THE HURRICANE
The story of "Hurricane" Carter is one of those classic sagas
in the annals of American race relations. This up-and-coming fighter, on
his way to becoming one of the greats of the sport, was cut down in his
prime by a murder conviction that was eventually shown to be racially motivated
and full of discrepancies and altered evidence. A pair of black men were
seen fleeing the scene of a fatal shooting in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey.
Shortly thereafter, Carter (Washington) and another man, John Artis (Garland
Whitt), were picked up and charged with the murders. Soon they were serving
three life sentences apiece in Trenton State Prison, and despite numerous
appeals and a second jury trial in 1976, they were unable to turn the verdict
around. After that, Carter's marriage to his wife Mae Thelma (Debbi Morgan)
broke up, and he found himself truly alone.
Just when he was about to give up hope and resign himself to spending
the rest of his days behind bars, he received a letter from a young man
named Lesra Martin (Shannon), who had read Carter's novel and become obsessed
with the fighter's story. Lesra was a black American teenager living in
Canada with a group of activists who had taken him under their collective
wing and were teaching him to read and preparing him for college. Soon Lesra's
interest in the Carter case had spread to his adult friends Sam (Liev Schreiber),
Lisa (Deborah Unger), and Terry (John Hannah), and the group decided to
move to New Jersey to research the case and investigate another possible
re-trial. Collaborating with Carter's defense attorneys, Myron Bedlock (David
Paymer) and Leon Friedman (Harris Yulin), they eventually took the case
to the U.S. Supreme Court, where its previous decision was overturned by
Judge H. Lee Sorokin (Rod Steiger) and Carter was released.
The most noticeable flaw in The Hurricane's script that holds it back from being a total success is the caricaturish portrayal of Carter's nemesis, Detective Vincent Della Pesca (Dan Hedaya). Della Pesca's open hostility toward Carter and his overt manipulation of evidence and witnesses takes away from the credibility of the story. In the final credits, there is a statement that "while this film is based on a true story, some characters have been composited or invented, and some events fictionalized." I daresay Hedaya's character is an all too clear indication of this alteration of the facts. Otherwise, The Hurricane is a thoughtful, moving story, and a triumph for Jewison, Washington, and Carter himself. ****