Review of The Fugitive (1993) by Donald W — 08 Oct 2009

This movie was based on the 1960's TV show "The Fugitive". It's a good movie with good special effects and good acting. It is probably one of Tommy Lee Jones best roles as the U.S. Marshal searching for Dr.

Richard Kimble. Much of the Movie was filmed in Chicago and the surrounding area in Illinois. The special effects in the first part of the movie are good, especially the train wreck. The climax to the Movie takes place in the Chicago Hilton Hotel that I enjoyed watching since I once stayed there when I was in High School when it was still the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

They used to hold the National 4-H Congress there and I went as part of the Oklahoma delegation. I recognized some of the banquet halls in the movie that I had been in. I have this movie on Laser Disc.

My sister gave it to me as a birthday present. She got it at a place that was having a close out sale of all its Laser Discs. The movie and the original TV show was inspired by Dr. Sam Sheppard from Cleveland, Ohio who was falsely accused of murdering his wife in 1954.

Dr. Sheppard never escaped the way Dr. Kimble did but was acquitted in a re-trial that took place while the TV show "The Fugitive" was on the air. The movie has a complex conspiracy theme to the story that was not in the TV show.

Except for the opening credits that began each episode showing the one armed man in the headlights of a car and Dr. Kimble coloring his blond hair black, the TV show never showed how Dr. Kimble escaped or how the murder took place.

In the last two episodes of the TV show Dr. Kimble finds the one armed man and finds out he was just a witness who knew the identity of the real killer. In the movie the one arm man was the killer and was working for a corrupt group of doctors trying to get a drug company to sell a drug that didn't work.

The movie staged the murder similar to the Shepard case except that Dr. Shepard claims to have fought with a "bushy haired man" not a "one armed man". The real Shepard case was never solved and had a lot of sexual motives that were theorized as being the motive for the murder.

This was left out of the movie and the TV show. In the TV show, the running from the law was just a plot device that allowed the writers to use the same formula used on many 1950's and 1960's TV westerns beginning with the Lone Ranger.

The lone hero travels from one town to the next doing good deeds and helping people. This overall plot was used again in the TV version of "The Incredible Hulk" in the 1970's and 1980's.