DEATH PENALTY
WHEN LIFE GENERATES DEATH (LEGALLY)

FILMOGRAPHY

Here is a short filmography of movies about death penalty, in chronological order.
If you know others of them, please write us with your suggestions.

JUSTICE IS DONE - A. Cayatte, France 1950
An emblematical legal case.

WE ARE ALL MURDERERS - A. Cayatte, France 1952
Murderer René Le Guan, who used to kill during World War Two, is sentenced to be guillotined.

A MAN ESCAPED - R. Bresson, France 1956
France, 1943. A partisan escapes from a Nazi jail: an occasion to think about man's power of reaction and irrepressible life instinct.

SACCO AND VANZETTI - G. Montaldo, Italy 1971
Story of two Italian anarchists emigrated to the USA and unfairly sentenced to death between the two World Wars.

SPECIAL SECTION - C. Costa-Gavras, France 1975
Paris, 1941: a court of justice prepares a farce-trial to sentence some French men to death, but the unfair mechanism jams.

HOUSTON TEXAS - F. Reichenbach, France 1979
The odyssey of a young man accused to be murder of a policeman. A sort of pamphlet against death penalty.

THE STAR CHAMBER - P. Hyans, USA 1983
A private court comminates capital punishments where justice can't act. But what if the condemned man is innocent?

DANIEL - S. Lumet, USA 1983
Inspired by the story of the Rosenberg's, sentenced to death because of groundless charges, in the USA in the fifties.

DANCE WITH A STRANGER - M. Newell, United Kingdom 1985
Ruth Ellis's story, the last woman who was sentenced to death in the United Kingdom.

THE THIN BLUE LINE - E. Morris, USA 1988
Inquiry-style movie; it reconstructs the witnesses that lead to sentence a man to death in the USA.

THOU SHALT NOT KILL - K. Kieslowski, Poland 1988/89
An effective explanation of the fifth commandment.

OPEN DOORS - G. Amelio, Italy 1990
The trial against a multiple homicide in Palermo becomes for Mr Justice Di Francesco the chance to challange the Rocco code. Based on the Leonardo Sciascia's book of the same title.

GOODBYE CHILDREN - L. Malle, France 1987
Quentin's story, a Jew boy who attends a German school during Nazis' regime.

DEAD MAN WALKING - T. Robbins, USA 1995
The life of a man after he has been sentenced to death until his execution.