Production Companies

John Frankenheimer Productions Inc., Edward Lewis Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer British Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Overview

"They accused him… They beat him… They condemned him… and after all that, they were more afraid of him than ever."

Set in tsarist Russia around the turn of the century and based on a true story of a Russian Jewish peasant Yakov Bog who was wrongly imprisoned for a most unlikely crime - the “ritual murder” of a Gentile child in Kyiv. We witness the unrelenting detail of the peasant handyman's life in prison and see him gain in dignity as the efforts to humiliate him and make him confess fail.