Monthly Archives: September 2015

  • The Thin Blue Line

    Errol Morris (1988)

    On Thanksgiving weekend in 1976, a Dallas police officer called Robert Wood was working on night patrol with a female colleague (one of the first women officers in the city to be assigned to patrol).  Shortly after midnight, Wood stopped a car because its headlights were not on.  He approached the car on foot.  As he did so, someone in the car fired two shots, the second of which killed Wood.  Twenty-eight-year-old Randall Dale Adams and his brother arrived in Dallas, from their native Ohio, on Thursday 25 November 1976, the night of Thanksgiving.  The brothers were en route to California but on Friday 26 November Randall was offered and accepted a job in Dallas.  He turned up for his first day of work on Saturday 27 November but found the premises closed for the weekend.  On the way back to the motel where he and his brother were staying, Adams’s car ran out of fuel.   Another driver, sixteen-year-old David Ray Harris, stopped and offered Adams a lift.  The two spent the rest of the day together; in the evening, they went to a drive-in movie before going their separate ways.  David Harris had stolen the car he was driving, from a neighbour in Vidor, Texas.  Harris also had in the car with him a pistol and a shotgun belonging to his father.

    The police investigation into Robert Wood’s killing led them to David Harris who, though still a juvenile, already had a criminal record.  Harris accused Randall Adams, who had no criminal record, of the police officer’s murder.  Adams was charged; at his trial in 1977, Harris was the chief prosecution witness and was granted immunity for his testimony.  The jury found Adams guilty and he was sentenced to death.  In 1980, the US Supreme Court overturned the sentence, which was commuted to life imprisonment by the Governor of Texas.  By the time Errol Morris completed The Thin Blue Line, Randall Adams had spent more than a decade in prison and David Harris had been sentenced to death for the murder of a man called Mark Mays, in Beaumont, Texas in 1985.  The release of Morris’s film was followed, in less than seven months, by the release of Randall Adams.  His case was referred to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which overturned his conviction, and returned to Dallas County for a retrial.  The district attorney’s office declined to prosecute the case again and Adams, following a habeas corpus hearing, left prison on 21 March 1989.  The Thin Blue Line had turned Adams’s conviction into a cause célèbre:  it’s hard to believe the film didn’t play a major part in bringing to light a miscarriage of justice and freeing an innocent man.  This would make it an important film even if it was otherwise undistinguished.

    In fact, undistinguished is not a word that naturally comes to mind in relation to The Thin Blue Line, which placed fifth in Sight and Sound’s greatest documentaries poll in 2014 and so qualified for screening in the BFI’s valuable season that has followed up that poll.  There’s an irony, though, in the film’s inclusion in S&S‘s all-time-top-ten of documentaries:  Morris was anxious for the promotion of The Thin Blue Line to avoid the label ‘documentary’.  The strapline on the theatrical poster described it as ‘a new kind of murder mystery’:  although the film won several documentary prizes in the late 1980s, the Academy deemed it ineligible for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar because it had been marketed as ‘non-fiction’ rather than as a documentary.  The ‘murder mystery’ tag connotes a drama and the piece is a highly effective piece of dramatisation in several ways.   The reconstruction of Officer Wood’s killing is frightening and, through repetition of excerpts from it, increasingly upsetting.  Philip Glass’s score, written for the film, is compelling.  Errol Morris includes quite extended clips from both parts of the soft-porn double-bill (The Student Body and Swinging Cheerleaders) that Adams and Harris watched at the drive-in on the evening of the murder.  Morris conducts interviews with Adams and Harris; men in Vidor whom Harris knew (and to whom he boasted of his killing of Wood); police and legal representatives; and other witnesses that the prosecution rustled up to tell lies to substantiate the case against Adams.  Morris doesn’t identify any of his remarkable collection of talking heads through explanatory text on screen:  we can immediately read Randall Adams’s surname on the pocket of his prison shirt but we get to understand who others are more gradually, rather as we would develop an understanding of the significance of characters in a fictional crime story.

    It’s hard to understand why the Texas police moved heaven and earth to pin the crime on Adams rather than Harris – hard, that is, until the likeable Edith James, one of Adams’s defence team, voices her simple and credible theory:  the police felt the murder of one of their own deserved capital punishment and Harris, unlike Adams, was too young to receive a death sentence.  When the Supreme Court overturns Adams’s death sentence, the story turns into something approaching appalling black comedy:  the police’s perverted determination to get justice for their colleague has proved entirely counterproductive – so that no one’s happy with the outcome.  Errol Morris doesn’t give his interviewees much opportunity to say whether their views about the crime, and their role in its aftermath, have changed with the years.  Those views may not have changed at all but Morris’s omission is as striking as it’s unsurprising.  He is not impartial; he wants to stress how pompous, complacent or outrageous certain contributors are.   The interview with Don Metcalfe, the judge at Adams’s trial, supplies the film’s title:  Metcalfe acknowledges how moved he was by the description, in the prosecution’s closing address to the jury, of the police as ‘the thin blue line separating society from anarchy’.  The prosecution’s three eleventh-hour, trumped-up ‘eye witnesses’ to the killing of Officer Wood are hard to beat in the outrageousness stakes:  Morris’s subsequent description of them as ‘evil clowns’ seems exactly right.

    There are elements of the strong-arming direction that you want to resist (Morris’s relentless use of the Philip Glass music, from the very start, is highly manipulative) but The Thin Blue Line is an example of tendentious film-making where the end justified the means.  Randall Adams himself comes across as intelligent and, very understandably, as angrily incredulous.  He had reason to stay angry too:  the injury of losing twelve years of his life in prison was compounded by the insult of receiving no financial compensation[1].  After his release, Adams also found himself in a legal battle with Errol Morris over the rights to his story.  Adams died of natural causes in 2010 at the age of sixty-one – six years after David Harris, who was executed for the murder of Mark Mays after nearly two decades on Death Row.

    11 August 2015

    [1]  According to Wikipedia:  ‘It is said that if Adams were “found to be wrongly convicted under today’s law in Texas, he would get $80,000 for each year of incarceration,” additionally “at the time his conviction was thrown out, wrongly convicted prisoners could get a lump sum payment of $25,000 if pardoned by the governor.” However, since Adams was released because his case was dismissed, not pardoned [sic], he received no payment from the state after his release for his wrongful conviction.’

  • Postcards from the Edge

    Mike Nichols (1990)

    Carrie Fisher’s ‘semi-autobiographical’ account of a film starlet’s desperately comic fight to free herself from drug dependency, rotten men and the shadow of her famous mother was published in 1987 but, as a movie, it has elements of an old-time ‘woman’s picture’, modernised by its sexually permissive ambience, by Fisher’s one-liners (she also wrote the screenplay), and especially by the shrewd shallowness of Mike Nichols’s direction, which makes Postcards from the Edge easy to watch and easier to forget.  At its centre is the relationship of Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep), a wan, drug-addicted actress, and her mother Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), a tough, brazenly egocentric musical comedy trouper.  It’s hard to summon the energy to root for the hapless Suzanne but you mildly hope and assume that things will improve for her.  In the event, she gets rid of her louse boyfriend, a sexually voracious film producer (Dennis Quaid), makes up with her mother and ‘finds herself’.  You don’t believe in the happy ending; you merely accept that it’s time for the film to end happily.  There are a few moments when Suzanne’s insecurity is touching, particularly her big scene with the kindly, paternal director of films-within-the-film (Gene Hackman).  But the real director’s frivolity is mostly impregnable.  Nichols bursts the emotional balloon even of Suzanne and Doris’s reconciliation – when the latter, hospitalised after a car accident, is suddenly, vulnerably old.  The scene shrinks to a small bubble of sentimental wisecracks.  Nichols’s irony is virtually self-protecting:  it’s as if nothing in the movie can be seriously criticised because nothing is seriously meant.

    Mike Nichols made Postcards from the Edge immediately after Working Girl, one of his most successful films (in every way).  Nichols seemed amused by the moral dubiety of a Cinderella story set in 1980s Wall Street, engaged with it wholeheartedly and made his audience follow suit.  There are moments in Postcards, however, when the artificiality of the piece seems on the verge of becoming its subject.  At the start of the picture, the coked-up Suzanne freaks out on set; a few hours later, she’s having her stomach pumped and Doris has her put in a detox clinic.  Gene Hackman is hard to beat as a barometer of emotional truth but, as the director of the film Suzanne is making when she collapses, even he is a little forced – perhaps ill at ease with the falsity of the set-up.  (Nichols sometimes seems to be on the same wavelength as the Dennis Quaid character, who at one point says to Suzanne, ‘You’re the realest person I ever met – in the abstract’.)  When Suzanne returns later in the film to do looping on the scene she flunked before she went into rehab, Hackman illuminates the exchange between them and his paternal benignity is entirely convincing.   But Mike Nichols doesn’t have the appetite for the heartwarming back-from-the-brink aspect of the material:  he seems more interested in the next technical challenge he’s going to set Meryl Streep.  (It’s no coincidence that the most successful collaboration between Nichols and Streep was Angels in America, in which she played four different parts.)

    There’s a moment when Suzanne tells Doris, ‘I’m middle-aged, Mom’.  This is an expression of Suzanne’s feeling that she’s wasted her life rather than a statement of fact but a basic problem for Meryl Streep here is that she looks too old for the part.  (She was was 40 when the film was made – Carrie Fisher was only 31 when the novel was published.)  It’s effective enough, given the relationship between Suzanne and Doris, that the daughter seems the mother’s spiritual senior – she’s certainly the more world-weary – but Streep’s aura of capability makes her mature in the wrong way.   Even so, she does many clever and charming things and the glazed remoteness she brings to the role is very right for what was the picture’s tagline:  ‘Having a wonderful time, wish I were here’.  Shirley MacLaine was 55 when she did this film (and is two years younger than Carrie Fisher’s mother, Debbie Reynolds).  You get the sense that MacLaine basically despises what she’s being asked to do; her presence and flair mean that she does it well – but she’s somehow uncomfortable.  She may be too naturally empathetic an actress to play a monster mother without strain and too truthful as a performer to believe in the moment when Doris, in hospital and deprived of her wig and the other accoutrements of mutton dressed as lamb, briefly stops performing.

    One element of the material that Nichols really does engage with is the musical numbers, all three of which work very well.   (As with Heartburn and Working Girl, the score is by Carly Simon but her contribution is a minor one on this occasion.)  At a welcome home party for Suzanne, Streep sings the Ray Charles song ‘You Don’t Know Me’ with a plaintive tentativeness that is very appealing – and which derives from Suzanne’s certainty that Doris is going to follow her onstage and completely obliterate her performance:  Shirley MacLaine duly delivers the Sondheim song ‘I’m Still Here’ with a crude panache that’s exhilarating and repellent at the same time.  In the finale – a piece of stomping country-and-western self-assertion called ‘I’m Checkin’ Out’ (written for the picture by Shel Silverstein) – Meryl Streep is tremendous.  She’s not only in great voice but she pitches the number perfectly, shaking off the faltering confidence of Suzanne’s earlier number but holding back from her mother’s vulgarian verve.  This is the one moment when the I-will-survivalism of the piece registers with some emotional force.  (Streep is even freer as she continues the number over the closing credits – it’s quite a curtain call.)

    The supporting cast, although most of them haven’t got much to do, is a remarkable line-up.  As well as Hackman and Quaid, there’s Annette Bening (incredibly vivid in the bit part of a bit part actress whom the Quaid character beds on the same day he beds Suzanne), Richard Dreyfuss (as the doctor who pumps Suzanne’s stomach and later asks her out on a date), Gary Morton (as Doris’s predictably unscrupulous manager), Mary Wickes (as Doris’s mother), Rob Reiner, Simon Callow and Michael Ontkean.  A dark-haired actress called Robin Bartlett, who I don’t remember seeing since[1], has a witty, straightforward incisiveness as Suzanne’s roommate in rehab.

    23 May 2009

    [1] Postscript:  Until Shutter Island (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), that is …

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