ERROL MORRIS 3 pioneer documentaries inc THIN BLUE LINE

Three titles from Errol Morris, one of the modern masters of documentary cinema. Features The Thin Blue Line (1988), which famously helped free an innocent man, Vernon Florida (1981) and Gates of Heaven (1980). Documentaries have been such big box-office in recent years that it's startling to recall that they used to be so commercially risky that they generally went straight to television. The mere fact that Errol Morris's films made it onto the big screen speaks volumes in itself. He first made a splash with Gates of Heaven (1978), a delightfully eccentric film about the contrasting fortunes of Californian pet-cemetery owners that turned into a wide-ranging philosophical reflection on everything from the grieving process to religion to the entrepreneurship underlining the American dream. As with Morris's 1980 follow-up Vernon, Florida (a similarly wayward study of the title town's bizarre inhabitants), it's hard to tell whether it's supposed to be funny: his deadpan interviewees are so blithely ensconced in their own private universes that listening to their monologues seems like eavesdropping. Despite critical ecstasy (Roger Ebert put Gates of Heaven on his all-time top ten), the films didn't earn much, and Morris switched careers in the early 1980s to become a private investigator, an experience that fed into the extraordinary The Thin Blue Line (1988). While researching another project, Morris became fascinated by the case of Randall Dale Adams, a man on death row for the murder of a cop. Convinced of his innocence, Morris amassed a mountain of evidence and constructed an argument that even the notoriously trigger-happy Texas authorities found unanswerable: after the film's release, the case was reopened and Adams exonerated. But with its cool, controlled visual style, pulsing Philip Glass score and overlaying of multiple viewpoints (the real killer is among the interviewees), it's far more Rashomon than Crimewatch The Thin Blue Line One of the most remarkable of all American documentaries, a substantial theatrical hit long before non-fiction became a regular box-office draw, and the source of major controversy not just for its real-life (and death) subject matter but also its perceived snub by the Oscars after it failed to secure even a nomination for Best Documentary, Errol Morris's film is a complete one-off. It's a masterly dissection of the circumstances of the killing of a cop and a forensic demonstration of the probable innocence of Randall Dale Adams, the Death Row inhabitant initially convicted of the crime. While making the film, former private investigator Morris gathered such a mountain of clinching evidence that even the notoriously trigger-happy Texas authorities were persuaded to reopen the case and ultimately exonerate him. But this is no sensationalised True Crime exposé – what makes the film so riveting is its unnervingly cool, controlled visual style, pulsing Philip Glass score and Rashomon-like presentation of multiple viewpoints, leading to a genuinely breath-catching moment when the real killer effectively confesses to the crime