It does seem like they should have been able to do something interesting with that, because wow.
It's aggravating! Partly it suffers from the unnecessarily popular problem with biopics where their versions of history are less weird than the real thing—it's not a minor gloss that the historical David Marshall Williams seems to have been a lot more like one of the protagonists of Gun Crazy (1950) whereas Stewart's Marsh Williams is a Hollywood-issue aw-shucks "rugged individualist" who may not even have done the crime he was sent up for. Partly it doesn't seem to have known how to take advantage of its own dramatic material, fictitious or no—I have no idea whether it's true that Maggie Williams formed a friendship by letters with Captain H. T. Peoples, the warden of Caledonia Prison Farm where her husband was incarcerated, but it's a fabulous suggestion of unexpected compassion on both their parts, it yields some early bitter comedy from Marsh's resistance to writing to his folks while on the inside and Cap's counterintuitive insistence to the contrary, and otherwise the film blows right past the possibilities of this three-cornered emotional structure except for the climax of the successful field test where Marsh is embraced by his wife and shaken hands with by Cap at the same time. The story is framed as the illumination of a complicated man to his son who has never known the full truth about his father, but nothing in it is really ambiguous, only misunderstood. Cap gets more of an arc than Marsh does, coming around from by-the-book antagonist to maverick ally to the point where he puts not only his reputation but his freedom on the line of Marsh's promise that he won't try to break out with his prison-smithied gun. Obviously Wendell Corey can sell this kind of turn like nobody's business—he never makes it look foregone and he isn't phoning it in, even if his Carolina accent sometimes ghosts on him—but even if I have always gravitated toward secondary characters, I feel it is generally understood that protagonists are supposed to be compelling to the audience, and what's compelling about Marsh is Stewart's craft as an actor, not any of the sprung and balanced ironies of his life that the film should have been able to make the most of.
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It's aggravating! Partly it suffers from the unnecessarily popular problem with biopics where their versions of history are less weird than the real thing—it's not a minor gloss that the historical David Marshall Williams seems to have been a lot more like one of the protagonists of Gun Crazy (1950) whereas Stewart's Marsh Williams is a Hollywood-issue aw-shucks "rugged individualist" who may not even have done the crime he was sent up for. Partly it doesn't seem to have known how to take advantage of its own dramatic material, fictitious or no—I have no idea whether it's true that Maggie Williams formed a friendship by letters with Captain H. T. Peoples, the warden of Caledonia Prison Farm where her husband was incarcerated, but it's a fabulous suggestion of unexpected compassion on both their parts, it yields some early bitter comedy from Marsh's resistance to writing to his folks while on the inside and Cap's counterintuitive insistence to the contrary, and otherwise the film blows right past the possibilities of this three-cornered emotional structure except for the climax of the successful field test where Marsh is embraced by his wife and shaken hands with by Cap at the same time. The story is framed as the illumination of a complicated man to his son who has never known the full truth about his father, but nothing in it is really ambiguous, only misunderstood. Cap gets more of an arc than Marsh does, coming around from by-the-book antagonist to maverick ally to the point where he puts not only his reputation but his freedom on the line of Marsh's promise that he won't try to break out with his prison-smithied gun. Obviously Wendell Corey can sell this kind of turn like nobody's business—he never makes it look foregone and he isn't phoning it in, even if his Carolina accent sometimes ghosts on him—but even if I have always gravitated toward secondary characters, I feel it is generally understood that protagonists are supposed to be compelling to the audience, and what's compelling about Marsh is Stewart's craft as an actor, not any of the sprung and balanced ironies of his life that the film should have been able to make the most of.