At nights Henry has been typing up Carl's handwritten notes, and will devote himself to finding a publisher. To Henry's horror, the jury is happy to comply, sentencing Carl to be hanged. He looks at a death sentence as liberation, arguing that the same society that created him should put him out of his misery. At his trial, he scorns the insanity defense suggested by Henry and insists on acting as his own lawyer. When he learns that Carl would like to write his life's story, he even risks his job to smuggle him paper and pencil.įinally provoked beyond endurance, Carl beats a guard to death. Out of simple humanity, and unaware of the nature of Carl's crimes, Henry extends a few kindnesses. As a rookie, Henry is appalled at the treatment meted out by more experienced guards to Carl (James Woods) and the other prisoners.
Even Woods, who's seldom less than electrifying, can't bring the misbegotten concoction to life.The film opens by introducing us to a most unlikely prison guard, Henry Lesser (Robert Sean Leonard), a young, educated Jewish man with progressive ideas - he quotes Eugene Debs. The result is part social studies lesson, part prison reform diatribe and part all-too-familiarĬharacter study, all done in the dreary style of public television docudramas. Metcalfe based his film on Panzram's own journals, which were shepherded to publication by a sympathetic guard named Henry Lesser (Robert Sean Leonard), who met Panzram during his final incarceration. Panzram, a drifter, lifelong petty criminal and eventually an unregenerate killer, bought himself some small measure of enduring notoriety with his eloquently hostile declaration that he wished the whole world had one neck and that he had his hands around it.
You can't fault it for sincerity and desensationalization of its lurid subject matter, but you find yourself asking why a filmmaker as stubbornly sober as Tim Metcalfe ever wanted to make a film about pioneering serial murderer Carl Panzram (James
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