What would you say if I told you I deserved to die?
I've had executioners on the brain all week, so it made perfect sense to wrap up this impromptu series with 1982's The Executioner's Song. Made for TV by producer/director Lawrence Schiller and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning true-crime novel by Norman Mailer, who also penned its screenplay, the film was originally aired as a two-part miniseries, but the version released on DVD is Schiller's director's cut, which runs 135 minutes and includes some language and nudity that wouldn't have passed muster originally. One thing that did was Tommy Lee Jones's Emmy-winning performance as Gary Gilmore, the first man to be put to death in United States in nearly a decade after capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. What makes Gilmore's case even more compelling, though, is that he insisted on being put to death and chose the same method -- being shot -- that he inflicted on the two men he murdered.
In the interest of presenting the fullest picture of their subject possible, Schiller and Miller spend the first hour of the director's cut (longer in the broadcast version, I would wager) on the months following Gilmore's release from prison into the custody of his cousin, Brenda Nicol (Christine Lahti), who lives in Utah. At first he goes to work for his Uncle Vern (Eli Wallach), a shoemaker who's happy to teach him the trade, but Gilmore eventually strikes out on his own and, desperate for female companionship after 12 years inside, falls in love with his "guardian angel," 19-year-old single mother of two Nicole Baker (Rosanna Arquette), who's unable to do much to tamp down his temper and even purposefully inflames it from time to time. The point of no return comes, though, when he becomes physically abusive and she leaves him high and dry, leading Gilmore to lose his bottle and the fateful moment when, in the course of a gas-station robbery, he casually adds "murderer" to the list of charges on his rap sheet. After his second robbery/homicide the following night, he's caught within hours, but the wheels of justice grind slowly in spite of his acceptance of the death sentence he eventually receives, so when the time comes for him to get strapped in and executed he's well past the point of struggling. Like many, he just wants the whole thing to be over and done with.
