BEFORE: I'm sticking with Errol Morris for a couple of days, so really, that means I'm hoping that at some point during this film, I hear him as the interviewer, asking at least one question from his subjects. Some directors choose to leave the questions in, others prefer to edit them out - but from going by the credits listings on IMDB, Morris seems to be one of those guys who leave them in. Fingers crossed. Morris carries over from "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara".
Assuming that I can see or hear Errol Morris in this film and the next two, then there's only one upcoming link that I'm unsure of, and my chain now hinges on whether there's footage of Joan Rivers in a documentary called "The Last Laugh". Wikipedia says that there is, but the IMDB makes no mention of her being in that film - which often happens with credits for archive footage, I've submitted a few hundred A.F. credits to the IMDB in the last two weeks, many of which were accepted. If Ms. Rivers appears in that film, then my chain should be good until the end of the year, I went through it yesterday and double-checked everything. (But I'll have to WATCH "The Last Laugh" to be sure that she's in there somewhere...)
THE PLOT: A film that successfully argued that a man was wrongly convicted for murder by a corrupt justice system in Dallas County, Texas.
AFTER: This film has a stellar reputation, a high rating on IMDB and it's also on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die". At least, it was the last time I checked, they keep taking movies off of that list to make room for new ones, and I may be due to check through it again soon. I'm up to about 414 on that list now, and I'm not actively pursuing the ones I haven't seen, but now and again I sort of watch one by accident and then later I'll get around to updating my total - it's not a high priority, because most of what's left on that list doesn't appeal to me that much, so it would be a tough slog to watch the 586 remaining.
Anyway, I'm not sure that this film has aged that well since its release in 1988, but that probably shouldn't lessen the impact of what it accomplished, which was to present evidence publicly to shine a light on the case of a wrongly convicted man. By working around / going around the legal system, a documentary can try to make it "obvious" that the wrong man was convicted of murder, just by presenting another suspect that seems like a more likely criminal. It's the equivalent of the "reasonable" doubt that may not be established during a trial, for whatever reason. Introducing this evidence and creating this doubt could create enough public outcry to overturn a verdict or force a new trial - and in this case, Randall Adams went from Death Row to being released from prison, about a year after the film's release. So making a film like this should not be done lightly, it could have a powerful impact.
I avoided watching any documentaries in this chain about the Central Park Five, because my chain was already set when I considered that, but with so many key figures in that case turning up in my other films - Al Sharpton, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, - now I'm thinking that I should have found a way to work that in. But we also have true-crime podcasts now, like "Serial", that take on specific cases and try to present new evidence, and change people's minds by working around the system. So this isn't a very flashy documentary, but it was ground-breaking, ahead of its time in many ways.
(I took so long to watch this one that I ended up seeing a parody of it on "Documentary Now!" before watching the real thing, which always feels like the wrong way to do something. Maybe I'll go back now and watch that episode again, it will probably be a lot funnier now that I have the right frame of reference.)
But let me get to the film - it seems like something similar to what happened with "Icarus" on this one, the filmmaker set out to make one film, and got pulled in a different direction to make another. Morris started making a documentary about "Doctor Death", a psychiatrist who had testified in over 100 trials that resulted in death sentences, and in almost every instance he would testify that the accused was an "incurable sociopath" who he believed would kill again, given the chance. And since Texas had the death penalty, testimony like this ended up justifying the executions of many men. But part of being a "sociopath" is having no remorse for the crimes committed - and guess who else would show no remorse for his crimes? That's right, an innocent man. So clearly there was a flaw somewhere in the diagnosis stage.
Randall Adams was just a drifter, driving from Ohio to California with his brother in November 1976, looking for work. (The part of his story I don't really understand is - who drives from Ohio to California via DALLAS? That seems like it's out of the way, if you're in Ohio, why wouldn't you go through Chicago?) But he was offered a job right after Thanksgiving, only he ran out of gas on the way to the job. David Ray Harris, driving a car stolen from his neighbor, saw him walking with a gas can and gave him a ride. The two then spent some time together drinking, smoking pot and going to a drive-in movie. Later that night, two Texas cops stopped the stolen car because its headlights were off, and during the traffic stop, the driver shot one of the cops five times and killed him.
There were many inconsistencies in the police record - where was the second officer? She was supposed to be right behind the stopped car, as is police procedure, but then why was her reaction time so slow after her partner was shot? She wasn't able to recall the license plate or the correct make of the car, so it's more likely that she was sitting in the squad car, possibly eating. And then once they tracked down the car, and found the guy who stole it, who had been bragging to his friends about he had shot a cop, and who led the investigators to the car AND the gun, why did the police arrest the OTHER guy? OK, sure, he was a drifter, we're clear on that, but doesn't the guy who stole the car and robbed the liquor store also seem like the more likely candidate to shoot the cop?
The accused man's attorney, plus a sort of internal affairs investigator brought in theorized that the car thief was still technically a minor, and couldn't be charged with the death penalty, but the adult drifter could. But that shouldn't be used to determine who gets charged with the crime, right? There just seemed to be this "Well, a cop is dead, so somebody has to hang for that, it doesn't really matter who" sort of mentality. Also the younger man/car thief was a local boy, so therefore he couldn't have committed murder? That logic doesn't track either. OK, he pointed the cops to the man he said shot the cop - but isn't that exactly what a guilty person might do, throw the blame at somebody else? Any way you slice it, this case was bungled. And while the appellate court upheld the ruling, it went all the way up to the Supreme Court, where Adams' death sentence was overturned, 8-1. But they still held him on a life sentence in Texas, and it wasn't until David Harris was arrested for a separate murder that any light got cast on the previous case.
Eventually, a new hearing was held, and in that hearing, David Harris recanted his previous testimony against Adams, and claimed (the second time) that Adams wasn't even in the car at the time that the policeman was shot. So, umm, where did the three witnesses come from, the ones who pointed at Adams and said, "That's the guy, I saw him shoot the cop from the car!" Apparently the witnesses had some connection to the judge, and they had family members with cases coming up the following week with that same judge, so in return for leniency in those OTHER cases, they must have agreed to testify as eyewitnesses against Adams.
It's not technically perfect, it seems the rules about re-enacting events for a documentary were still being sorted out, and it would have really helped to put the names and job titles of the interviewed subjects up on the screen, so we could learn their names better and figure out their connections to the case. Because it feels like their job titles sort of determined their opinions about the case, and that shouldn't be the case in a trial situation, either.
Thankfully, there's a bit at the end where Errol Morris' voice is heard on a tape recorder - during a last-minute interview with David Ray Harris, it seems there were some technical problems with the camera (or perhaps with the infamous Interrotron system of two-way mirrors, as was used in "The Fog of War"). That really helps me out, because otherwise there would be no visual or audible link to yesterday's and tomorrow's films....
I'm reading on Wikipedia now about Errol Morris' early films, made before "The Thin Blue Line", and it's just fascinating, even though many of those projects never got completed. He and Werner Herzog were tossing around ideas for a documentary about serial killer Ed Gein, but it never went anywhere. Next Morris wanted to make a film called "Nub City", about a town in Florida where many people committed insurance fraud by deliberately amputating their own limbs. Eventually he made "Gates of Heaven", a doc about the pet cemetery business - and then his other ideas that went nowhere are even more fascinating. And then later on, in 2002, he apparently made a short film with Donald Trump discussing "Citizen Kane" - that one might be worth looking up. If I do another documentary chain next year, I should remember to look up the other films of Errol Morris.
Also starring Randall Adams, David Ray Harris, Gus Rose, Jackie Johnson, Marshall Touchton, Dale Holt, Sam Kittrell, Edith James, Dennis White, Don Metcalfe, Emily Miller, R.L. Miller, Michael Randell, Melvyn Carson Bruder.
RATING: 5 out of 10 cheerleaders on the drive-in screen
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