TV Reviews : ‘Shoot the Picture’ Graphic on Death Row

The final moments of the Death Row drama “Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture” (Sunday night at 9 on HBO) are graphic and unflinching. The subject is capital punishment, the viewpoint ridicules the death penalty, and the condemned man (Arliss Howard) is an uncanny portrait of quirky resignation. You’ll remember him.

The star is a bearded Roy Scheider, playing a burned-out photographer hired by the condemned man (with the permission of the state of Florida) to take his picture at the moment of execution. The public wants blood? The doomed one will give it to them.

Director Frank Pierson and writer Doug Magee (who has interviewed and photographed Death Row convicts as a photojournalist) are unsparing in depicting the preparations for death by electricity.

The events and images associated with the chair--the metal hat, the straps, the shaved head--are caught with a Frankenstein horror. The production will not likely affect the mind of death penalty advocates, but those straddling the fence may be another story.

The narrative, though, is not a clean, well-lighted place. A last- second reprieve early on is followed by a maddeningly entangled plot (including Bonnie Bedelia with a kind of weary, dime-store sexuality) that leads to yet another trip to the electric chair and the production’s undeniably wrenching finale.

The movie’s problem is the story between the visits to the chair. The drama outside the prison is a blur. It’s fun for a while to watch Scheider unravel the truth of a cop killing through his blowups of photographs. But negotiating the plot’s murky trails and secondary characters is exhausting.

By the way, a news reporter (Andre Baugher) interminably yelling, “I’m from Time magazine,” is an inane view of reporters, who take it on the chin again (but then so does the cliched governor and the district attorney).