As faculty blogger of the month, I feel obligated to address this month’s question about one’s favorite movie about legal practice. In truth I have no such favorite movie, only some that are less tedious or off-putting than others. Yet the recent passing of John Mortimer (left) compels me to say just a few words. (I know an “ode” is supposed to be a poem, but I’m a lawyer after all, so a short essay is the best I could hope for.)
I honestly do not much like movies or television shows about lawyers or legal practice. It’s not that they are “unrealistic”; they are, after all, entertainment, not educational in purpose. The lawyers are usually caricatures at one extreme or the other. On the one side you have the unctuous Atticus Finch-type (I’d rather leave the planet than read or watch To Kill a Mockingbird — Finch loses the big case and gets his client killed; nice job!) and on the other you have the venal sleaze-ball. I like subtlety. Denzel Washington’s character in Philadelphia, for example, is affecting because he portrays a lawyer fighting his own demons while battling for his client.
And this brings me to John Mortimer, himself an accomplished barrister, a champion of free speech, and a gifted writer who died last week in Great Britain.
Mortimer’s alter ego was the quintessential Old Bailey hack Horace Rumpole. (The Old Bailey is London’s criminal court.) Over the decades Mortimer wrote scores of Rumpole stories that appeared in print and on television. I’ll confess that I have not watched a Rumpole episode since the 1980s, but as a young lawyer learning how to try cases I was drawn to the character. I certainly did not want to emulate Rumpole — an obnoxious fat old guy who drank way too much and ignored his family. (On my worst days, even I don’t aim that low.) Rather, Mortimer’s Rumpole had a passion for lawyering along with a grudging affection for his clients, mostly petty criminals, despite their shortcomings. He relished examining witnesses and trading salvos with opposing counsel and the bench. Most of all, Rumpole appreciated that trying cases was at once both an art form and an intellectual exercise, and the trial itself a key feature of the rule of law. Rumpole did not judge his clients; rather, he understood that under the rule of law his client was guilty only if the prosecution met its burden of proof. And in Horace Rumpole the audience saw a lawyer who would rather be trying a case, win or lose, than doing just about anything else in the world. When this happens you have found your niche in the profession, whatever it may be.
Thanks for a rare but well-placed shot at TKAM. I often winced at the nearly obligatory adulation of Atticus Finch in law school. I find the novel bleak because it seems to say, after all, how little one person can do to change an unjust society. Besides that, Finch is just not a believable character and does too little to be justifiably called heroic.
A very nice appreciation.
Years ago I read an excellent book called The Trials of Oz, which chronicled the obscenity/free speech trial of the eponymous “humor” magazine at which John Mortimer famously served as defense counsel.
I expect the book might be difficult to find nowadays but I see there was a television adaptation produced in 1991 and written by the book’s author, Tony Palmer.
It appears to be British teevee, based on the (stellar) cast, which includes Hugh Grant, Alfred Molina, and the late, great Nigel Hawthorne.
That one’s got to be worth watching.
There is a surprisingly common type of lawyer in contemporary popular culture who falls in between the lawyer as altruistic hero and the lawyer as slimey conniver. This third type of lawyer character starts out self-interested and duplicitious but then has an epiphany and is redeemed. Redemption stories are nothing new, but I find it intriguing that the lay public can relate so easily and frequently to a lawyer in need of redemption. Part of this involves distrust of lawyers in the first place, but on a deeper level a lawyer character can be the existential everyman. And who among us doesn’t need redemption of some sort?
For me, the quintessential lawyer redemption story is Barry Reed’s 1980 novel, The Verdict. Reed was a successful Boston trial lawyer who dabbled in writing on the side. The Verdict was his first novel, and it was published by Simon & Schuster.
The Verdict is the story of Frank Galvin, an alcoholic Irish-Catholic lawyer in Boston who squandered his early promise and by the time of the novel has hit rock bottom. He solicits clients at funerals, and he spends what little he earns on drink and cheap floosies.
However, redemption arrives with the opportunity to represent a young couple in their medical malpractice lawsuit against a powerful Boston hospital owned by the Catholic Church and represented by one of the city’s most powerful law firms. Although their young child has been left in a comatose state, the couple has few resources and they turn to Galvin for legal assistance because they feel that they have no other choice.
Resisting pressures to settle the case and fighting off the demons that haunt him, Galvin argues eloquently on behalf of his clients and justice is done when the jury enters a multi-million dollar verdict on their behalf.
Like many lawyer novels, The Verdict is best known for the film based upon it. The movie version was released under the same title in 1982. The Sidney Lumet directed film starred Paul Newman as Frank Galvin, and the screenplay was written by David Mamet.
Interestingly, Robert Redford was the original choice to play Frank Galvin, but Redford did not like the script. In retrospect, this was fortunate because Newman was a perfect Frank Galvin. Although the film did not ultimately win any significant academy awards it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Leading Actor, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Unfortunately for the Verdict, the Academy Awards that year almost all went to Richard Attenborough’s film Ghandi.
To pick up on Gordon’s post, Gandhi was also a lawyer, although that aspect of his education and career often seems underplayed, perhaps because his message and methods do not fit comfortably within stereotypes of lawyers.
George Orwell had this to say about Ghandi: “Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions.”