Here we are, once again with our eyes before a carefully-crafted, compelling piece of art. Cinema, as we know, is the single most powerful tool for conveying a message. It doesn’t matter if the content is faithful to the truth, what matters is the narrative. The award-winning case presented by this film is clearly anti-capital punishment. Does it matter that it’s false? (Let’s use the du jour term, “Revisionist”).
Depends on one’s viewpoint.
History has proven that we too often succumb to repeated logical fallacies when they align with our own beliefs. Lies repeated become truths. Fallacies of authority, falsehoods of associated “success”. We’ve witnessed far too much of it lately, and perhaps that’s why this entry from 33 years ago feels eerily familiar.
Prof. Alex Taylor calls Hollywood out for one of its most egregious lies on capital punishment.
But it won an Oscar, so who cares?
Published in the Gainesville Times, Tuesday, September 13, 1988.
A full transcript and additional commentary follow the column.
TRANSCRIPT
Hollywood hugs criminals, ignores innocent victims
This fall, several major television networks will re-enact old crime stories and ask you to solve the event by identifying the perpetrator(s). Some of the information depicted will be very factual, while most will be totally false and misleading.
Why? Because television, and primarily Hollywood, has a history of showing crime and criminals in a distorted way, depending on the beliefs of script writers and directors.
Over the years, you have watched movies about the innocence of, or misguided lives of notorious criminals such as Bonnie Parker, Baby Face Nelson, Billie the Kid, Lizzie Borden and others. Some were cast as innocent when they were guilty, while others were portrayed as blood-thirsty killers when in all probability they were innocent, such as Lizzie Borden.
Perhaps the phoniest movie ever made about a criminal was the story of murderess Barbara Graham.
Born in California in 1923, Barbara was the product of a broken home and spent most of her teen-age mother. While still in her early 20s, Barbara drifted into criminal gangs in the San Francisco Bay area and by 1947, had become the star call girl for Sally Stanford, Stanford, the city’s most infamous madam, introduced Barbara to Jack Santos, the leader of a murderous robbery ring. Besides Santos, the gang consisted of Emmett Perkins, a savage man who enjoyed the pain of others, Baxter Shorter and John True, a deep-sea diver.
The gang spent four years robbing and beating people in the Bay area, but it was not until 1951 that the killings began. In December 1951, they kidnapped and tortured to death Andrew Colner and his wife, believing the Colners had a large quantity of gold. Later that same month, the gang attacked and murdered Edmund Hansen, a gold miner, in an attempt to obtain his gold mine.
In October 1952, Barbara and her friends brutally murdered a grocer named Guard Young, his two little daughters and the small child of a neighbor. But they were not through. In March, 1953, they murdered Mrs. Mabel Monahan, a 63-year-old disabled widow who lived in Burbank, Calif. It was this killing that showed how vicious Barbara could be in her murderous ritual during a robbery.
She got the gang into Mrs. Monahan’s house by asking to use the telephone. Their plan was simple: crowd into the house, gag and blindfold Mrs. Monahan, find the large stash of money, then leave. The plan fell apart when Barbara seemed to go insane and began beating the victim over the head with a gun butt. In agony and moaning, the elderly woman fell to her knees while Barbara continued to pound her about the head. When one of the men yelled, “Give her more!” Barbara did, cracking her skull and causing instant death.
John True was caught and gave a full confession on this particularly brutal crime. On trial for murder, Barbara posed for photographers with her 19-month-old son . . . still professing her innocence.
On June 3, 1955, Barbara Graham, Santos and Perkins went to their deaths in the gas chamber at San Quentin. In 1958, actress Susan Hayward won an Academy Award for her moving film portrayal of a “used and beaten” Barbara Graham. The name of this phony film was, “I Want To Live” . . .
But so did her innocent victims.
-Alex Taylor’s column on history and criminology appears in The Times on Tuesdays.
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(November 2025 Update)
Speaking of distorted:
Lying in bed, catching up on the day’s current events while my wife watched one of her vast selection of crime action dramas, CBS’ FBI series, I was suddenly struck by yet another stark example of Hollywood being Hollywood. Dad’s entry from 1988 reminded me, yet again, not much has changed in the political landscape.
It was FBI’s Season 7, Episode 21 (2025.5.13): “Devoted”. The antagonists were maligned libertarian mobs, costumed to mimic ANTIFA, out to do violence against the angelic and righteous “Deep State puppets” (FBI and government agencies in general — a categorization fallacy).
These tropes are repeated throughout the episode, ad nauseam.
Rote reinforcement … quite obvious. The sad part is, a significant portion of their viewers either agree with these maligned caricatures or are wholly apathetic.
“It’s just a show.”
Indeed, and the ’70s’ term “dummy box” also resurfaces. Clickbait is nothing new. Not really.
Speaking of distorted:
Lying in bed, catching up on the day’s current events while my wife watched one of her vast selection of crime action dramas, CBS’ FBI series, I was suddenly struck by yet another stark example of Hollywood being Hollywood. Dad’s entry from 1988 reminded me, yet again, not much has changed in the political landscape.
It was FBI’s Season 7, Episode 21 (2025.5.13): “Devoted”. The antagonists were maligned libertarian mobs, costumed to mimic ANTIFA, out to do violence against the angelic and righteous “Deep State puppets” (FBI and government agencies in general — a categorization fallacy).
These tropes are repeated throughout the episode, ad nauseam.
Rote reinforcement … quite obvious. The sad part is, a significant portion of their viewers either agree with these maligned caricatures or are wholly apathetic.
“It’s just a show.”
Indeed, and the ’70s’ term “dummy box” also resurfaces. Clickbait is nothing new. Not really.
