The Executioner's Song (1982)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

A Disappointing Continuation

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

I am currently reading the "true life" novel on which this movie is based. The movie is a lot like the book - very simple and candid with scenes that are mostly devoid of narrative punctuation.The movie is based on a real life character called Gary Gilmore who decided to not defend himself in a murder trial. In fact, he asked for his own execution. Gilmore spent most of his life in jail and the film is mostly about how he tries to settle back into normal life in Utah when he is on parole. The film tells us a lot about the way of life within the predominantly Mormon community in Utah.The film is not as detailed as the book (which runs into more than a 1000 pages) and in fact leaves out a lot of good parts.The performances were satisfactory. Tommy Lee Jones was very good - he plays Gilmore like the sociopath that he was. Unfortunately the film has next to nothing about Gilmore's artistic inclinations - Gilmore was good at drawings and was well read. Rosanna Arquette plays the women half his age with whom he has an intense love affair (they even enter into a suicide pact when Gary is in jail). Eli Wallach and Christine Lahiti are very good as Gary's family. But none of the performances blew me away.There were a few scenes which jarred due to use of background music and did not fit in with the overall tone of the movie (like the scene where Gary has a fight with his cousin Brenda). I liked the country song played during the titles.There are many beautiful long shots of the Utah sunsets and used car lots.The final scenes where Gilmore is executed are quite frightening.(6/10)

A DVD that is represented as a director's cut should be exactly that. This DVD is not a director's cut. I remember watching this movie when it first aired on TV. There was one scene in particularly where despite the dim lighting, you could tell that Rosanna was partially nude. In this DVD, it is obvious that they have censored this scene by covering her up with dark blotches. It is the strangest sort of censoring that I've ever seen. They tried to make it look like she is wearing some sort of leotard, but it is obviously faked because it jumps around all over the place from one frame to the next, and anyone who saw this when it originally aired on TV will probably recall that Rosanna was not wearing any sort of leotard in this scene.I bought the "Director's Cut" because that was what I wanted. This amounts to false advertising. It is unethical, and it should not even be legal to do this. I hate when I buy a DVD and find this sort of thing. I encourage everyone to boycott this DVD.

Norman Mailer's book about Gary Gilmore was compelling in the first half, but the second half was a limp, uphill struggle. There's no such problem in the TV adaptation, which is tighter and absorbing all the way through, with both Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette giving two of the best performances of their careers... you now know why it's easy for us to forgive him for "Batman Forever" and her for "Off The Wall" (which she made the following year, and oh dear me that was BAD).This is available in both miniseries form and a shortened cable/theatrical version (to quote Buffy Summers, "We're talking violence, strong language, adult themes..."), but I actually prefer the TV version because while you get more nudity - female AND male - and more graphic scenes in the cable cut (not to mention lines like Rosanna's "Yeah, you and seven other motherf***ers"), it's at the expense of a little story coherence; you lose some seaminess in the miniseries version, but the tale is ultimately stronger, clearer and not so rushed. But either version is a must.

I thought this was a very good dramatization of Mailer's huge book. Tommy Lee Jones does an excellent job of portraying psychopathic killer Gary Gilmore and Rosanna Arquette is terrific as his teenage girlfriend, Nicole. While it was a made for TV movie, some R-rated footage was added in when the movie had a European release. If you can get that version on tape, do so. Rosanna is dynamite in the more adult scenes.Christine Lahti (who later won a short-film Oscar as a filmmaker) and Eli Wallach provide solid support. Jones shows the same brooding intensity that years later translated into an Oscar for him in "The Fugitive." Look for Ron Howard's father, Rance Howard, in a small part as the police detective who first interrogates Gilmore after his arrest.It says something about the culture when a loser like Gilmore can be transformed into a sort of folk legend which is what the book and movie ultimately do. He had an enormous impact in 1977 by demanding that Utah go forward with his execution, the first execution in the US since the 1960s and the first since 1972 when the Supreme Court ruled that all death sentences prior to that date were unconstitutional. After Gilmore faced the firing squad hundreds of executions have been carried out. I would wager though that most Americans couldn't name more than two or three of those who have been executed but they will remember the small-time loser Gary Gilmore.