George Wright in his arrest photo taken in 1963. Photograph: AP
If the story of George Wright, the convicted murderer captured this week in Portugal after 40 years on the run, has not yet been optioned by an enterprising producer, then the film industry has really missed a trick. From a cinematic storytelling perspective, this tale has everything. Wright, who had participated in a spree of armed robberies, was imprisoned for the murder of the service station owner Walter Patterson in 1962, only to escape from the Bayside state prison farm in Leesburg, New Jersey, in 1970. Already you've got the heist movie and the prison break-out movie covered. That's a big market: expressed in mathematical terms the potential audience would be (fans of Bonnie and Clyde) + (fans of The Shawshank Redemption). And only a fool would rule out defenders of Buster.
But there's more. According to the FBI, Wright joined an underground militant group, the Black Liberation Army, and lived in a "communal family" with some of its Detroit members. A year later, dressed as a priest and travelling under the alias "the Rev L Burgess", he hijacked a Delta airlines flight to Miami, securing a $1m ransom for release of the hostages before flying on to Algeria, where Wright and his associates were taken in by the US writer and Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver. The other fugitives were arrested in France in 1976, but Wright himself was on the lam, and high on the FBI's to-do list, until this week.
Now tell me that isn't a film, or even an HBO mini-series. Are you thinking, as I am, of Carlos, A Prophet, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Papillon, Panther, Patty Hearst, Dog Day Afternoon, Roberto Succo, Running on Empty and Prison Break, to name only the most obvious? If Wright's story ever makes it onto the DVD shelves, an entire separate website will be required for the "If you liked this, try these ?" section, which usually demands a few lines at the foot of the page.
The attraction of the crime movie is not hard to fathom, with its promise of the vicarious experience of wrongdoing, atoned for eventually in some manner of moral workout. Put those criminals on the run and you've got the instant forward momentum that narrative cinema requires. The moral contours of such a movie are determined very much by where the narrative emphasis lies, and on whom the close-ups fall.
Bonnie and Clyde is interesting for allowing the limelight to concentrate almost exclusively on Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and their gang, with occasional exposure for the civilians and police officers who cross their path. By the time the police have the gang fully in its sights, we may be experiencing something akin to Stockholm syndrome, having been holed up with the crooks for so long that our moral compass is in a spin. The final sequence, in which our heroes-cum-captors are comprehensively perforated, leaves us alone with the consequences of our misguided empathy, and the knowledge that we threw in our lot with the wrong crowd.
Another way in which filmmakers can reshape a gangsters-on-the-run narrative like Wright's is through cross-cutting: moving back and forth between the pursuers and the pursued. This was popular in the early 1990s, when movies like A Perfect World and Thelma and Louise used the device to establish an equivalence and parity between the supposed criminals and the avuncular police on their tail; the effect was to make these films essentially buddy movies or love stories at one remove, not so very different in spirit from Sleepless in Seattle.
But no one is likely to expect such an approach from a movie about George Wright, least of all the relatives of Walter Patterson. Fortunately there already exists a one-movie masterclass in balancing the competing elements of such a tale: storytelling that is suspenseful but also conscientious, and non-judgmental characterisation, which honours its factual basis. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith concerns an oppressed Aboriginal farm worker, Jimmie (Tommy Lewis), in early-20th century Australia, who snaps after one humiliation too many and commits a brutal massacre. The second half of the movie follows the pursuit of Jimmie by those he has wronged, but what's radical about the film is how it invites our empathy and investment democratically, so that we appreciate at once the depth of rage in Jimmie, and the thirst for retribution in his pursuers.
Wright's story is full of complex shadings ? France refused to extradite his accomplices to the US in 1976, and passed down far more lenient sentences than they would have received back in America. The defence argued that the hijacking had been motivated by "racial oppression" in the US, and the jury found "extenuating circumstances" in what they did. Whether or not this is the case, any filmmakers looking to adapt Wright's story would need to take such complexities into consideration. They could have no better model than The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/28/george-wright-cinema-great-escapes
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