channel, so this movie was right up my alley. I liked how the director supplemented the actual story with real interviews, maps, reenactments, etc. I too thought that half way into the movie it began to drag on. I was hooked and wanted to know what else was going to happen - but I was becoming impatient. I would say overall though that this documentary did a good job at presenting the story in interesting unconventional means.
-John R.
I really enjoyed this documentary - all of the "characters" were presented as complex individuals. Even David Harris had some very quotable lines, especially about the blind scales of justice.
I think its interesting that the Academy did not recognize this film because they said it crossed the line of "documentary". This brings up vital points about history and truth. As the facts get muddled and the truth is lost, how does Justice work? If District Attourneys hold power over life and death and twist the truth at will, how is Morris' work any worse?
Also, was this a poineer of crime re-enactment, cause it certainly is in wide use in the dozen crime shows on TV (America's most wanted, etc).
I was happy to learn that Randall Adams was freed in 1989 after the film was released.
-Tim Donlan
I was more concerned about how Randall Adams must have felt after this whole ordeal. I spoke breifly in class about how he had come to be an advocate for a moratorium on the death penalty in Texas. I found a quote by him that I thought was very interesting: "The man you see before you is here by the grace of God," Adams said at a legislative hearing in 2001. "The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room, and if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me." This was part of his fight against the death penalty. He actually met his wife, Jill, at an anti-death penalty ralley in 1998 when he actually went back to Texas to speak against the death penalty. He also apparently meets psychiatrists regularly who are interested in teh effects the experience had on him. People are always telling him how at peace he is with the situation and how calm he is about it. His reply is that "I came 72 hours from being executed. At that point, you better make peace with yourself." I was just surprised to hear all of this normalcy coming from a man who was about to die for no reason. I thought it was a good film by the way.
I was more concerned about how Randall Adams must have felt after this whole ordeal. I spoke briefly in class about how he had come to be an advocate for a moratorium on the death penalty in Texas. I found a quote by him that I thought was very interesting: "The man you see before you is here by the grace of God," Adams said at a legislative hearing in 2001. "The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room, and if it doesn't, then that scares the hell out of me." This was part of his fight against the death penalty. He actually met his wife, Jill, at an anti-death penalty rally in 1998 when he actually went back to Texas to speak against the death penalty. He also apparently meets psychiatrists regularly who are interested in the effects the experience had on him. People are always telling him how at peace he is with the situation and how calm he is about it. His reply is that "I came 72 hours from being executed. At that point, you better make peace with yourself." I was just surprised to hear all of this normalcy coming from a man who was about to die for no reason. I thought it was a good film by the way.
Did anyone notice that Randall Adams in the movie is wearing a white uniform, while David Harris is wearing the more common orange one? I'm wondering if these were just the standard issue clothes of the prisons they were in, or if Morris had Adams wear white as a kind of symbolic sign of innocence.
-Steve S.
Carlo stated that the most disturbing aspect of the movie to him was the music. Although it wasn't discussed heavily in class, I was most disturbed by the underlying hints the film gave concerning the state of the social climate in Vidor, Texas. In an attempt to uphold an image of what I would call "Hometown, USA," certain persons in this region of Texas were not only willing to put to death an innocent adult to spare the life of an "innocent child", but also to endanger the life of a man (Dennis White) who was willing to defend someone who claimed to be innocent that no one, frankly speaking, wanted to believe.
I was kind of cofused at the end of the film. I thought I read that Adams was still serving the sentence, even though Harris basically admitted to killing the officer that night. On a different topic about the film, we talked in class about the death penalty supported or not. I think it was supported especially when they showed the records of the prosecuter who had more death sentences than life sentences.
I felt this is one of the better one of the movies that we have viewed all semester. It was well done, being a documentary it was well layed out where there was something keeping me interested throughout. It took the viewer to the opinion that everyone of the small town had and then brought them all the way to what was the real truth behind the story. Having the reinactments was some what lame, but it helped the viewer get a visual of the scenes. I also thought the music was a wierd choice for this documentary, there could have been another choice of background music to help the movie take effect.
I liked the film. I grew up watching episode after episode of Unsolved Mysteries so the movie caught my attention. It seemed to almost drag a little just because of the length of the movie, but it is forgiveable. Its one of those kind of stories that you expect Randall to be executed at the end despite the movie and we get a relief to know that he finally gets out after 12.5 yrs. It is rather unfortunate that an innocent man had to serve that long before being released, but how many people do you expect are in jail right now who are totally innocent? How many innocent people have been executed over the years? This movie raises the issue of the fallacies in our legal and punitive system.
Another death penalty state Resource... LifeLaw.org . A discussion forum for all that deals with such hot-button issues as death penalty state .
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