The Chamber

The Chamber is a 1996 American legal thriller film directed by James Foley. It is based on John Grisham's 1994 novel of the same name. The film stars Chris O'Donnell, Gene Hackman, Faye Dunaway, Lela Rochon, Robert Prosky, Raymond J. Barry, and David Marshall Grant. Plot In April 1967, the office of Marvin Kramer, a Jewish civil rights lawyer in Indianola, Mississippi, is bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing Kramer's five-year-old twin sons and leading to the amputation of Kramer's legs and his later suicide. Klansman Sam Cayhall is tried for murder in the bombing, and is eventually convicted and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Twenty-nine years later, Adam Hall, a young attorney at the Chicago law firm of Kravitz and Bane, seeks assignment to the firm's pro bono representation of Cayhall in the last weeks before his scheduled execution. Adam is Cayhall's grandson, his family having since moved away from the South and changed their name, haunted and shamed by Cayhall's actions. Adam is motivated to take the case in a search for some understanding of the dark secrets of his family, which prompted the suicide of Adam's father the year Sam was sentenced to death and whose body Adam found as a child. Adam is sent by the firm to Jackson, Mississippi to take over the case and there reconnects with his aunt Lee Bowen, an alcoholic socialite who has managed to avoid public association with her infamous father, and who warns Adam about the dangers of dredging up the past. On death row, Sam remains a brusque, bitter, unrepentant racist who brags about his participation in the Klan bombing campaign of which the Kramer bombing was a part, though he denies that any of the bombings were intended to kill. He taunts Adam for his youth, legal inexperience, anti-racism, and the suicide of his father, but he agrees to allow Adam to represent him, though he forbids Adam from seeking clemency from Mississippi Governor McAllister, who had prosecuted Sam in his last retrial and had campaigned on that prosecution in his election to Governor. Nevertheless, as he begins to argue the case, Adam is approached by the Governor through an aide, Nora Stark, who suggests that he might consider clemency if Sam provides information about unidentified co-conspirators to the bombing.