By Richard Winters
My Rating: 5 out of 10
4-Word Review: Paid to execute criminals.
Jonas (Stacy Keach) is a man who makes a living executing prisoners with his electric chair in the South near the turn of the century. He charges $100 per execution as he travels from prison to prison. On his latest stop he’s set to execute siblings Willy (Stefan Gierasch) and Gundred (Marianna Hill). While Wily’s goes smoothly he ends up falling for Gundred and coming up with a scheme where he’ll fake her execution, giving her just enough voltage to knock her out and make her seem dead, but then revive her later on with the help of Doc Prittle (Graham Jarvis) the prisoner doctor. However, this plan gets stymied when Doc demands payment upfront in order to be a part of the scheme forcing Jonas to come up with different ways to raise the funds including hiring the local prostitutes to ‘service’ the prisoners inside their cells for five minutes each at a set rate.
The story was the product of writing student Garrie Bateson who wrote the script for one of his screenwriting classes he was taking at USC and his teacher liked it so much he shopped it around to the studios before MGM decided to finance it. The idea is original and the first two acts work pretty well and at times has some delicious black humor, but by the third act it begins to falter and never fully recovers.
Keach’s performance was one of the things I did like. He’s always an excellent actor and here he helps humanize a character and even makes him engaging and likable particularly with the way he ‘counsels’ the prisoners as they’re being strapped down by telling them stories about the ‘Fields of Ambrosia’ and convincing them they’re not necessarily going to die, but instead being swept up into a another world that will be full of bliss and beauty. The on-location shooting, shot at the closed Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama during the dead of winter, helps to accentuate the period flavor while also encompassing it with the brown, sparse landscape which works to bring out the dead theme of the story.
There’s good support from Hill, who speaks with a German accent, but she’s not in it enough. For Keach to risk so much, his job and reputation, just to save her, a woman he hadn’t known just a few days before, simply because he suddenly got smitten with her, was rushed and unconvincing. Would’ve worked better had there been some underground element willing to pay him off if he faked her execution, which I feel would’ve been more believable.
Spoiler Alert!
I actually thought the scheme to fake her death was a cool idea and I was intrigued to see if he could pull it off, but unfortunately the plot becomes too preoccupied with the side story of Keach trying to make enough money to pay off the Doc to keep quiet about it. When one con doesn’t work, he tries another until you start to forget about the electric chair, which was in the shop getting repaired, altogether. The ‘friendly executioner’ was what made the movie unique, and everything needed to remain focused on that, not silly scenarios on how to bring in quick money.
The finale, which has Keach strapped to his own electric chair, and everything malfunctioning, which causes the entire prison building to blow up, has a nice surreal quality to it, but the message is unclear. This was intended to be a ‘satire’ on the death penalty, but it never makes much of a point if any. Also, having Keach go on a long rant about the ‘Fields of Ambrosia’ slows everything down. The ending needs quick edits in order to heighten the tension not having the camera glued to a talking head that drones on and on, which is why I feel the film failed at the box office as it didn’t maintain its momentum and lost sight of its offbeat premise.
My Rating: 5 out of 10
Released: October 1, 1970
Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Jack Smight
Studio: MGM
Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive Collection), Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 