The Death Penalty in American Cinema: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film by Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan (review)

In The Death Penalty in American Cinema: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film, Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan tackles a subject that has largely been ignored save for a few master’s theses. The author, a film scholar at the University of Haifa, examines the legal, social, religious, and other cultural dimensions that relate to capital punishment, particularly as this nation has persisted in implementing something long abolished in most other nations. As Kozlovsky-Golan notes, “The social and philosophical drama of the death penalty is also a wellspring of fascinating personal stories, which Hollywood cinema has expertly exploited over the years to tell audience-pulling tales of human interest” (1).

Much of the appeal of films with death penalty themes has been rooted in the popularity of the courtroom genre, and Kozlovsky-Golan addresses the generic conventions of the legal film. Using Christian Metz’s theory of identification, she notes how viewers can identify with the victim or the convict, but that this empathy may shift throughout while watching the film. The extensive first chapter progresses chronologically, as the author traces the history of cinematic depictions of the death penalty. She concludes the chapter by treating the popularity of legal television shows such as Law & Order and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (and their multiple spinoff manifestations). Despite censorship concerns and the enforcement of the Production Code, films dealing with the death penalty were at their height between 1920 and 1940. If execution films proliferated during the 1930s (the decade in which executions themselves were at a peak, an average of 167 a year versus about 40 a year in recent years), then Kozlovsky-Golan argues for the 1950s as a “golden age in legal cinema.” Oddly enough, although she treats two other Lang classics: Fury (1936) and Scarlet Street (1945), a discussion of Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) is noticeably absent from Kozlovsky-Golan’s book.

Kozlovsky-Golan reserves much of her vitriol over the acceptance of the death penalty in the United States for chapter 2, a historical overview of the practice. She condemns a political system dominated by social Darwinism and ruthless capitalism, as well as this practice, which demonstrates institutional violence against racial minorities better than any other. Kozlovsky-Golan notes, “The death penalty sheds light on hidden social and cultural aspects of that [American] experience, aspects obscured for fear they might tarnish Americans’ ethos and self-image. The death penalty, in other words, lies at the heart of the American paradox” (75). This “American paradox,” in her perception, is that “though ostensibly the land of freedom and opportunity, the United States is also the most violent country in the West. … The supremely violent death penalty, which has long perished in Europe’s progressive nations but is still alive and well in the United States, is one palpable instance of this phenomenon” (78). While such criticisms are certainly well worn, American readers may still benefit from reading an outsider’s perspective on this controversial issue that still divides its citizens. Included in this chapter, moreover, is the fascinating and farfetched history of the invention of the electric chair and Thomas Edison’s involvement in it.

Chapter 3, “A Cinematic Window to Problems Concerning the Death Penalty,” looks at how Hollywood has addressed the themes of deterrence, justice, and adequate representation in film. Kozlovsky-Golan incorporates historical cases of injustice in her analysis, from the obvious (John Brown, the Scottsboro Boys) to the less so (Carly Chessman, whose story is told in the 1977 TV movie Kill Me If You Can).

The fourth and final chapter in The Death Penalty in American Cinema addresses “women on the gallows,” how American audiences have been fascinated with female execution victims, despite the fact that they represented a miniscule number of actual execution victims. Kozlovsky-Golan argues that these women typically become a passive object of the male gaze and are sometimes even fetishized. Showing her interest...