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The Thin Blue Line



cast :

Randall Adams
David Harris

crew :

Directed by: Errol Morris
Written by: Errol Morris
Produced by: Mark Lipson
DOP: Robert Chappell and Stefan Czapsky
Editor: Paul Barnes
Music Score by: Philip Glass

release date :

1988

The third film by renowned documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, ‘The Thin Blue Line’ (1988) is a story of murder and injustice. With a murder on a dimly lit street, deep shadows and moonlight haze, guns, drugs, crooked cops, false witnesses, cover-ups and an innocent man, Morris’s archetypal documentary has all the elements of a classic noir thriller.


In November 1976, drifter Randall Adams is cruising around Dallas County, Texas. Late one evening he runs out of petrol and is picked up by 16-year-old David Harris. They hit it off. They go to the movies, they talk, they smoke some marijuana. This much is agreed. The rest of the night is a scrambled mess of truth, lies and contradictions. Adams says that after the movies and marijuana he and Harris part company, but Harris’s version of events is radically different. He claims that after the movies they are pulled over by the police for a minor traffic offence. And, according to Harris, Adams shoots and kills the police officer as he approaches the driver’s window. When Errol Morris began filming in 1987, Randall Adams had already served nearly eleven years of a life sentence for the murder of the police officer Robert Wood.


Morris’s documentary is an investigation into the events of that night in ’76 - an investigation in which, to some degree, the viewer is invited to assume the role of the detective. After Adams and Harris give their accounts, we are introduced to a series of police officers, lawyers, detectives and witnesses. None of these are introduced with their name, job title or relationship to the case in captions – this, it seems, is also part of the mystery that, by paying close attention, the viewer is expected to solve. As each person is interviewed, we begin to notice something dubious, some discrepancies, some contradictions – things are not adding up. We become sceptical. Then, Morris’s narrative device begins to reveal itself – he is presenting us with the evidence, the clues we need to solve the murder. Often contradicting one another’s statements, we have to learn who to trust, who to believe. Each person’s testimony, including those of Adams and Harris, are given equal weight. Morris does not try to lead us into making rash judgements or into blindly accepting his own views – the facts will speak for themselves and the truth will eventually be uncovered. As the story unfolds, we learn to trust our instincts – there are good cops and bad cops, honest witnesses and liars, an innocent man and a guilty man. It emerges that certain members of the Dallas County police force and judiciary had decided that Randall Adams was the guilty man. Adams, after all, was a 28-year-old drifter and, though he had no prior convictions, he could be given the death penalty. Harris, on the other hand, was a 16-year-old and would probably avoid the ultimate punishment. Subsequently, vital evidence was either fabricated or covered-up in order to convict Adams and avenge the murder of one of their colleagues.


The scene of the shooting is reconstructed continually throughout the film as new and conflicting evidence is given. They begin with a long shot of a blue car parked at the side of a quiet, out-of-town road. A few metres behind is a police car with its red light slowly rotating. Silence. The quintessential noir scene. A police officer steps out and approaches the car in front. We see a close-up of a handgun peeking out of the driver’s window of the blue car. The gun fires a series of shots, each cut in sequence with a picture of a torso in close-up and showing the corresponding entry point of each bullet. As we are introduced to each participant – police officers, lawyers, witnesses, etc – Morris reconstructs the scene to incorporate the additional information. The shooting is eventually shown from numerous points of view, each slightly different from the preceding version. Diagrams, charts, photos, and newspaper articles are inserted into the relevant points in the scene – some offer clarification, some serve only to cloud and confuse the truth. Gradually, the viewer, much like a detective in a noir thriller, builds a mental image of the shooting for themselves, selecting and discarding information as they proceed through the investigation. By now the viewer is completely drawn into Morris’s narrative device.


A radical departure from late 80s documentaries, the low-key lighting techniques on show in ‘The Thin Blue Line’ bear more resemblance to a mid-century film noir, such as Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ (1949) or François Truffaut’s ‘Tirez Sur La Pianiste’ (1960). The interviews are stylishly lit, casting long shadows over the faces of the participants. Backgrounds are often dim, unclear, abstractions. Every attention is made to heighten the atmosphere of mystery and secrecy. Which clues inhabit the shadows? Who is hiding the crucial bits of information? The reconstructions are also painstakingly designed to strengthen the mood of a crime thriller. Close-ups of the police officer’s feet approaching the car in front, canted angles of the gun peeking out of the driver’s window, audible silences cracked by the gunfire. The score by master composer Philip Glass (The Qatsi Trilogy (1982-2002) / Kundun (1997)) should ideally be given a separate paragraph all of its own. The score is as vital to the mood of the film as any other single element, and it is one of many ingredients of ‘The Thin Blue Line’ to be endlessly reused and imitated in films, television programmes, trailers, and adverts. From the opening seconds of the film, Glass’s strings initiate the rhythm which pushes relentlessly onwards throughout the investigation – softening to a gentle bounce during interviews and building to a grandiose thump during the reconstructions.


Morris’s reconstructions of the scene of the shooting drew scorn and distain from many in the documentary industry. The strict precepts of Direct Cinema dominated documentary form in 1988 (and still does today in many cases). In the eyes of some, his use of dramatic re-enactments and highly stylised interviews relegated ‘The Thin Blue Line’ from the ranks of documentary proper, and the film was not nominated for an Academy Award. Morris has always scoffed at the strict limitations of Direct Cinema. During the filming of his previous two films, ‘Gates of Heaven’ (1978) and ‘Vernon, Florida’ (1981), Morris had intentionally set out to flout the conventions of Direct Cinema. He used tripods, lights, two-camera interviews – any methods available to him to prove that engaging and pertinent documentaries could be made outside the conventions of Direct Cinema. In ‘The Thin Blue Line’, Morris employed the conventions of film noir to great success. Today, reconstructions are extremely common in both cinematic and television documentaries, and the docudrama or drama-documentary is given its own unique place within the documentary genre. Although dramatizations were used many years before in such films as Humphrey Jennings’s ‘Fires Were Started’ (1943) and Peter Watkins’s ‘The War Game’ (1965), Errol Morris is often credited with popularising the technique in ‘The Thin Blue Line’ – and rarely has it been executed with such style and grace.


The final sequence of the film consists of a taped conversation between Morris and David Harris recorded sometime after the end of principal photography. The conversation holds the key needed to access the whole truth of what occurred that night in November 1976. In it, Harris speaks candidly to Morris and all but confesses that he alone committed the murder of the police officer and that Randall Adams was entirely innocent. For Morris, how to treat this vital information must have been awkward; it was, after all, merely a conversation recorded on audio tape with no visual accompaniment. But what we get is one of the film’s most striking and memorable images – a tape recorder in motion. The noir lighting scheme is maintained, and the camera angles are sporadically switched, as Harris and Morris’s conversation plays out. The mechanical rhythm of the tape recorder is visually arresting, holding our focus enough without distracting our attention from Morris’s and (particularly) Harris’s words.


‘The Thin Blue Line’ is perhaps best remembered as the film which overturned the guilty verdict of an innocent man, the exposing of a gross miscarriage of justice. In fact, the film was never entered into evidence at any time, though it did convince some influential figures to push for Adams’s retrial (which eventually led to his release). Harris was never tried for the murder of police officer Robert Wood, but in 2004 he was executed for a separate incident involving abduction and murder. Incidentally, following his release from prison Randall Adams unsuccessfully sued the filmmaker Errol Morris on the grounds of breach of image rights. He claimed that Morris had made his fortune from his story and Adams wanted his share. Morris claimed to have lost money on the film.


The adage that real life is more exciting than fiction does not come closer to being proven than with ‘The Thin Blue Line’. This is a truly engaging and still unique film experience. Morris’s documentary contains all the ingredients of the most suspenseful and stylish film noir; expertly paced and realised, outstanding design, and one of the most memorable of cinema’s original scores. A genuine thriller.


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Country: USA
Budget: $1Million
Length: 103mins


Filmography:
‘The War Game’, 1965, Peter Watkins, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
'Fires Were Started’, 1943, Humphrey Jennings, Crown Film Unit
‘Vernon, Florida’, 1981, Errol Morris, Errol Morris Films
‘Gates of Heaven’, 1978, Errol Morris, Gates of Heaven
'Kundun', 1997, Martin Scorsese, De Fina-Cappa
‘Tirez Sur La Pianiste’, 1960, François Truffaut, Les Films de la Pléiade
‘The Third Man’, 1949, Carol Reed, London Film Productions,


Pub/2008


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