And thus was born The Thin Blue Line, Morris’s masterful, groundbreaking documentary that ultimately played a key role in exonerating Adams, who was released from prison the year after the film debuted. However, its impact was not only felt in the justice system, but in the practice of documentary filmmaking, which Morris upended in myriad ways in his pursuit of conveying what he saw as the truth.

Unlike the school of vérité documentary, which eschewed formal interviews and relied on handheld camerawork and natural lighting to capture life “in the moment,” The Thin Blue Line is a highly stylized and, truth be told, expertly manipulative work that is clearly intended to sway the viewer toward a particular reading of the mystery at its core (bear in the mind that, when the film was made, Randall Adams was considered not just a murderer, but a cop killer). In fact, Morris’s “sins” against documentary practice were so extensive that the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refused to even consider it for its Best Documentary Oscar, arguing that it was closer to a fiction film, a telling sign of how extensively traditional documentarians associate particular aesthetic practices with truth and fiction.

The most egregious of Morris’s sins was his decision to rely heavily on re-enactments of the murder, which took place on the night of November 28, 1976, after police officer Robert W. Wood pulled over a car that Adams was supposedly driving. Throughout The Thin Blue Line Morris punctuates the film with dramatized recreations of the event that, Rashomon-style, differ according to which interviewee is telling the tale. The style in which Morris produces these re-enactments further complicates the film’s connection to traditional documentary, as he utilizes techniques of light and shadow associated with film noir and shoots the action against an almost barren black background that gives the reenactments a particularly theatrical feel, as if they are being shot on a soundstage rather than on an actual street.

Morris always either elides the actors’ faces or keeps them in shadow, a crucial decision given that one of the film’s central questions is who was driving the car and who shot Officer Woods. The reenactments tend to oscillate between wide shots of the cars pulled over on the side of the road and close-ups of lights, hands, and feet. Crucial bits of evidence like a tossed milkshake and a gun pulled from beneath the front seat are showed multiple times, sometimes in slow motion. Interestingly, though, in all of the variations of the film’s primal scene, never once does Morris give us a reenactment of what he believes actually happened. Instead, the reenactments are always what others say, which means that they are all effectively false.

Morris’s work as a private investigator is clearly evident in the film, not only in its fascination with justice gone awry, but in the incredible attention to detail and effort that Morris made to interview all of the major participants in the case (none of whom, by the way, are identified on screen with title cards; Morris forces us to piece together who is who over the course of the film, a strategy that ensures complete audience involvement). Not only does Morris interview Adams, who sits in front of a dark backdrop in a white prison suit, seemingly resigned to his fate as a wrongfully convicted man while still evincing an air of measured indignity, but he also tracked down both of Morris’s defense attorneys, the judge who oversaw the case, police officers in both Dallas and Vidor, Texas, who were involved in the investigation, and a number of key witnesses, including two whose lies are so palpable that it strains credulity that they were ever taken seriously in a court of law (had they been written into a fictional screenplay, they would have been immediately cut for being patently unbelievable). We never hear Morris’s questions, but it is obvious that he knows exactly what to ask. The interviewees provide copious strands of information that, once expertly interwoven via Morris’s first-rate editing and overlaid with Philip Glass’s haunting, evocative score, make clear that this particular case is one of not justice, but injustice. The most interesting interviewee is certainly David Harris, a soft-spoken young drifter who the film clearly fingers, without saying a word, as the actual killer, which turns his boyish charm and aw-shucks geniality into the menacing embodiment of a sociopathic mind.

In some ways, it is difficult to recognize now just how groundbreaking The Thin Blue Line was in the late 1980s, especially because so many of its techniques are now the standard approach of popular television series like Forensic Files and Cold Case Files. Morris was working in a dangerous middle ground between the traditional documentary and the fictional feature film, and his merging of various techniques paid off in a film of singular uniqueness in both its aesthetic approach and its real-world impact. There are many great documentaries, but how many of them have literally saved a man’s life? As Morris said in a recent interview, “I will never be more sure of anything than I am of Randall Adams’s innocence and David Harris’s guilt.” And he was right.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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