`My Father’s Shadow: The Sam Sheppard Story,” a new CBS movie looking at the high-profile 1950s crime that served as inspiration for television’s “The Fugitive,” seems on its surface to be the latest sensational TV movie to mine all it can from lurid subject matter.
But under that surface is a moving, sad study of a father’s unintentionally destructive influence on an adoring son.
“That’s what attracted me to the picture,” says veteran television actor Peter Strauss. “When I first got the script, I sort of went `ugh.’ The last thing I want to do is a picture that is another true crime story come to life.”
But Strauss, the father of sons ages 14 and 12, could relate to the fact that, even though the movie deals with a man’s struggles to clear his father’s name, it is at its core a heartfelt study of the conflicting relationship between the character Strauss plays, flamboyant Cleveland doctor Sam Sheppard, and his son, Sam Reese Sheppard.
“It is ultimately a very interesting sort of (Eugene) O’Neillian American tragedy,” says Strauss, 51, known for such enriching TV fare as “Rich Man, Poor Man” and “The Jericho Mile.”
Airing at 8 p.m. Tuesday on WBBM-Ch. 2, “My Father’s Shadow” is about the brutal 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard (played in the movie by Lindsay Frost), and the imprisonment of her husband for the crime. In what Strauss says is analogous to the O.J. Simpson case because of its sensationalism, Sheppard, who professed his innocence throughout, was fairly railroaded into jail by a biased judge, uncaring jury, frenzied media and apathetic Cleveland population.
Twenty-five years after his death, Dr. Sheppard’s grown son (“Mission Impossible’s” Henry Czerny, who doesn’t match the star power of Strauss until near the end of the piece) seeks to exonerate his father through long-buried evidence and DNA-testing technology that was just starting to make its mark on the criminal justice system.
That’s the spine of the movie. But “My Father’s Shadow” isn’t just a detective story.
Told in extensive flashbacks, we see how the crime quietly tormented the life of Sam Reese Sheppard:
– From the time he is traumatized at age 7 (Bradley Reid) in 1954 when he loses his mother to a brutal death, and his father after he was sent to prison for the deed;
– To when he grows into a young adult (Jonathan Kroeker) dealing with a bitter, self-absorbed and verbally abusive father whom he still fiercely loves;
– To the adult Sam Reese (Czerny), a lonely and morose person whose life is sadly shaped by the death of one parent, the fall from grace of another and his own, subconscious doubts about his dad’s innocence.
Those doubts manifest themselves as the ghost of Sam Sheppard, a constant companion to his son–whether his son wants him or not.
“You make me sick,” Sam Reese rails to his father’s prison-garbed spirit. “You haunt my life like you’re some kind of conscience. You push me to see the truth. Well, I see it . . . you were never a father to me and you were never a husband to my mother.”
“When you imagine,” explains Strauss, “dealing with the slaughter of his mother, the incarnation of his father and the accusation that he did it . . . and this bizarre relationship where he can only visit his father once a month, I began to think, my God, what does that feel like, how do you examine that?”
After begging unsuccessfully to return to his old hospital, Dr. Sheppard resorts to treating knife wounds and venereal diseases in a motel room for $5 a pop, and serving as a bad-guy wrestler.
One day, after catching his father making out with a girl his son was seeing, Sam Reese heart-wrenchingly hugs his father goodbye at a bus terminal and never sees him again. His father–who throughout Sam Reese’s life always told him what “beautiful” hands Sam Reese had (“These hands have greatness in them”)–eventually drinks himself to death.
Strauss was initially offered the role of Sam Reese, but saw playing the elder Sheppard as the true challenge: “If you take a guy who’s charming and arrogant and has the attitude of everything being his, and you take it all away in the manner of which it was taken away . . . the sense of anger and rage that is built in someone must be huge.”
Despite DNA testing that in March tabbed Richard Eberling, a handyman who worked on the Sheppard home, as a more likely suspect (ironically, Eberling died during the making of this movie), the state of Ohio refused to formally clear Sheppard’s name, and the real Sam Reese continues his battle.
“This son obviously had to feel an enormous amount of love from this father to make this his life’s journey,” Strauss points out. “Or, he’s simply haunted.”
The haunting effects of past injustices, struggles for unattainable redemptions and uncompromising love permeate “My Father’s Shadow,” a subtle yet powerful lesson on how one’s sway over another can have life-long repercussions.
