New Doubts Raised About ‘Crime of the Century’

Here’s more fine work from HBO, by far our greatest resource for provocative, quality films that originate on television.

The utterly absorbing “Crime of the Century” joins the large body of second-guessers asserting the innocence of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who died in the electric chair in 1936 for the kidnapping and murder of the toddler son of American icon Charles Lindbergh. Even when reportedly offered commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment in exchange for a confession, Hauptmann still denied guilt.

Drawn from “The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann,” Britisher Ludovic Kennedy’s well-researched 1985 book about this famous case, William Nicholson’s teleplay argues so persuasively on behalf of its subject that the movie is often painful to watch, so great is the apparent miscarriage of justice.

It helps that Stephen Rea (“The Crying Game,” “Citizen X”) resonates powerfully as Hauptmann, the Bronx carpenter and illegal German immigrant who is doomed here by his discovery of a $14,000 ransom stash in a package left with him by a shady business partner who bilked him and subsequently returned to Germany and died.

Hauptmann has no idea that the bundles of distinctively marked gold certificates in his possession are part of the Lindbergh ransom. Yet by hiding the money and treating it as his own--in his mind as payment for being swindled out of his life savings by a man he considered his friend--Hauptmann indelibly brands himself as a kidnapper in the eyes of authorities.

And after several years of frustrating dead-ends in the case, they happily latch onto him as the killer, twisting evidence and ignoring the many potholes in their case that appear to rule out Hauptmann. Pushed by a politically ambitious prosecutor and a driven police executive, cops use appalling tactics and pressure witnesses, including Lindbergh himself, into either bending their testimony or lying to ensure Hauptmann’s conviction. Newspapers generously fabricate and print damaging fantasy about him as fact; banner headlines shout out his guilt.

Quite simply, he’s railroaded.

That, at least, is the scenario offered by “Crime of the Century,” which borrows a label applied to the murder by newspapers more than six decades prior to the media-titled “Trial of the Century” that titillated much of the nation in 1995, just as the Hauptmann case did in another time.

HBO’s movie is in one sense as sealed off from a wider reality as Hauptmann was in his prison cell. What isn’t adequately conveyed here is the mid-1930s U.S. environment surrounding the case that influenced its outcome: anti-German sentiment, intense hero worship of famed flier “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh and other attitudes of a nation in fidgety limbo while emerging from one global crisis (the Depression) and edging toward another (World War II).

Even so, “Crime of the Century” reruns a segment of the past that speaks pointedly to the present. The O.J. Simpson case and more recent frenzy over Atlanta bombing suspect Richard Jewell affirm that the potential for lethal media excess and mischief has not diminished since Hauptmann. And although much of the conduct in and out of the courtroom by authorities in the Hauptmann case would not be tolerated today, “Crime of the Century” still delivers a strong message about fairness in the U.S. justice system and what could happen should the ongoing victims’ rights movement swing too far in that direction.

We also get a strong message about capital punishment. Director Mark Rydell makes Hauptmann’s death memorable. His hooded demise in The Chair is grisly, with smoke rising from his twisting body, and even his tormentors are repulsed by the stinging aroma of the death they are witnessing.

In buying even the possibility of Hauptmann’s innocence, some viewers will surely see this case as affirmation of the adage that it’s better that 12 guilty parties go free than one innocent person be executed.

“Crime of the Century” immediately establishes Hauptmann as sympathetic if flawed, and ultimately comes close to elevating him and his wife, Anna (Isabella Rossellini), to sainthood. Whether hemorrhaging outrage in court or more often stoically pursing his lips in silent anger over his plight, minimalist Rea is superb. Finally, when Hauptmann realizes that the game is up and his fate assured, he has the resigned, closed-down look of a deer in the grasp of a predator.

Rea gets excellent support from J.T. Walsh as New Jersey State Police Col. Norman Schwarzkopf (father of Gulf War hero Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf), David Paymer as prosecutor David Wilentz, Allen Garfield as Police Lt. James J. Finn and Michael Moriarty as New Jersey Gov. Harold Hoffman, whose belief in Hauptmann’s innocence doesn’t save him.

And also exceptional help from Rossellini as the sterling Anna, who died two years ago at age 96. “Isn’t he innocent until proven guilty?” she wonders here, stunned by the lynch mob furor sabotaging her husband, and revealing a naivete as applicable today as 60 years ago.

* “Crime of the Century” airs at 8 tonight on HBO.