Dead Man Walking (Havoc, Working Title Films, Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Gramercy Pictures, Paramount, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 26) my husband Charles and I watched a truly great film on Turner Classic Movies: Dead Man Walking, a socially conscious film based on the real-life memoir of Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), a nun in Louisiana who reached out to death-penalty inmates at the notorious Angola state prison in general and one inmate in particular, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). Six years before the main action, Poncelet and an older accomplice posed as police officers on a stretch of Louisiana back country being used as a lovers’ lane, handcuffed a young man named Delacroix and a young woman named Percy and took them to a deserted stretch, where one or the other of them raped the girl and then killed both of them. (The real criminals’ names were changed for the film, and so were the names of their victims.) Dead Man Walking was based on Prejean’s book of the same title and was a personal project for Tim Robbins, who not only wrote and directed the film but cast his life partner, Sarandon, in the lead. What made this film especially remarkable was that, though Robbins and Sarandon were well known in Hollywood and among the celebriati as political liberals, they did not make this film a didactic anti-capital punishment “message” movie. They felt real compassion not only towards Poncelet but the parents of his victims, Earl and Lucille Delacroix (Raymond J. Barry and Roberta Maxwell), and Clyde Percy (R. Lee Ermey, the real-life drill sergeant Stanley Kubrick famously cast as one in his 1987 Viet Nam War film Full Metal Jacket) and his wife Mary Beth (Celia Weston). In one intense scene, Earl tells Sister Helen that his brother was totally against the death penalty until Earl’s son was murdered, after which he was all for it. I’d already been asking myself how I would feel if Charles was murdered: if I would be so angry and revenge-driven I’d want to see his killer put to death or would my overall compassion win out and I’d want to see even the man who took the love of my life away from me spared the ultimate accounting. There’s one line in Robbins’s script in which Sister Helen consciously or unconsciously echoes the late Lenny Bruce’s marvelous line about the death penalty: “Capital punishment means killing people who killed people to prove that killing people is wrong.”

Throughout the film’s two-hour four-minute running time, we not only meet the parents of the victims and feel genuine sorrow for their loss, we also see fragmentary flashbacks of the crime and we learn in the end that, though Poncelet originally attributed both murders to his accomplice (who for some quirky reason that goes unmentioned in the film drew a life-without-parole sentence instead of a death warrant), he ultimately admitted that while the other man in question raped and killed the girl, he shot the young man himself. Prejean’s memoir and the film both controversially claimed that in the end Poncelet felt remorse for his crime, while that’s been questioned. It reminded me of some of the classic 1930’s movies that attacked the death penalty, including The Last Mile (1932) – which carried a written preface by Lewis E. Lawes, then warden at Sing Sing, that read, “The Last Mile is more than a story of prison and of the condemned. To me it is a story of those men within barred cells, crushed mentally, physically and spiritually between unrelenting forces of man-made laws and man-fixed death. And justly or unjustly found guilty, are they not the victims of man’s imperfect conventions, upon which he has erected a social structure of doubtful security? What is society’s responsibility for ever-increasing murders? What shall be done with the murderers? The Last Mile does not pretend to give an answer. Society must find its own solution. But murder on the heels of murder is not that solution” – which could have been used as a preface to Dead Man Walking as well.

The final scene, in which Poncelet is strapped to the gurney and made ready for the three injections that in sequence will kill him (and both Charles and I responded to the irony that the nurse who inserts the IV through which the lethal injections will be administered swabbed the skin with alcohol first; the moment he started chuckling at this, I knew immediately he was savoring, as I was, the irony that she was carrying out the standard precaution against giving the patient an infection when the whole point of the procedure was to kill the person anyway) and faces death with a preternatural calm, couldn’t help but remind me of the classic ending of Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) in which priest Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien), who was the boyhood friend of gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), asks him to act like a coward as he approached his execution. Cagney did just that, though in his memoir he wrote that the most frequent question he was asked about his career was about that scene and whether he meant to depict Sullivan as really scared to die or feigning cowardice to disillusion the slum kids that idolized him. He didn’t give an answer and said that was a secret he would take to his own grave (which he did). Dead Man Walking won an Academy Award for Sarandon, and arguably Sean Penn (who was nominated but lost to Nicolas Cage for Leaving Las Vegas) deserved one too. It’s a quite impressive movie and Robbins directed it in a quiet, unassertive style that communicates its message effectively. Mention should also be made of the film’s unusual musical score, which was publicly credited to Bruce Springsteen even though he wrote only one song for the film and it isn’t heard until the very end (and it’s a good song but not at the level of his own Academy Award winner, “Streets of Philadelphia” from the 1993 AIDS message movie Philadelphia). Mostly the score was atmospheric (East) Indian music by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with a few rock performers, notably Eddie Vedder and Ry Cooder, briefly chiming in, a score of great subtlety and power that adds immeasurably to the film’s haunting mood and echoes its unwillingness to take sides, its compassion for all affected by a heinous crime and the absurdity that “murder on the heels of murder,” as the foreword to The Last Mile put it, can be part of the solution to any moral dilemma.