It's the great game of hot potato in where a man's life is constantly put on the line.
A man by the name of Caryl W. Chessman was committed of 18 individual crimes, some of which were rape, kidnap and bodily abuse. These 18 cases put together put the man in Maximum Security Prison what's the potential of a death sentence.
But because of the (possably) fraudulent nature the case it now hung in limbo.
For over 10 years a man who may or may not have been guilty of those crimes was constantly put on the edge to be murdered via lethal injection.
And if a lethal injection is even ethnically right for the crimes he was supposedly committed.
A fair bit of the film is just this man and his on-again-off-again lawyer going up against the massive bureaucracy and indifference of the court system, stacked with a bunch of people who would rather see him dead regardless of his actions.
It's an interesting enough story to watch even if you can predict the ending from the onset, especially if you already know about the real life events of the man
Really the main reason I watched it was just to see Alan Alda in a more serious role.
He does them from time to time and he's usually pretty good. And he's solid enough hear, nothing that he can really sink his teeth into but still a decent performance. I think it's Talia Shire that takes away the movie in the long run. She plays his (kind of) defence attorney and I think she's the one that really gets to shine. It's just nice to see these two people in the same film. Such varied careers.
It's a fairly decent courtroom drama.
It wants to pretend like it's taking place in the late forties and fifties but it feels like a 70s film through and through especially within the first 20 minutes. Maybe that can't be helped given the lower budget and basic camera work of the movie.
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