The People vs. Paul Crump
First screened in August 2012 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: William Friedkin. Documentary about a death row inmate in Illinois, whose capital sentence rests on debatable evidence. VOR:⑤
Ahead of its time or at least on its leading edge in so many respects: docudrama form, prison critique, mobilizing of TV, sheer craft.
I first saw this restless and furious anti-death penalty docudrama from 1962 as what I'd thought of as gratuitously deep background for an essay a friend had commissioned from me about William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band. The film so completely blew me away that I got way more interested than I'd expected to be in Friedkin's gristly artistry as a director, in his sometimes subtle but never delicate slides between objective and subjective perspectives, and in his career-long fascination with masculinity as an ongoing China Syndrome of nuclear meltdown. That's just as prevalent a dynamic in The Boys in the Band as in something like Sorcerer or The Hunted or To Live and Die in L.A., though it seems to me that Boys is almost always treated as a case apart because... well, you know why. (My finished essay is here.)
I credit Paul Crump for getting me started on those ideas, but I credit it with much else besides. It's a work of astonishing energy, inextricable from its roiling anger about capital punishment, especially but not only when the targeted man is innocent, as Paul Crump seems to be in this version of events, though the truth got murkier in later years. Friedkin stages the recreations of Paul's alleged crime and of his days-long torture by CPD officers with overwhelming power and immediacy. Moreover, he uses that quality as a tangible contrast to the slow, deadly stasis of incarceration and of existential abandonment. You really feel the stale, immobile, eternal anti-eventness of imprisonment in Paul Crump.
Friedkin later grew embarrassed of his ostentatious camera in this film, but especially for a documentary production for TV, he's amazingly inventive about where to situate his lens—and how to pair those arresting frames with a soundtrack that veers between amplifying the reality we're observing and abstracting it through nondiegetic pings, wracking sobs, and flagrant audiovisual dissonance. Paul's testimony on his own behalf has both an Everyman quality and an enviable philosophical scope, particularly as his date of death nears (once again, that is, after many, many, many postponements already, most of them announced only a day or two out from a scheduled execution).
As potent as it is as a characterization of Paul and as a protest of his fate, and of the thousands of other fates for which it stands, The People vs Paul Crump is also a pretty majestic primer in how early-60s nonfiction cinema was already making extensive, artistic use of elaborate grammar, New Wave rhythms, and dramatic reconstruction, all in tandem with more vérité elements—though in truth the movie is almost never as vérité as its footage appears. Paul's is an unforgettable story, if all too common to so many other dead men walking in the prison system. Even over a fêted half-century career with several memorable highs (and just as many egregious lows), Friedkin rarely felt as aerobic and committed in his filmmaking as he does in Paul Crump. He uses the brute liveliness of cinema to help make a case for the poignant, hopefully inextinguishable liveliness of his eloquent, quietly commanding subject, no matter how tangled in truth and prevarication, no matter how ground down and binned away. Grade:A–
