I had originally intended to title this review, "A Lawyer Movie for lawyers", and before writing it I was careful to read a lot of the other reviews to see what the non-lawyers were getting out of it. The first time I saw it I was still a non-lawyer, and also comparatively young, and I remember left feeling it was a bit flat, a fairly standard old black & white melodrama with a courtroom setting with a lot of loud jazz music and typical old-Hollywood histrionics. The main draw for me was simply that it was a courtroom drama, and a "vintage" one at that. It did not offer the delightful English character actor performances or cleverly-drawn plot twists of WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION or even the relentless, irresistible, and authoritative hammering of Raymond Burr in PERRY MASON. Moreover, the courtroom antics struck me as decidedly unrealistic, since they conflicted diametrically with my grand total of two days over Spring Break while in junior high school in California of watching what I would eventually learn was the extremely subdued trial presentation of an otherwise fairly sensational murder case.
Thus, I was disappointed when some years later I asked a law school professor with a penchant for this kind of thing what the most realistic classic courtroom or lawyer movie was and he came back with this one.
The next time I saw this movie I was a either a law student or a very newly-minted lawyer in an insurance defense (i.e., personal injury defense) practice and with the smidgen of professional experience I had acquired by that time could begin to see his point. But it wasn't until I saw this recently, after 29 more years in harness in general practice, that I could really appreciate it for at least part of its true merit.
This is very likely the most realistic lawyer movie ever made. Surely there are few others that could begin to compare. It is no exaggeration to say that I did not detect a single instance of anything in this movie that could not plausibly happen in real life, and in fact, there was so much that was so classically typical. "Juke joints" and county jail lockups. A basically trashy defendant (however well he might turn out in the uniform of his country, although one thing I have always wondered is why is he only a lieutenant after about nine years in the Army) and his complimentarily hot-to-trot trashy wife (as one venerable judge in our "family law" courthouse used to say, "2's do not marry 7's"). The wonderful ambiguity inherent in the RV-park where they live in a large-sized Airstreamesque camping trailer. The locally-flashy small-town prosecutor who must have made a better smiling, glad-handing, provincially Clark-Gablesque candidate for District Attorney than Jimmy Stewart's quirky, essentially iconoclastic character, whom he defeats for reelection, even while his amount of actual legal acumen is seriously questionable. The self-impressed, condescending expert-from-out-of-town lawyer who knows perfectly well what he is doing in the courtroom and doesn't make any particular secret of it. The judge was completely believable as a real, utterly competent "visiting" judge handling another judge's docket and this particular trial with these particular lawyers in particular (if he had a weakness, it was only the gentleness of his voice, even when he is reading the lawyers a 100% accurate version of a judge's riot act). The unpaid yet staunchly loyal legal assistant, personally invested in the matter up to her armpits (and I'd still like to know how much damage was done to her car and how that was eventually ameliorated). The old lawyer who is basically a decent old fellow but has fallen on hard times and lost a lot of his self-respect (surely every courthouse has at least one of these). And a main character who who looks decidedly abnormal with his fishing (not to mention fly-tying) hobby exaggerated to the level of a personality quirk. He comes complete with a home-based office and a two-or-three-generations-past body-style car that has obviously seen better days (one can easily envision the studio car shop banging a dent in the passenger side door on one side while another crew is changing the driver's side door for an old used one that doesn't really match on the other). About the only thing he lacks is a saggy old hound dog. He is the type of lawyer (at least on this occasion, now that he no longer commands the hammer of the prosecution, but is only a lowly criminal defense lawyer, begging and pleading) who decides to lavish exhibitions of melodramatic emotion on the court with all the usual results that kind of thing will get you if you are foolish enough -- or simply caught up enough -- to try it. Such types do actually occur in nature (or at least, at a courthouse near you).
As another reviewer on here (self-identified intriguingly as "tightspotkilo") observed in 2005, practically every single act seen and every statement heard in this movie absolutely realistic (or at least 101% plausible). The story was written by a lawyer from the "upper peninsula" of Michigan, where it is set, and the director, Otto Preminger, who made a lot of impressive Crap after this, apparently was wise enough in this case to reproduce it just the way it must have been written originally. In the movie's trailer, he appears with the author and they exchange comments to the effect that every single thing that appears in the film was cleared by the lawyer/author first. I believe this because, when I see the film now, it could not possibly be any other way. What I would not give to do the commentary track on a DVD issue. The hardest part of that would be getting all the logical comments in within the run time of the movie.
Thus, the repeated comments of non-lawyer reviewers about all the shades of gray and ambiguity in this picture make me laugh out loud. What they seem to laud as a sublimely-inspired, meticulously and no doubt painstakingly-crafted example of the the screenwriter's art is in fact, nothing more than just plain fact. Yea, verily, if this movie is to be offered as any example of the cinematic art, it is in how it makes what could be a documentary into an emotionally-involving drama. Indeed, it is what the better trial counsel almost always try to make happen in a real courtroom. It amounts to a sort of monument to the adage, "truth is stranger than fiction".
If there is one thing in this piece which makes me cock an eyebrow, it is Jimmy Stewart's reluctance to take this case in the first place. Now, the lawyers in this picture might well have been dead by the time I started practicing law (certainly, actors Stewart and George C. Scott were at very advanced ages by that time). Moreover, Stewart plays a small-town lawyer, which could readily factor into this attitude of his, while my own experience is largely big-city-oriented. In other words, maybe there is a fundamental difference between his circumstances in 1959 and any I have encountered since 1990. That said, in the film Stewart is seen hesitating because he is afraid he can't win the case at trial. In my experience, this is a very unusual thing for a defense lawyer to do. Normally, a defense lawyer has a stack of bills, both occupational and domestic, to pay, and will sign up anything with any money attached to it. The very best and most sought-after might turn down something because they are just too overloaded with other cases to handle it, but that doesn't describe the vast bulk of lawyers. (At the risk of digressing, it is identical to something Humphrey Bogart said in THE MALTESE FALCON in 1940: he told Mary Astor that his detective agency took her case not because they believed her story, but because they believed her $200.) In agreeing to defend somebody, you sign them up first and worry about how to handle the case second.
In that regard, you know that the state usually has plenty of good evidence that the vast majority of your clients are as guilty as the year is long, and those clients will wind up pleading guilty in exchange for a known (hopefully) sentence in what is technically known as a plea bargain. In this movie, the "in" expression in the upper peninsula of Michigan in 1959 for this kind of thing apparently was "copping out"; today, and at least in other places, it is called pleading out, taking a plea, or even taking a deal (just to name the ones I've heard in my particular neck of the United States). While this movie seems to suggest the competitiveness of courtroom lawyers via this device, it isn't really necessary because there is plenty of other material here to show that without it. Maybe the author thought it necessary as exposition, or to enhance the drama. If so, it would be about the only unrealistic bit in the movie. Either that, or maybe that was really the way it was for some lawyer who lost his DA reelection bid in the back woods of Michigan in 1959, and maybe thought he had something to prove.
In that vein, from a modern perspective, at least, it is also unusual that he neglects financial matters generally, and in fact doesn't seem concerned about money at all. Most private practitioners I know are always thinking, if not actually worrying about money, because they really don't want to find themselves living in their car (even if it were an early 1950's Chevy convertible; ironically, today that same car in reasonable condition would be worth a years' worth of paychecks to some people). Of course, even us newer older lawyers know that, prior to the 1980's, the legal business environment was much more favorable then than it has been for our generation.
What is suggested by all of this, in modern parlance, is a clinically depressed lawyer, and it would seem that an underlying, if overlooked, theme of this movie is that of a defeated man like Stewart's character reclaiming a critical measure of self-respect via this trial experience, a theme accentuated by bein
Thus, I was disappointed when some years later I asked a law school professor with a penchant for this kind of thing what the most realistic classic courtroom or lawyer movie was and he came back with this one.
The next time I saw this movie I was a either a law student or a very newly-minted lawyer in an insurance defense (i.e., personal injury defense) practice and with the smidgen of professional experience I had acquired by that time could begin to see his point. But it wasn't until I saw this recently, after 29 more years in harness in general practice, that I could really appreciate it for at least part of its true merit.
This is very likely the most realistic lawyer movie ever made. Surely there are few others that could begin to compare. It is no exaggeration to say that I did not detect a single instance of anything in this movie that could not plausibly happen in real life, and in fact, there was so much that was so classically typical. "Juke joints" and county jail lockups. A basically trashy defendant (however well he might turn out in the uniform of his country, although one thing I have always wondered is why is he only a lieutenant after about nine years in the Army) and his complimentarily hot-to-trot trashy wife (as one venerable judge in our "family law" courthouse used to say, "2's do not marry 7's"). The wonderful ambiguity inherent in the RV-park where they live in a large-sized Airstreamesque camping trailer. The locally-flashy small-town prosecutor who must have made a better smiling, glad-handing, provincially Clark-Gablesque candidate for District Attorney than Jimmy Stewart's quirky, essentially iconoclastic character, whom he defeats for reelection, even while his amount of actual legal acumen is seriously questionable. The self-impressed, condescending expert-from-out-of-town lawyer who knows perfectly well what he is doing in the courtroom and doesn't make any particular secret of it. The judge was completely believable as a real, utterly competent "visiting" judge handling another judge's docket and this particular trial with these particular lawyers in particular (if he had a weakness, it was only the gentleness of his voice, even when he is reading the lawyers a 100% accurate version of a judge's riot act). The unpaid yet staunchly loyal legal assistant, personally invested in the matter up to her armpits (and I'd still like to know how much damage was done to her car and how that was eventually ameliorated). The old lawyer who is basically a decent old fellow but has fallen on hard times and lost a lot of his self-respect (surely every courthouse has at least one of these). And a main character who who looks decidedly abnormal with his fishing (not to mention fly-tying) hobby exaggerated to the level of a personality quirk. He comes complete with a home-based office and a two-or-three-generations-past body-style car that has obviously seen better days (one can easily envision the studio car shop banging a dent in the passenger side door on one side while another crew is changing the driver's side door for an old used one that doesn't really match on the other). About the only thing he lacks is a saggy old hound dog. He is the type of lawyer (at least on this occasion, now that he no longer commands the hammer of the prosecution, but is only a lowly criminal defense lawyer, begging and pleading) who decides to lavish exhibitions of melodramatic emotion on the court with all the usual results that kind of thing will get you if you are foolish enough -- or simply caught up enough -- to try it. Such types do actually occur in nature (or at least, at a courthouse near you).
As another reviewer on here (self-identified intriguingly as "tightspotkilo") observed in 2005, practically every single act seen and every statement heard in this movie absolutely realistic (or at least 101% plausible). The story was written by a lawyer from the "upper peninsula" of Michigan, where it is set, and the director, Otto Preminger, who made a lot of impressive Crap after this, apparently was wise enough in this case to reproduce it just the way it must have been written originally. In the movie's trailer, he appears with the author and they exchange comments to the effect that every single thing that appears in the film was cleared by the lawyer/author first. I believe this because, when I see the film now, it could not possibly be any other way. What I would not give to do the commentary track on a DVD issue. The hardest part of that would be getting all the logical comments in within the run time of the movie.
Thus, the repeated comments of non-lawyer reviewers about all the shades of gray and ambiguity in this picture make me laugh out loud. What they seem to laud as a sublimely-inspired, meticulously and no doubt painstakingly-crafted example of the the screenwriter's art is in fact, nothing more than just plain fact. Yea, verily, if this movie is to be offered as any example of the cinematic art, it is in how it makes what could be a documentary into an emotionally-involving drama. Indeed, it is what the better trial counsel almost always try to make happen in a real courtroom. It amounts to a sort of monument to the adage, "truth is stranger than fiction".
If there is one thing in this piece which makes me cock an eyebrow, it is Jimmy Stewart's reluctance to take this case in the first place. Now, the lawyers in this picture might well have been dead by the time I started practicing law (certainly, actors Stewart and George C. Scott were at very advanced ages by that time). Moreover, Stewart plays a small-town lawyer, which could readily factor into this attitude of his, while my own experience is largely big-city-oriented. In other words, maybe there is a fundamental difference between his circumstances in 1959 and any I have encountered since 1990. That said, in the film Stewart is seen hesitating because he is afraid he can't win the case at trial. In my experience, this is a very unusual thing for a defense lawyer to do. Normally, a defense lawyer has a stack of bills, both occupational and domestic, to pay, and will sign up anything with any money attached to it. The very best and most sought-after might turn down something because they are just too overloaded with other cases to handle it, but that doesn't describe the vast bulk of lawyers. (At the risk of digressing, it is identical to something Humphrey Bogart said in THE MALTESE FALCON in 1940: he told Mary Astor that his detective agency took her case not because they believed her story, but because they believed her $200.) In agreeing to defend somebody, you sign them up first and worry about how to handle the case second.
In that regard, you know that the state usually has plenty of good evidence that the vast majority of your clients are as guilty as the year is long, and those clients will wind up pleading guilty in exchange for a known (hopefully) sentence in what is technically known as a plea bargain. In this movie, the "in" expression in the upper peninsula of Michigan in 1959 for this kind of thing apparently was "copping out"; today, and at least in other places, it is called pleading out, taking a plea, or even taking a deal (just to name the ones I've heard in my particular neck of the United States). While this movie seems to suggest the competitiveness of courtroom lawyers via this device, it isn't really necessary because there is plenty of other material here to show that without it. Maybe the author thought it necessary as exposition, or to enhance the drama. If so, it would be about the only unrealistic bit in the movie. Either that, or maybe that was really the way it was for some lawyer who lost his DA reelection bid in the back woods of Michigan in 1959, and maybe thought he had something to prove.
In that vein, from a modern perspective, at least, it is also unusual that he neglects financial matters generally, and in fact doesn't seem concerned about money at all. Most private practitioners I know are always thinking, if not actually worrying about money, because they really don't want to find themselves living in their car (even if it were an early 1950's Chevy convertible; ironically, today that same car in reasonable condition would be worth a years' worth of paychecks to some people). Of course, even us newer older lawyers know that, prior to the 1980's, the legal business environment was much more favorable then than it has been for our generation.
What is suggested by all of this, in modern parlance, is a clinically depressed lawyer, and it would seem that an underlying, if overlooked, theme of this movie is that of a defeated man like Stewart's character reclaiming a critical measure of self-respect via this trial experience, a theme accentuated by bein