Tag Archives: Courtroom drama

The Rainmaker (Francis Ford Coppola, 1997)

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Caught Coppola’s The Rainmaker on TV last night, one of his weaker efforts, visually undistinguished, narratively a mess with that constant annoying voice-over. And yet it’s one of those films I’m drawn to watching over and over again because….isn’t Coppola great with actors? Here Matt Damon and Claire Danes, so delicate and true, and now seeming so young. Danny Devito playing up to his persona and being funny with it. But it’s in all the supporting cast that we see how Coppola brings out the best in actors: Jon Voight as a rich, slick, charming sell-out; Roy Scheider in a tiny role, making an impression and delighting with the way he elongates his lines, picks his pauses; Mary Kay Place, unrecognisable and moving as the mother; Teresa Wright as Damon’s landlady offering her warmth, depth and range in her last film role. And this is not even mentioning others with bigger roles (a still recognisable Mickey Rourke, Danny Glover as the judge, Virginia Madsen as a lovely bruised blonde with big hurt eyes) or those in tiny roles (Dean Stockwell as the corrupt judge at the beginning is so great with a few lines; and Randy Travis as the juror who jumps out of the jury box to assault the lawyer). I’m sure I’m forgetting some of them. But what a great cast, all judiciously cast and at their very best. For Coppola.

José Arroyo

Scandal (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

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Very enjoyable but perhaps the least successful of the Kurosawas I’ve been seeing recently. Each individual episode is masterfully shot but the film as a whole doesn’t cohere. It begins as a light and glamorous screwball about a famous artist (Toshiro Mifune) who meets a star (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) in a mountain retreat, the paparazzo take a shot of them together and sell them to the Amour magazine claiming evidence  of a secret affair. They decide to sue and hire a lawyer (Takashi Shimura) with a gambling addiction and a tubercular daughter. At this point the film shifts tone and focus, leaving the glamorous couple behind to focus on the moral failings of a good but weak man. The film then shifts again, this time into a Christmas film, with lots of orchestral versions of famous American holiday songs, culminating in Auld Lang Syne and highlighting the redemptive potential of the holiday season itself. Will the lawyer whose sold out his clients to the pulps honour his now dead daughter and do the right thing for his clients? This is drawn out in the finale which becomes a courtroom procedural. So, a film with serious themes —  the limits of free speech in the age of mass media —  but of dual protagonists, various genres, too sudden shits in tone, that doesn’t quite cohere. What I liked best were the montages, first a 30s style one of the pulp press sinking its teeth into the story, then the cycling races affording opportunities for gambling. There’s also an incredible shot of Mifune looking very dashing, riding his motorcycle with a fully decorated tree at the back being followed by children. It’s a film of many pleasures that is not quite good.

José Arroyo

The Scandal Montage:

At the (bicycle) races:

Cool Yule turns melodrama:

An illustration of the mastery of compositions, a triangle structure of paparazzo at the centre as the lawyer on the left speaks, leaving room for another court official on the right, thus illustrating the tension of the theme, the law vs the press:

José Arroyo

An Act of Murder (Michael Gordon, 1948)

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An example of the fluidity of noir as a term. ACT OF MURDER is a domestic melodrama which would have been marketed as a ‘serious’ film on difficult moral and ethical issues: is mercy killing acceptable even if a dear one is terminal and in unbearable pain? Should intentions be a consideration when applying the law, by whom and to what extent? It’s the themes and the ‘seriousness’ of treatment that would have drawn in Fredric March and Florence Eldridge to star. They’d subsequently perform Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE and O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT on Broadway in the 50s to great acclaim as one of America’s great couples of the theatres (the Lunts being the only rivals).

 

March plays Calvin Cooke, a judge who applies the law literally and harshly. His daughter (Geraldine Brooks) is about to be engaged to a lawyer (Edmond O’Brien) with a different, more liberal interpretation and understanding. Cooke’s convictions are put to the test when, after celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, the wife he still loves is diagnosed with a terminal illness whose ending will be accompanied by horrifying pain, currently untreatable. When he sees the pain she’s in, he decides to put an end to further reoccurrences by crashing his car in the hopes of killing her and himself. She dies. He turns himself in with every expectation of having the law applied to himself as he has applied it to others. But his daughter’s fiancé steps in to offer an unsolicited and unwelcome defence that nonetheless saves his neck, and converts him to the point of view the film hopes to convince the audience of: that intentions and individual circumstances matter.

An absorbing, efficient melodrama that in the last twenty minutes develops into a court-room drama, very well-acted throughout but ultimately unconvincing. The famous Universal Courthouse set was built for this film. The gap between the film’s ambitions and its achievements can be seen in the funhouse sequence, clearly influenced by Welles’ A LADY FROM SHANGAHI but not a patch on it. Based on a novel by Ernst Lothar.