the chamber

Director: james foley

Actor: chris o'donnell,gene hackman,faye dunaway,robert prosky

Data Published: Fri Oct 11 1996

Genres: Crime,Drama,Thriller

Key Words: death sentence,attorney,racist,death row,ku klux klan

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115862/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chamber_(1996_film)

Description: The Chamber is a movie starring Chris O'Donnell, Gene Hackman, and Faye Dunaway. A young man fresh out of law school tries to win a reprieve for his racist grandfather who is on death row.

Plot: In April 1967, the office of Marvin Kramer, a Jewish civil rights lawyer in Indianola, Mississippi, is bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing Kramer’s five-year-old twin boys and leading to the amputation of Kramer’s legs and his later suicide. Klansman Sam Cayhall (Hackman) is tried for murder in the bombing, and is eventually convicted and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Twenty-nine years later, in 1996, Adam Hall (O’Donnell), a young attorney at the Chicago law firm of Kravitz and Bane, seeks assignment to the firm’s pro bono representation of Cayhall in the last weeks before his scheduled execution. Adam is Sam Cayhall’s grandson, his family having since moved away from the South and changed their name, haunted and shamed by Cayhall’s crime. Adam is motivated to take the case in a search for some understanding of the dark secrets of his family, which prompted the suicide of Adam’s father the year Sam was sentenced to death (and whose body Adam found as a child). Adam is sent by the firm to Jackson, Mississippi to take over the case and there reconnects with his aunt Lee Bowen (Dunaway), an alcoholic socialite who has managed to avoid public association with her infamous father, and who warns Adam about the dangers of dredging up the past. On death row, Sam remains a brusque, bitter, unrepentant racist who brags about his participation in the Klan bombing campaign of which the Kramer bombing was a part, though he denies that any of the bombings were intended to kill. He taunts Adam for his youth, legal inexperience, anti-racism, and the suicide of his father, but he agrees to allow Adam to represent him, though he forbids Adam from seeking clemency from Mississippi Governor McAllister, who had prosecuted Sam in his last retrial and had campaigned on that prosecution in his election to Governor. Nevertheless, as he begins to argue the case, Adam is approached by the Governor through an aide, Nora Stark (Rochon), who suggests that the Governor might consider clemency if Sam provides information about unidentified co-conspirators to the bombing. As Adam investigates, inconsistencies in the facts of the original case come to light, casting doubt on Sam’s intent to kill and suggesting that he lacked the ability to make the bomb himself, and both Stark and the original FBI agent who investigated the case indicate that the bombing may have been the result of a broader conspiracy involving the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and White Citizens' Councils, which were active at the time of the bombing in opposition to civil rights. Sam refuses to authorize Adam to seek access to the Sovereignty Commission’s files, sealed by order of the state legislature, fearing it would expose Sam’s former associates in the Klan, as well allowing the Governor to obtain useful information on political enemies, which he indicates is the Governor’s real reason for seeking Sam’s cooperation in unsealing the files. Adam continues to work through the courts, filing and arguing motions for a stay of execution, including on the grounds that Sam was legally insane and unable to tell right from wrong, due to his indoctrination into the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Lee, faced with the unearthed ghosts of the family history and having lapsed back into full-blown alcoholism, reveals to Adam that in the early 1950s, as children, she and Adam’s father had witnessed their father murder the family’s African-American neighbor, Joe Lincoln, during a fight that had started because Adam’s father, Eddie, had wrongly accused Lincoln’s son of stealing a toy soldier. Eddie had blamed himself for the murder, as well as Lee, for failing to stop Sam, the guilt of which was a factor in Eddie’s later suicide and Lee’s alcoholism. Lee also reveals how their father had been indoctrinated into the Klan as a child, showing Adam an historic photograph of Sam as a young boy attending a Klan lynching (which Adam uses in his arguments before the courts). Adam and Nora secretly gain access to the Sovereignty Commission’s sealed files, which prove a wider conspiracy to the bombing, and also indicate the participation of an accomplice. The former FBI agent resurfaces, and reveals to Adam that the FBI had identified the accomplice, Rollie Wedge, whom the FBI had never been able to prove responsible, but who has reunited with other Klan members to commemorate the bombing on the eve of the pending execution. Adam goes to the Klan reunion and is beaten by several Klan members, and threatened at gunpoint by Wedge. Adam’s persistence, the revelation of how much Sam’s hatred had destroyed his family, and his impending execution begin to affect Sam, and he softens, reconciling with Lee and expressing remorse for his actions and the effect they have had on his family. Sam forcefully rejects the Klan when Wedge visits him in prison to encourage him to remain silent, and it is revealed that Wedge was the one who had built the bomb and set it deliberately to kill. Ultimately, Adam’s motions for a stay are denied by the courts, including the United States Supreme Court. Despite Sam’s finally authorizing the release of relevant Sovereignty Commission files, the Governor refuses to grant clemency, betraying him and Adam, while nonetheless using the files as political leverage (as Sam had predicted), though Wedge, identified in the files, is finally arrested. Ultimately, Sam is executed in the gas chamber, though Adam remains as a confidant and advocate for his grandfather up until his execution, and he and Lee embrace at the end, in the hope that maybe the ghosts of the past are gone.