Guilty As Charged

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1991

Guilty As Charged
Sam Irvin
USA, 1991 95 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: I.R.S. Media Inc.
Executive Producer: Miles A. Copeland, III, Paul Colichman
Producer: Randolph Gale, Adam Moos
Screenplay: Charles Gale
Cinematography: Richard Michalak
Editor: Kevin Tent
Art Director: Byrnadette DiSanto
Music: Steve Bartek
Principal Cast: Rod Steiger, Lauren Hutton, Heather Graham, Lyman Ward, Isaac Hayes, Zelda Rubinstein, Irwin Keyes

Meet Ben Kallin, America’s newest law enforcement official. Ben believes that murderers should die for their crimes. This, in itself, is not so unusual, except for the fact that Ben, an erstwhile sausage industrialist, is a man of action. Escaped convicts, parolees, those acquitted of crimes through technicalities, all are subject to Ben’s angel-winged electric chair, as administered by his associates: Aloysius the priest and Deek the hunchback. But one day, Ben rescues a young woman named Kimberly from a rapist. She promptly introduces Ben to her boss, pro-capital punishment congressional candidate Mark Stanford. Ben invites Stanford to witness the execution of Hamilton, the man who murdered Stanford’s former secretary. Hamilton insists all the while that he was framed, and Liz, Stanford’s wife, has a few stories of her own. So goes the swirling plot of Guilty As Charged.

This paean to the seedier, vengeful side of American justice is an astonishing treat. Shot mostly at night and in dark earth tones, Guilty As Charged manages to flaunt a palpable gothic menace while retaining a campy, precocious sense of style. Eccentric casting helps the madness along: Rod Steiger plays Kallin as a modern-day King Lear, complete with rabid intonements and soul-searching angst. With his white hair, white beard, and semi-stoop, Steiger comes across as a peculiar sort of avenging angel. Also appearing are Lauren Hutton (suitably icy as Stanford's wife) and the inimitable Isaac Hayes (who also does the film’s closing song, a bust-it-out version of “Amazing Grace”). No film in recent memory has managed to quite capture the lawless venom and vigilante sneer of the American Dream quite as vividly, or as stylishly, as Guilty As Charged. —Noah Cowan