Dead Man Walking (film) Dead Man Walking (film) Dead Man Walking is a 1995 American crime drama film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, and co-produced and directed by Tim Robbins, who adapted the screenplay from the non-fiction book of the same name. Sister Helen Prejean (Sarandon) establishes a special relationship with Matthew Poncelet (Penn) – based on real-life murderers Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie – a prisoner on death row in Louisiana, acting as his spiritual adviser after carrying on correspondence with him. Matthew Poncelet has been in prison for six years, awaiting his execution after being sentenced to death for
Helen (play) root of all evil. About thirty years before this play, Herodotus argued in his "Histories" that Helen had never in fact arrived at Troy, but was in Egypt during the entire Trojan War. The Archaic lyric poet Stesichorus had made the same assertion in his "Palinode" (itself a correction to an earlier poem corroborating the traditional characterization that made Helen out to be a woman of ill repute). The play "Helen" tells a variant of this story, beginning under the premise that rather than running off to Troy with Paris, Helen was actually whisked away to Egypt by the gods.