The Thin Blue Line

Released 1988
Directed by Errol Morris

One dark night in 1976, a Dallas police officer named Robert Wood was shot dead by someone inside a car he had stopped for a minor traffic violation. The man who was convicted of that murder, a young drifter named Randall Adams, is currently serving the 11th year of a life sentence. The chief witness against him, David Harris, has been sentenced to death for another murder. In the tense last moments of "The Thin Blue Line," Harris confesses to the murder of Wood.

Those moments are the result of a 30-month investigation by Errol Morris, one of America's strangest and most brilliant documentary filmmakers, who sometimes jokes that he is not a "producer-director" but a "detective-director." Morris originally went to Texas to do a documentary on Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist nicknamed "Doctor Death" because in countless capital murder cases over 15 years he has invariably predicted that the defendants deserved the death penalty because they were sociopaths who would certainly kill again. While researching Grigson, Morris interviewed Adams, a young man who had no criminal record until the Wood case.

The result is a movie that is documentary and drama, investigation and reverie, a meditation on the fact that Adams was plucked from the center of his life and locked up forever for a crime that no reasonable person could seriously believe he committed.

Summary by Roger Ebert

The most amazing thing about this documentary is that it led to Randall Adams' freedom. The most appalling thing about it is what a miscarriage of justice this was. I believe in the justice system, but stories like this shake that belief pretty hard. I would like to think things like this couldn't happen today, but I'm sure that's a fantasy. I know this movie was extremely subjective, but it was no more subjective than the entire system that railroaded an innocent man to satisfy a need for vengeance and personal gain. The justice system let us all down and allowed a punk to continue his crime spree until he killed another innocent person. Errol Morris uncovers the truth and presents the story in an interesting manner. What greater impact can a documentary have?

I've waited a long time to see this movie, and I have to say I was disappointed with the DVD. There should have been a bonus feature about the end of the story that was spawned by this movie. Hollywood loves to be self-congratulatory, and here was a case where it was actually warranted. I wanted to see the details about the retrial and how Adams was released. --Bill Alward, August 13, 2005