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.’