Joyce McKinney, alleged kidnapper of a Mormon missionary and the subject of Tabloid. Photo / Supplied
Anyone who heard Kim Hill's Saturday morning interview with Joyce McKinney, the subject of this surreal story of amour completely fou will remember Hill trying to get a word - no, a syllable - in edgeways, moaning "I'm losing the will to live here, Joyce," and, after repeated warnings, simply
hanging up.
Morris' take on the McKinney story (inevitably immortalised as the "Mormon in chains" case) is less incoherent - a filmmaker has the editing suite, not available to the radio interviewer working live-to-air - but no less hysterical in both senses of that word.
Morris is unquestionably one of the era's foremost documentarians, a man whose filmography includes the masterly The Thin Blue Line in 1988 about a man wrongly imprisoned; Mr Death (1999), a portrait of an executioner who thought the Nazi gas chambers would have been technically impossible; and the absolutely riveting The Fog of War, an extended interview, interpolated with archival footage, of the Kennedy- and Johnson-era US Secretary of State, Robert McNamara.
But here in a film he describes as "a return to my favourite genre - sick, sad and funny", he matches the style to substance of a story so strange you could not possibly have made it up.
McKinney, a former beauty queen, was alleged to have abducted a young Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson in Surrey in 1977 and held him captive in a farmhouse in Devon where he was chained to a bed (the word spreadeagled is gleefully repeated) and even perhaps forced to engage in sex against his will.
