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| return to sender
DEATH ROW DAYS
Above, a holding cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, where Return to Sender was shot.
Aidan Quinn (next page, with Kelly Preston) plays Frank, who becomes fascinated by the case of Charlotte Cory (below, as she appears in Frank’s dream).
THREE LOCAL CITIZENS WILL EACH BE PAID $200 TO
OPERATE THE SYRINGES THAT SEND THE LETHAL COCKTAIL
OF CHEMICALS INTO THE PRISONER’S VEINS
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Filming began in the second week of January, with interiors shooting in Denmark, followed by four weeks in Oklahoma. There, the production was based in Tulsa, with the prison scenes shot inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, a mid-sized town whose only other claim to fame is that it has the last armoury in the United States still to be manufacturing conventional (as opposed to nuclear) bombs.
Google-search McAlester and you get a lot of civic pride, but very little mention of one of the town’s largest employers. The OSP (Oklahoma State Penitentiary) was, however, a godsend for the film-makers. Shooting inside the McAlester pen wasn’t easy, says Lunderskov wryly, “but it sure gives you high production values!”
Return to Sender is not so much an ‘issue’ film, however, more a thriller: the death sentence hanging over Charlotte Cory is the starting point of the film, but what drives it is the excitement of slowly discovering the truth behind the events that put Charlotte inside.
“I don’t like to be didactic,” says Nielsen who plays Charlotte, on death row for the abduction and presumed murder of a baby several years earlier. “I don’t like to be someone who is teaching any lessons, and I don’t think in that sense that the film is a political film at all.”
What it basically is, says Lunderskov, is a “thriller about an unusual relationship between three people”. First, of course, there is Charlotte, who has been demonised by the local press over the ensuing years. Known as the ‘Thanksgiving Girl’ after the weekend when the abduction happened, she has stolidly refused to reveal any details of the crime. She is, reckons her lawyer, Susan Kennan (Preston), the second corner of the triangle, protecting someone, but no amount of probing will reveal who. Charlotte has accepted that she is going to die and has retreated into herself.
The third main character is the mysterious Frank Walsh (Aidan Quinn), who appears at first sight to be just another death penalty-parasite. He writes to prisoners on death row, pretending some indirect contact with them - in Charlotte’s case, he claims he was in the Army with her father during the (first) Gulf War and had been there when he died. Then, after the execution, he sells the dead man or woman’s final letters to the papers. That’s how he makes his living, and the fact that he is now in contact with one of Oklahoma’s most notorious and secretive killers promises to bring Frank a pay-day of close to a million dollars.
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