The Thin Blue Line
**I also shared my thoughts on “The Thin Blue Line” for Filmotomy’s blog about the 50 Best Films of 1988.
The first film of Errol Morris’s I had ever seen was, I believe, “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” but not long after that was his 1988 true crime masterpiece, “The Thin Blue Line.” What led me there was reading about the film in Leonard Maltin’s movie guide, and it was the fact that it actually had real-world implications for its subject that fascinated me most. I was still relatively new to documentaries, but with these two, Morris showed himself to be a wholly unique voice in the medium of film, something that has only been further solidified through his films since.
Part of the intrigue for me in returning to “The Thin Blue Line” recently was a recent rejuvenated interest in Morris’s film with not just the release of his Netflix docudrama, “Wormwood,” but a couple of “Movie a Week” entries for his first two films, “Gates of Heaven” and “Vernon, Florida,” along with the fact that “Thin Blue Line” turns 30 this year. Watching so many of his films (including his first three) in quick succession has made for fuller portrait of this singular filmmaker, and his gifts as an interviewer and filmmaker, than I think I’ve ever had before. Thinking more specifically of “Wormwood” and “The Thin Blue Line,” they make for complimentary studies in true crime that push the envelope of what documentary cinema is by using re-enactments to build their cases as the main players are allowed to speak. In “The Thin Blue Line” especially, the effect is stunning as we see the way justice becomes miscarried, set to a haunting Philip Glass score.
The story of “The Thin Blue Line” begins in November 1976, when Randall Adams and his brother drive from Ohio to California. Around Thanksgiving, they stop in Dallas County, Texas, and Adams is offered work, which he accepts. One night, Adams meets 16-year-old David Harris from nearby Vidor, and they spend a night drinking, watching “The Carol Burnett Show” and drive-in movies. Later in the evening, they are pulled over by two police officers, and before the one officer (Robert Wood) can begin to talk, the driver of the car shoots Wood four times, and they drive off, with Wood’s partner taking aim as they get away. A month later, the investigation leads the police to Harris, who gives them Adams’s name. Less than a year later, Adams is convicted, and sentenced to death, for the murder of Wood, but the evidence has never quite added up in the case, and when Morris began talking to Adams, his sentence was reduced to life in prison, with no chance at a retrial.
Morris, who was a private investigator at the time of starting the film, first talked to Adams because he was originally going to do a documentary of Dr. James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist who gained the nickname “Doctor Death” because, in capital murder cases for 15 years, he invariably pushes for the death penalty by giving testimony that the defendant is a psychopath who will kill again in the future. Grigson did the same in Adams’s case, but when Morris went to interview Adams, he didn’t see that in him, which led him to study the case further. The result is probably the most probing look at true crime since In Cold Blood, and it’s one that had such an impact that, after it was released, it was compelling enough in its evidence against Harris that Adams was set free, although that might have something to do with the fact that, in his last interview with Harris (which was only captured on tape recorder), Harris- who was already on death row for a murder in 1985- confessed to Morris of his This ws guilt in the shooting of officer Wood. I would say that this was an unbelievable occurrence, but the truth is, once Morris begins layering in interview after interview, re-enactment after re-enactment, the only logical conclusion is that Harris was the one that pulled the trigger, and Adams was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The idea of using re-enactments in a documentary was audacious at the time, and it cost Morris an Oscar nomination (although the branch was not always intelligent about the “best” being eligible for a while- “Hoop Dreams” was snubbed years later), but it was a choice that makes “The Thin Blue Line” riveting to watch as Adams, Harris and others associated with the case tell their stories, and Morris puts the pieces together for us to make our conclusions. Few filmmakers pull us into unusual stories better than Morris does, and the fact that his are all surrounding real-life individuals make them unmissable to film fans.
