Reviews and notes

On the face of it, THE THIN BLUE LINE seems an entirely new departure for Errol Morris, the man who made Werner Herzog eat his shoe in the process of establishing himself, with Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida, as the quirky historiographer of the heartlands of American eccentricity. An exemplary slice of investigative reportage, no longer lightly juggling amusing follies but gravely producing one man's right to justice out of the conjurer's hat, it offers what seems to be
unassailable proof that Randall Adams has been the victim of a shameful legal travesty.

Not only is the evidence of Adams' innocence marshalled with total lucidity, but the intricate maze of pieces that go to make up the jigsaw are fitted together with an instinctive feel for the logistics of exposition, elaboration and suspense that an old hand at whodunitry like Agatha Christie would surely have admired. And in piecing his picture together, Morris has also been lured into his fIrst real attempt at mise en scène with the stylised reconstruction of the crime - or rather, the fantasy image drawn of it by police and prosecution - that recurs at intervals, subject to modifications as new evidence is adduced (or fabricated) during the course of the trial, but never coming close to what must have been the truth to which everyone so studiously turned a blind eye.

At the same time, it seems quite characteristic that Morris should have stumbled almost by accident on to the possibility of a miscarriage of justice while following up the scent of an entirely different film, this one about Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist commonly known as Dr. Death because of the extraordinarily high percentage of convicted criminals sent to Death Row by his testimony. His psychiatric method, it seems, was to ask the prisoner whether he felt remorse for his crime; since Randall Adams had committed no crime, he declared that he felt no remorse; and was thereupon promptly pronounced a candidate for the electric chair by Dr. Death, on the grounds that no remorse equals probable recidivism. For Morris, this character was clearly a founder member of the loony fringe he celebrated with such delight in Vernon, Florida; and in fact, beyond the dogged determination to establish the truth of a man's innocence, THE THIN BLUE LINE finds Morris contemplating the people who contributed to the railroading of Randall Adams - from Judge Metcalfe to perjured witnesses by way of bulldozing cops and ambitious prosecutor - with a tolerant, almost sympathetic wonderment.

Like Renoir, his watchword is "Everybody has his reasons"; and one of the most fascinating things about THE THIN BLUE LINE is the way all these reasons are subtly adumbrated between the lines. The reason why David Harris was shunted aside as a suspect (if not actually protected) seems to have had to do with the active influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Vidor (Harris was not only a local boy but a clean-cut all-American; Adams was an outsider and a long-haired hippy). The reason for the police's eager embrace of Adams as a suitable case for conviction appears, initially at least, to have been acute embarrassment and a need to restore the force's tarnished image of efficiency. It was, after all, one of their own, the murdered cop's partner, who stalled the hunt for the killer by giving a fabricated description of the murder car; who, evidently sitting in the cop car drinking a milkshake when it happened, failed to observe procedure by backing up her partner when he approached the suspect car; and who was, to boot, a policewoman (with a fine tangle of macho/feminist snares attendant upon that fact).

The most pleasing aspect of the film, in other words, is that instead of thumping tubs, waxing righteously indignant, and pointing accusing fingers when the culpabilities (like the DA's ambitions and the defence's inexperience) are plain for all to see, Morris is more concerned to contemplate the ramifications. Two bizarre mental landscapes in particular are exposed. One belongs to the judge who sentenced Adams to the electric chair on a distinctly fragile spiderweb of circumstantial evidence. His first reaction when invited to comment on the case is to launch into a proud historical reminiscence recording that his father was present with Hoover at the Biograph on the glorious occasion of Dillinger's demise; his second, that the only thing he really remembers about the case is the prosecuting attorney's arresting tribute to the police as "the thin blue line" between the public and anarchy. Clearly a mythomane of the same ilk as the Melvin Purvis of John Milius' Dillinger, he reveals himself to be the proverbial ostrich with his head safely buried in dreams of glory. Confronted with the fact that his verdict was finally reversed 8-1 by the Supreme Court, he blandly retorts that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had previously upheld him 9-0: "If you tally those votes, I come out 10-8".

The second, oddly parallel insight is into the mind of David Harris. Affable, charming, innocently babyfaced, unquestionably psycho, he gets worked up only once, in describing with genuine moral indignation ("He's crazy! He came at me with a gun!") the violent reaction of a man into whose apartment he had broken and whose wife he was in the process of abducting with violence. Protected from any awareness of his own evil by some mysterious myth-making process of his own - glimpsed, though perhaps merely parroted from some psychiatrist's diagnosis when he recalls ("might have been some sort of traumatic experience") being blamed by his father for the death by drowning of his little brother - he is, in his very blandness, in the playfully childish tone with which he effectively testifies to Randall Adams' innocence of the crime for which he is still in jail, genuinely unreachable, a brother from another planet. With good reason does poor Adams say, "The kid scares me".
- Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1989.

Weblink: Roger Ebert review

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