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Proceedings of a Conference (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1993) © Tarlton Law Library The Hollywood Mouthpiece: An Illustrated Journey Through the Courtrooms and Back-Alleys of Screen Justice Rennard Strickland* new book, The Movie That Changed My Life.1 Two dozen or so prominent writers contributed essays highlighting films that influenced them. As I read their stories, I was reminded that while we speak of film as "mass culture," as popular art, movies are nonetheless very personal. While there may be fifty or five hundred patrons in a theatre, it is really only one person who sees and remembers, bringing their own personal experience to what is happening on the screen. As Rosenberg's book reminded me, a young girl in India sees Doris Day's frothy fifties comedies very differently than a teenage boy in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Films have different meanings for each of us depending upon age, sex, ethnicity, sexual preference, geography, and religious beliefs and, indeed, films have, in turn, helped shape how we view even these critical questions. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay on Dracula, concludes: [M]ovies, comprised of images.... have the power of form of self-love.... We seem, once we pass theLet me begin by asking: what movie would you have selected? We start this slideshow with the film I would have chosen. My selection, Inherit the Wind (1960), is one of the half-dozen or so classic lawyer movies from the late fifties and early sixties -- Professor Nevin's first Golden Age of Law and Film. For a kid from Muskogee raised near the buckle on the Bible Belt and just starting to college, unsure of a profession, Spencer Tracy's Drummond -- Clarence Darrow by another name -- made an impression from which I have yet to escape. Early film memories, Oates concludes, "become a kind of conduit into the past.... as if these ... memories were fated always to be stubbornly rooted in time [and] place."3 For me, Inherit the Wind is always at the old Thompson/Cherokee Theatre in Tahlequah and it is back in 1959. Even today, when I see my own copy of Inherit the Wind on my VCR, I am that freshman kid back in Tahlequah deciding that maybe being a lawyer was what I ought to do. This morning I want to cast a broad net, to look impressionistically at the vast diversity of law's images in film. I want to do that with the help of movie advertising art, through promotional materials created by the studios to draw audiences into the theatres. When the Museum of Modern Art selected a group of fifty of the finest twentieth century American posters, they included this Saul Bass one-sheet for another golden age law film, Anatomy of a Murder. This slide presentation is adjunct to our lobby card exhibit. I want to thank Mike Widener, the Tarlton rare book librarian and archivist, who installed the show. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in what is called "movie memorabilia." A month ago, a King Kong three-sheet brought almost $58,000 at a Christie's auction in New York. Unfortunately, a decade ago I started collecting paper dealing with lawyers rather than other monsters. In this slide presentation I will not draw heavily upon the movie images or themes found in our exhibit, so I encourage you to take a look at those lobby cards which are in the lobby for some of your favorites. With a sort of MTV speed, we'll move quickly through a number of films as seen in their advertising art. So, fasten your seat belts, put on your glasses and tune into your memories as we begin our impressionistic journey through the courtrooms and dark alleys of Hollywood screen justice. Let us begin with the lawyer -- the Hollywood Mouthpiece. Our first screen lawyer is Atticus Finch--of all screen lawyers the most idealized and probably the most idolized. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's Lincolnesque version of her father, as portrayed by Gregory Peck, has become our cinematic standard of the profession at its very best. When the leader of the black community says to Scout, "Stand up, your father is passing," surely we all stand taller. In that same year of 1962, Gregory Peck gives us another unforgettable lawyer in the original Cape Fear. Peck is driven to lawlessness in order to protect his family when the law itself fails him. Martin Scorsese's new Cape Fear (1991) makes Nick Nolte into a more ambiguous lawyer who reflects our contemporary doubts and hostilities. Cinematic lawyers come in all shapes and sizes; the Hollywood mouthpiece has varied motivations and skills. There are young lawyers, like the youthful Paul Newman who steals rich widow Billie Burke as a client and defends society outcast Robert Vaughn in The Young Philadelphians (1959). And old, tired lawyers, like Paul Newman who struggles against alcoholism, shysterism and James Mason in The Verdict (1982), which might be called the Old Bostonian. The screen gives us a view of the legal profession divided in ways which, while they may not fully mirror the actual practice of law, suggest its kaleidoscopic dimension. There are Criminal Lawyers (1951), some of whom are actual criminals but most of whom just represent the criminal and work around the edges of the law. And Society Lawyers who, in the movies, mostly end up with criminal problems, too, but in the sophisticated settings of sleek penthouses with double dry martinis. And there are the Main Street Lawyers who have struggled against mighty odds to get where they are, and, of course, lawyers For the Defense, earnest, steady and determined. There are some lawyers whom we've not suspected until recently were even lawyers, like Humphrey Bogart's Rick in Casablanca, shown here negotiating for the sale of Rick's place with the Blue Parrot's owner, Sydney Greenstreet. And then there are the lawyers we are all too aware of but would like to forget -- Walter Matthau, for example, as the ambulance chaser in The Fortune Cookie (1966), a film which exposes the comic but dark underside of tort litigation. Perhaps the most familiar lawyers, and certainly the most clearly drawn, are from the world of criminal litigation -- the prosecuting and defense attorney. Movies of this genre range from a series of Mr. District Attorneys films, here represented by an early Republic Pictures entry with Bogart as the "double-fisted district attorney" in his last picture for Warner Brothers, The Enforcer, to the other side of the courtroom in an early lawyer-courtroom talkie called The Mouthpiece (1932), which was remade in 1955 with Edward G. Robinson as Illegal, in which the mob's attorney is thusly described: "He never pulls a job but he peddles legal loopholes. He never pulls a trigger but he takes care of the hood who does." Perhaps my favorite screen mouthpiece is a Mae West character who comes to her own defense, arguing her case of breach of promise to the judge and jury in I'm No Angel (1933). In fact, she extends that famous invitation, "Why don't you come up and see me sometime," to his honor -- who finds in her favor. You will see that in our lobby card exhibit we focus on famous judges and juries. These juries and judges are standard ingredients in the screen mixture of law and order, as seen in The Missing Juror (1944). Screen judges, like screen lawyers, come in varied shapes, sizes and sexes. In fact, I am quite sure more women served on cinematic judicial benches in the 1930s and forties than in real courts. Clearly, there was something of a shock intended by this title: A Woman is the Judge. The Career Woman, particularly what the screen called "the lady lawyer," was more often an excuse for romantic melodrama than for an examination of questions of law. Most of the stereotypes of women were neither positive nor career enhancing. The Lady Objects is typical of the "successful lawyer, failed woman" screen syndrome. As law professors, we should not think ourselves exempt from screen stereotyping. I picked Edward G. Robinson's I Am the Law (1938) because this presents a positive view of a law school dean, one who becomes a prosecutor and cleans up his town. Law students get it, too. The American International black exploitation film, J.D.'s Revenge (1976), concerns a gangster who is reincarnated in the body of law student Lou Gossett. Another pre-Paper Chase, but not so well known, law student film is Dean Jones' Handle With Care (1958), in which a student "mock trial" becomes a real investigation that exposes public corruption. It must have been a good educational experience because eighteen years later Jones emerges as The Shaggy D.A. (1976) -- "the only candidate with a law degree and a pedigree." Keeping with the law school theme and the idea that viewers bring their own experience to film, most of you probably did not realize that From Russia With Love (1963) is a law school movie about civil procedure. Well, it is. My first year law school class went en masse after our last exam -- Civil Procedure -- to see it. If you remember the film, as I do, Lotte Lenya was a vindictive civil procedure teacher who went after first-year law student James Bond with a test disguised as a knife in her shoe. There is a long history of law in film, one worthy of serious study. From the earliest silent pictures -- one- and two-reelers -- law and the screen seemed made for each other. Later in this conference, we will hear in some detail about Traffic in Souls (1913), a key film in the exploitive unfolding of law and "white slavery" in "six reels of thrilling realities." Speaking of Law and Order (1953) and thrilling realities, I give you a brief intermission of what I call Reagan-At-Law. Who can forget Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), starring a future president as a college professor who watches while future Maytag repairman Jesse White plea bargains Bonzo's fate. And, of course, Hellcats of the Navy (1957), which has nothing to do with law but I couldn't pass up this "cheap shot" of the only lobby card featuring Ronnie and Nancy. Somehow it seemed appropriate to follow Bonzo and Nancy with Arline Judge in Monogram Picture's Law of the Jungle. Surprisingly, the courtroom scene in Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942) contains a brief thoughtful dissertation by Tarzan on the differences between African jungle law and law in the jungles of New York. Tarzan's points are better stated than most of the answers I graded last week to a similar question in my Legal Anthropology course. Alfred Hitchcock's wartime adventure, Lifeboat (1944), asks many of the questions we raise in our jurisprudence courses, especially when we talk about our old friends, the Speluncian Explorers. John Hodiak asks: "Whose law'? We're on our own here. We can make our own law." Films can and do ask important questions. Like the novel from which it is adapted, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) dramatically challenges vigilantism and lynch law. The film of Billy Budd (1962) raises Melville's classic questions. I remember that when I saw Billy Budd as a law student these questions interested me far more than the jurisdictional issues we were studying in that much maligned Civil Procedure course. This morning I don't want to suggest that film is solely personal; as Joyce Carol Oates suggested, film is also tied to time and place. Films capture an age's sense of the law's issues and its ideas of legal solutions. For example, there is Warner Brothers' powerful I Am a Fugitive From A Chain Gang (1932), a film which helped change penal institutions and practices. Winterset (1936), Maxwell Anderson's poetic verse drama about anarchists and judicial corruption, evokes, even when seen today, the darkness of the Sacco- Vanzetti case upon which the play was based. And for me, an Okie from Muskogee, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), like Our Daily Bread (1934), conveys more about the way the legal system impacts upon "outsiders" than all the Supreme Court Reporters put together. It also has an eerie relevancy in this age of the homeless family. In Knock on Any Door (1949), Bogart is forced to resign from his blue chip, silk stocking law firm when he chooses to represent young accused murderer John Derek. In a classic drama supporting the sociology of the forties and fifties, Bogart himself, the legal profession, and society at large, all bear the heavy burden of a good boy gone bad. Oh the sixties and Easy Rider (1969) and its third-billed lawyer Jack Nicholson who set out with Fonda and Hopper to find America and found stardom instead. In the process he gave us another attorney tragically tuned to time and place. By the eighties, sixties radicals in The Big Chill (1983) had settled into their Reagan-Yuppie world and Mary Kay Place, the corporate lawyer, was listening to her biological clock and picking the impotent William Hurt as the potential father for her child. The cop has always been a popular film subject and Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry (1971) captured an American attitude about "turn 'em loose justice" and "legal technicalities" long before politicians were exploiting Willie Horton at the ballot box. As the lobby card for An Eye for an Eye (1966) asks: "What makes an ex- cop take the law in his own hands'?" The answer came resoundingly off the screen: "The failure of the law." One place where law rarely fails us is in the Old West. Of course, there are hundreds of law-titled Westerns like Johnny Mack Brown in Law of the West. Ron Davis' interviews in the archives at S.M.U. tell us that the "B" Western was often in the can ready for release before the title was even selected. A number of you were fortunate enough to see Buck Jones' One Man Law yesterday afternoon and our next speaker is going to talk about 1930s and 1940s Westerns, hopefully including my favorite, Wyoming Outlaw, which features John Wayne's last Three Mesquiteers appearance before he was rescued from the Saturday Matinee by John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Too often film study and scholarship focuses on "A" features only. We forget that much of screen history is found in popular programmers like the "B" thrillers, Saturday serials, cheap detectives, and formula crime dramas. I'm a "B" film, Republic Studio freak. These were the films shown in Muskogee at the Okla and the Broadway theatres. The big budget "A's," like Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, were always shown at the Ritz, where stylish thieves were right at home projecting a slick view of law and outlaw in lush drama and screwball comedy. Law and legal issues are found in almost every film genre. The melodrama -- the oft-described women's picture -- is exemplified by Somerset Maugham's The Letter (1940), starring Bette Davis, which turned on a trial and the professional misconduct of her lawyer who assured her acquittal with the purchase of the letter from the mysterious Gale Sondergaard whose presence overshadows her dead husband in this stunning French rendering. And, of course, there are the detective films, of which Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a classy example from the early days of film noir. J. Edgar Hoover seemed to have the head of every studio in his pocket so that the film industry turned out picture after picture glorifying the F.B.I. and its "G. Men." In the center of this half-sheet the Osage murders -- the systematic killing of my mother's people -- is one of the featured crimes. (You weren't sure how I'd be able to work Indians into this, were you?) The prison and prison-break picture could be the basis for a whole slide show of its own. Big House, U.S.A. (1955) typically incorporates most of the standard con stories. The studio comedy series -- Dr. Gillespie, Henry Aldrich, Jiggs and Maggie, Dr. Kildare -- all had their brushes with the law, as in MGM's highly successful father/son family pictures like Judge Hardy and Son (1939). The courtroom was as often as not a scene of comedy, as with Peter Sellers in Trial and Error (1962) or, in the world of Disney animation, with The Trial of Donald Duck. Law comes to the horror genre as a central plot element in The Son of Frankenstein (1939) with Boris Karloff's last portrayal of the monster who is used by Bela Lugosi's Igor to kill off, one by one, the members of a jury who sentenced him to be hanged. Other genre's -- science fiction, for example -- feature futuristic jurisprudence as in Outland (1981), which proclaims: "On Jupiter's Moon he's the only law." The sex-ploitation, drive-in, adult film -- not to mention X- rated videos -- found crime and law's response a particularly enticing plot in road shows such as Bootleg Babies or a particularly vulgar pornographic stag film (not pictured here since this is a PG showing) from the archives of the Kinsey Institute, Divorce Lawyer. Somehow, the Reefer Madness (1936) and Devil's Harvest ("The smoke of hell -- the truth about marijuana") films seem to fit here as well. Their rise, not surprisingly, chronicled the anti-drug movement of the 1930s, but these films had become high camp by the 1960s. Over the years, I've collected a number of posters and lobby cards on the black-produced films designed for the segregated theatrical market. Many of the law-related issues of mainstream films are here mirrored, but with their own twist. Finally, the films in which law and the failures of the legal system are most cinematically disturbing -- productions which the French labeled film noir, the dark cinema. This is a world inhabited with as disreputable a bunch of lawyers as ever flickered across the screen and as doomed a group of victims as ever got ensnared by the creaky wheels of justice. This Italian poster for Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) captures the noir feeling of one trapped by forces and fates which suggest the inevitability of defeat: the wrong man, accused of the wrong crime, because he is at the wrong place at the wrong time. In our exhibit we have a number of noir lawyers, but the theme predates these films of the forties and fifties. Henry Fonda, our doomed hero of The Wrong Man, suffers an even more disturbing fate in Fritz Lang's noir precursor You Only Live Once (1937). The law film addresses many of the most serious and controversial questions faced by the legal system. Susan Hayward's Academy Award winning performance in I Want to Live! (1958) not only questions capital punishment but equal justice for women. Storm Center (1956) confronts the firestorm of library censorship amidst the anticommunist hysteria of the fifties with Bette Davis as a civil libertarian librarian. Fredric March is a stem judge who takes the life of his wife Florence Eldridge in An Act of Murder (1948), a film which asks, as the poster proclaims: "Can you condemn this man? He murdered with mercy in his heart!" And, well, what can I say: bootlegging and car chasing? Shades of Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road (1958)'? Is this a film genre or just screeching brakes and hairy-chested beefcake? Burt Reynolds is in White Lightning (1973) where "the law is for breakin'." In our lobby card exhibit we look at a group of films focusing on race relations, civil rights and domestic questions. Note films like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) or Monogram's effort to use a fading Kay Francis to make their version of an "A" film called Divorce (1945). As we close out this look at Hollywood law, since this is just after Christmas -- "a family time" -- I want to glance at several films of the family in legal conflict over "youth run wild." A film which screams of its time and place is James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) which begins, as you may recall, at the police station and echoes the common theme boldly stated in the PRC programmer, I Accuse My Parents. It all leads, of course, to Untamed Youth (1957). Read along with me from this Mamie Van Doren classic: "Youth Turned Rock-N-Roll Wild. Kids Gone Wrong." It is fun to look at the hype and hooey of such fifties films -- indeed, many of the films of my youth -- but, in conclusion, I would like us to look at what film at its best is able to do and say about the law. I was tempted, for the movie that changed my life, to chose Paths of Glory (1957) rather than Inherit the Wind. An example of the court martial film at its best, Paths of Glory forces us to face the futility of war and the abuse of power in a way that is so disturbing that we are never quite the same again. Films show us both man -- and womankind at their best and worst -- often on the same occasion -- as in the French film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which was adapted from the actual trial transcript and demonstrates the universality of the silent cinema. Films show us the saints and the martyred, like John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). With almanac in hand, Lincoln has become to the American public the ideal lawyer, the supreme practitioner from a golden age when law and lawyers served the nation well. The screen has also given us ordinary men, like that most extraordinary of ordinary men, Jimmy Stewart, struggling in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Behind it -- or, as in this poster showing the Judge from MGM's A Stranger in Town (1966), in the center of it -- is THE LAW .... Alexis de Tocqueville first noted that in America, sooner or later, every political question becomes a legal one and, as we have learned in the wake of Roe v. Wade, every legal question can become a political one. Sometimes important issues come out of Texas. At its best, a movie can take the shadow of justice and injustice and, with its enlarged images flickering across the screen, remind us that law in the final analysis is a human enterprise, that there is a human cost behind both our failures and our successes. Films can return us to occasions which have tested the law -- and tested it in the most human of terms. I close with this image from another favorite film -- John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), in which lawyer James Stewart asks John Wayne: "What kind of a community have I come to?" Film not only tells us what kind of community we have become but also is capable of helping us understand what kind of community we ought to become -- or, at least it did for me back in the late fifties sitting in the Thompson/Cherokee Theatre in Tahlequah. I knew, then and there, as I continue to believe here and now, as Spencer Tracy told the court: "You cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. A wicked law destroys everyone it touches." Indian Law and Policy, The University of Oklahoma. 1. David Rosenberg, ed., The Movie That Changed My Life, (New York: Viking, 1991). 2. Joyce Carol Oates, "Dracula: the Vampire's Secret," in Rosenberg, 73-74. 3. Id., 74. |
