Watch The Executioner's Song

This engrossing movie appeared just a few years after the United States resumed allowing states to engage in capital punishment, a sanction which was briefly prohibited during the late 1960s and the part of the 1970s. The story concerns the heinous crimes and punishment of Gary Gilmore, played by talented actor Tommy Lee Jones. The film dramatizes efforts on the part of the prisoner to demand that the State of Utah impose a death sentence quickly and not spend a lot of time on automatic appeals. It portrays death sentence opponents sympathetically. The cast includes Rosanna Arquette and Christine Lahti.