Murder in the First (1995) on Netflix
Henri Young is sent to Alcatraz for stealing five dollars. After a failed escape and three years in the dungeons, he kills a fellow inmate. Public defender James Stamphill takes the case.
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- Rotten Tomatoes50%
Trailer
Plot summary
At seventeen, Henri Young steals five dollars so that he and his sister Rosetta can eat, and the crime, committed in a store that also houses a post office, becomes a federal offense. Rosetta goes to an orphanage and Young to prison, and years later he is transferred to Alcatraz, where associate warden Milton Glenn oversees him. An escape attempt with two other inmates fails, and Young is put in the dungeons, where he spends three years in the dark. Returned to the general population, he stabs a fellow inmate to death with a spoon. James Stamphill, a recent law school graduate, is handed the murder case, and he argues that Alcatraz itself is what drove his client to kill.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Murder in the First (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To prepare for his role as Henri Young, Kevin Bacon spent a night in a solitary cell and lost twenty pounds.
- Filming at Triscenic Production Services in Sylmar was interrupted on January 17, 1994 by the Northridge earthquake and resumed two weeks later. The production then moved to Alcatraz Island, where more than 300 crew members had to be crammed into the prison cells and shooting was done at night so the National Park Service's daytime tourism was not disrupted.
- The real Henri Young was not convicted of stealing $5 to save his sister from destitution. He was a hardened bank robber who had taken a hostage at least once and committed a murder in 1933, and he had already served time in two state prisons in Montana and Washington before reaching Alcatraz in 1936.
SPOILER
The film ends with the fictional Henri Young returned to the dungeons of Alcatraz in the early 1940s, where he supposedly dies. The real Young stayed on Alcatraz until 1948, then moved to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where he remained until 1954.- Screenwriter Dan Gordon was unhappy with the film version of his script, so he wrote a novelization of his own screenplay and later adapted that into a stage play.
