Genre #6 - Courtroom Dramas - A Debriefing

Here's the order The American Film Institute puts the movies in: #10 - Judgements at Nuremberg, #9 - A Cry in the Dark, #8 - In Cold Blood, #7 - Anatomy of a Murder, #6 - Witness for the Prosecution, #5 - A Few Good Men, #4 - The Verdict, #3 - Kramer Vs Kramer, #2 - 12 Angry Men, and #1 - To Kill a Mockingbird.

Here's My Order:

#10 - The Verdict (1982) - I can't think of anything good about this movie. It was boring, the way it was filmed was alienating, I don't remember it at all. Surprisingly, not from the 70's.

#9 - A Cry in the Dark (1988) - All the flaws of The Verdict, but at least it has the delivery of "A dingo ate my baby."

#8 - Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) - It didn't really stick with me very much, and it lags in bits, but it did raise a lot of valid ethical questions, and that makes for a good movie.

#7 - Witness for the Prosecution (1958) - I was very entertained by this movie. I liked the lack of romance, the old British protagonist the very Christie plot, the humorous banter. It was a fun movie to watch.

#6 - Anatomy of a Murder (1959) - I really like Jimmy Stewart,l I love the Michigan setting, and the story is great. You're legitimately not certain what's true or not. My favorite part of this movie is the soundtrack - It's the first mainstream movie not about jazz to have an all-jazz score. I wonder if it's because it's set in Michigan?

#5 - In Cold Blood (1967) - I've read the book and I love Truman Capote's prose style, and I really like the very 60's aesthetic of the movie - It's like murderous, poverty-stricken Mad Men. This is a great character study of the murderers, and it was actually filmed in the house were the murders toke place in reality, which seems in poor taste to me, but whatever.

#4 - A Few Good Men (1992) - Great cast, really really great script, and probably my favorite film on the list, if not necessarily the best. I would watch this movie over and over again.

#3 - Kramer Vs Kramer (1979) - Despite being made in the 70's, this is stiff competition for A Few Good Men as my favorite, probably mostly because of Dustin Hoffman. I really like the message and the actual film itself, even though Meryl Streep is super creepy in it.

#2 - 12 Angry Men (1957) - I like how stylized this movie is, and it's got all these great characters (Twelve, actually) that you remember for a long time, and the guy who plays Piglet is in it (He's also a poker buddy of the Odd Couple, fun fact), and it's against prejudice, which is great because I'm against prejudice.

#1 - To Kill a Mockingbird (1963) - It's just an American classic, you know? Atticus Finch is who we all look up to, or should look up to, and it's still also about growing up and childhood, and prejudice and empathy. It packs a lot in there, but it doesn't feel forced. The kids in it are great, and it has Gregory Peck. Which is great.

Courtroom Drama #1 - To Kill a Mockingbird (1963)

I've read this book in school, of course. I like it - It's about a Southern lawyer, Atticus Finch, who defends a black man who's been accused of raping a white woman. It's also a coming of age story for Atticus' daughter Scout, the narrator. It's one of the Great American Novels. The whole movie has a sort of lazy, heat of summer feel, and there's also a theme about having empathy for people, and not hurting innocent things. It's a classic.

Gregory Peck is really well-known for this role. I always thought that he didn't seem all that much like Atticus, apparently Harper Lee herself loved it, so I suppose I'm alone there. Something's that great to me about this movie is how much people love Atticus. The American Film Institute has a list of the greatest heros in American film, and Atticus is number one - Just ahead of James Bond and Indiana Jones. There's something terrific about that to me. Atticus isn't fighting Nazis or Communists, he's just a regular, stoic guy who's doing the right thing even though he can't win and it causes trouble for him. I love that that's the kind of guy people idolize.

I also want to point out that I've been to Monroeville, Alabama, which is the town that the town in the movie is based on, and that childhood friends Truman Capote and Harper Lee both have works that ended up on this list. Fun fact.

Courtroom Drama #2 - 12 Angry Men (1957)

I've actually seen this movie before, and read the play. I like it. It's about prejudice and the justice system and it's a very stylized movie. Most of it takes place in one room and in real time, and none of the characters have names. They're just Number 8 and 6 and so on. The 12 angry men are a jury, and they're on an apparently open-and-shut murder case with a death sentence hanging over it. All of the jurors are convinced that the accused is guilty except for one, Juror #8, who thinks that they should at least just talk about it for a while.

The rest of the movie is just people talking to each other, about the case and racism and the concept of reasonable doubt. It's a very, very character driven piece - It must be a great play to be in. The power that this movie has is really incredible when you look at how it's made - It's just twelve guys with no names in a room. It's even more incredible than A Few Good Men (It has more men in its title, for one thing). You can totally tell all of the characters are coming from and what we're supposed to think about them, and all they really talk about is the one case. It's great writing.

And the guy who plays Piglet is in it. As it turns out, he uses his natural voice for that role.

Courtroom Drama #3 - Kramer Vs Kramer (1979)

This project has taught me many things: There's no movie that won't benefit from Jack Nicholson. They stopped making good mysteries in 1959. Stories that take place in the Middle East never last less than three hours. But the most important lesson that I will take for this endeavor is this: You can always rely on a movie made in the 70's to be unwatchably boring.

Which is why I was surprised to find that this movie, was awesome. I think it's probably the influence of Dustin Hoffman here. I'd only seen him before in All the President's Men, but he pops up a lot in the remaining movies (roughly seventy, by the way.) He's amazing. He carries the brunt of the story here - Most of the time we're watching him by himself or with a little kid - and he just makes the whole movie great. He even makes up for the typical 70's movie maneuver of not using music. He can handle a silent scene. He also has great hair.

Kramer Vs. Kramer is about a man whose life leaves him and their young son. He and his son bond and build a life together. Then, his ex-wife decides that she wants the child back, and they get into a custody battle over him. The thing is is that we want the son to stay with Dustin Hofman, but we know that's not going to happen because it's 1979. It's all very sad. The movie's really about gender roles and how they relate to parenting (They don't) and I thought it was very touching.

Meryl Streep was also in it. She was nominated for an Oscar for it. Obviously.

Courtroom Drama #4 - The Verdict (1982)

This movie was boring. That's pretty much all I remember about it. I know that the lawyer's an alcoholic and the case is about medical malpractice, and I think they won, but I actually don't remember. I do remember that one of their witnesses is a doctor but he's black, and that's bad for the case. I was surprised that that would still be the case in 1982.

The filming style was very seventies - No background music at all, very long takes and scenes where nothing really happens. It was also very gray. I almost felt that I was watching this movie second-hand - like I was watching someone watch it in another movie. I just didn't get into at all, and when I compare it to a movie like a A Few Good Men, I was just totally unconnected to it. When I remember A Few Good Men, I remember the universe of the movie, but when I think of The Verdict, I remember watching the movie. It was just so boring.

Courtroom Drama #5 - A Few Good Men (1992)

Much like Witness for the Prosecution, I did not want to watch this movie. I put it off for a long time, and I didn't think I would like it, but then...the credits. Oh, Rob Reiner I said. Well that's nice. And then Aaron Sorkin came up - Aaron Sorkin. And everything started to look more promising. And the actors: Jack Nicholson, Kevin Bacon, Christopher Guest - How could this movie not be awesome? And it was everything the credits promised.

The story is about a hazing ritual and Military culture. Tom Cruise is a lawyer in the Navy and he has to defend two Marines who accidentally killed another Marine because Jack Nicholson told him to and Demi Moore is also there. And she's great. The story is very very dialogue driven, because Aaron Sorkin wrote it, and the ending scene is just so intense and engaging, and it's just people talking to each other. It was probably the best courtroom scene I've seen in the entire genre, and it gets all of its emotion and excitement from then great acting and the great dialogue.

The whole movie came as a surprise attack of quality to me. Jack Nicholson is always great and creepy (And this has to be the fifth or sixth time we've seen him by now), and I was entertained the whole time and I cared about the outcome of the case. I was so, so glad that it didn't really have a romance in it in the end, and more than anything, I actually enjoyed watching it. I would watch it again, even. This movie was good entertainment.

Courtroom Drama #6 - Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

So I put this one off for a long time, but that really turned out to be a mistake - This was probably the most light-hearted movie I'm going to see on this list. It looks very sensational on the poster, but don't be fooled - It's really a sort of mystery dramedy British thing. It's a Billy Wilder-directed Agatha Christie movie, and it's fun. It's about the mystery - a murder, obviously - and about the escapades of the...District Attorney, maybe? I don't know what his job is, but he's a lawyer. He just had a heart attack, and he's this mean British guy, which means that he's definitely not the DA, because they don't have those in Britain (I assume), but that doesn't really matter. He's important, and he's defending the accused murderer. He's also Charles Laughton - Just so you're picturing this right.


The man he's defending may have murdered his (the murderer's) rich elderly lady friend, and the murderer's wife, despite telling Charles Laughton that she wants to help her husband, ends up testifying as a witness for the prosecution (Hey! That's the title of the movie!). She's Marlene Dietrich, who was also in Judgement at Nuremberg.

I actually didn't expect the ending, which was fun, but I should have - It is Agatha Christie, after all. It was a fun but rather blandish mystery before that; It's a lot like The Usual Suspects in that respect, actually. I was glad we didn't have to sit through a real romance, because those are getting very tedious, especially in this genre. The Courtroom Drama apparently does not lend itself to a love story, but they keep shoving them in there anyway. It's really, really getting on my nerves. This one was  really about an older man though, so they didn't really do anything like that.


Fun fact: Apparently Alfred Hitchcock used to get all kinds of compliments about this movie, which is odd to me - It's doesn't seem like his style at all, really. Maybe it's because Marlene's a blonde. 


I liked the humor that they had throughout this movie, and I liked the lawyer character a lot, because he was very fun to watch, and he had a lot of great scenes in the beginning. I also enjoyed the ending. The middle bit was iffy to me, but the movie makes up for it. Good show Christie, good show.

Courtroom Drama #7 - Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

I actually put off watching Anatomy of a Murder for a long time, because the thing is three hours long and the beginning is just not exciting, but once I finally got around to watching it, it was not as mind-numbingly boring as I thought it would be. Jimmy Stewart is in it, and he's just a simple country lawyer from Michigan who's defending a man who killed the man who raped his wife - Or did he? It's actually pretty engaging. It leaves you actually guessing about whether or not everyone's story is true, and even the ending is pretty ambiguous (Or I just didn't understand it. That's also an option.) It discusses the rape in frank language that you don't even always see in movies today, and practically never in movies made during the reign of the Hayes Code. I was extremely surprised by that aspect of the movie. It was filmed up in the U.P., because apparently they have buildings there that don't serve to guide ships to shore, which also surprised me.

Anatomy of a Murder is also based on a true story, which makes it the fourth movie in the genre to be so. I'm not really surprised by this - court cases do lend themselves well to entertainment - but didn't expect all of the movies I've seen so far to have some basis in reality. In Cold Blood is even straight-up nonfiction. Almost as surprising as those buildings in the Upper Peninsula (Not to mention that whole town full of people!)

The best parts of this movie are actually totally unexpected. For one thing, for some reason, the judge is totally awesome. He's just always making all kinds of snarky comments and he doesn't put up with Jimmy Stewart's crap and he makes the whole thing so much more entertaining. I don't know why he's like that, but hey, it's cool. He's not even an actor - the judge is played by Joseph Welch, who was the lawyer who represented the U.S. Army in the Joseph McCarthy hearings. You know, in real life. And he's like the best part of this movie.

Another great thing about the movie: The soundtrack is great. It's all jazzy and fantastic. And do you know who it was composed by? Duke Ellington, of all people! It is exactly what you would expect from a movie score by Duke Ellington. It's actually of historic interest, too, because it's the first main-stream movie that wasn't, like, night-club themed or something to feature a jazz score. It's groundbreaking.

I also want to point out that this a great looking black and white film. It's so crisp and the contrast in every shot is just perfect. It was good that I was consciously thinking about it for pretty much the whole movie. It was just so well filmed.

In conclusion: Anatomy of a Murder was surprisingly entertaining, and surprisingly frank, and surprisingly not just three hours of trees, like I would expect a movie filmed in the Upper Peninsula to be. I would watch it again. It also had Saul Bass credits, by the way - That's a good sign for a movie. Look at Vertigo.

Courtroom Drama #8 - In Cold Blood (1967)

I was actually really excited when I saw that In Cold Blood was on this list. I read the book last summer and really liked it, and I don't think I even knew there was a movie. In Cold Blood is a Truman Capote book, and I really like him - I enjoy his writing style and inexplicable film appearances - so the book was a big hit with me. It's nonfiction and about this random murder of a family in Kansas. It's really a character study of the guys who committed the crime, and the story, especially in the movie, follows them more than any other side of the murder. It's very interesting - the story makes a point of making them real people, and even though they aren't portrayed at all sympathetically, there still not just flat-out evil. It also comes right at the beginning of the time when they were starting to get some information on the phenomenon of serial killers - the idea of people killing just for the sake of it was just becoming a real theory at the time - So it was interesting to see them discuss that in the movie.

 The whole thing is a lot like Rope to me, which is an Alfred Hitchcock movie about Leopold and Loeb (They murdered a man as an intellectual exercise) from way back in 1940. The two men in that movie have a very similar relationship to the men in In Cold Blood, at least as far as their murdering dynamic goes. It should be noted that I don't actually think their relationships are similar in any other way. The dynamic they have is interesting to me though, because even with only the two instances of it, it gives the impression that that sort of dynamic is common in murder, that you get two people pushing each other toward that to...impress each other, basically, often. It's interesting to me that you can see the same relationship between two unrelated sets of murders. It's very strange.

But the movie - It is wonderfully Sixties. I really liked the way it was filmed. The music was very guitar-y and plucky and it was filmed in that 60's way with all the weird angles and like filming from above and musical montages and things - Think a darker West Side Story. It was in black and white but the picture was real sharp, so I liked the contrast. The whole thing was very enjoyable to watch. It does drag a little at the end and in the middle, when they're in Mexico, but it picks up, so that's okay. The only thing I really didn't like was that they filmed the movie in the house where the actual murders occurred. That just seems...icky to me. I'm not a fan of that.

I really liked In Cold Blood - It was interesting and it was well filmed and it had good music. I thought about it way more than I thought about A Cry in the Dark. Also, Paul Frees just randomly showed up in the middle, which was a fun surprise.

Courtroom Drama #9 - A Cry in the Dark (1988)

So, Blogger just updated itself and you guys - I can't figure out how it works. I am just not quite hip enough. So bear with me if anything weird happens to the formatting.

A Cry in the Dark was...boring. Really, really boring. It's about that woman who was arrested in Australia because she said that a dingo ate her baby, but everyone thought she murdered it. I know - That sounds interesting. It isn't. Meryl Streep is in it, and it has some commentary on media sensationalism, and the phrase "A dingo ate my baby" is hi-larious, but somehow that does not all add up to entertainment. I just....It did not make an impression on me. It was so Eighties, and not in a fun way - I mean come on: Look at the poster. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't engaging at all. Judgement at Nuremberg at least made me feel something. It made me think about things. This movie just didn't. That's the peril of the early part of the list, of course. We all remember Reds, for example, and Blue Velvet. There are always a couple of movies that I just don't really care about. Movies that don't make we want to say anything about them. I assume we'll have to work through a lot of this once I get to the sports movies, unfortunately.

But enough about that - Here's the thing, you guys: I have 229 days until the end of the world, and seventy movies, give or take. This is possible. But I really have to buckle down. I have to zoom through these Courtroom Dramas and get right on to the Gangsters (Which should be fun), the Sports (Which should be torture), and the Westerns (Jury's still out on the Westerns). Then it's the Romances, the Comedies, and the Romantic Comedies. And then Citizen Kane. I can do this. This can happen. And the next movie actually was really good, so I'll have something to say about that, at least.

Courtroom Drama #10 - Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)

This movie makes me kind of uncomfortable. It's cool - It's supposed to - But it's still not a pleasant watch. You see, Judgement at Nuremberg is about the trial of German judges involved with the Holocaust. It's largely about the accountability of the German people in the Holocaust. Whether they're responsible or not even though they didn't specifically kill anyone. It does raise a lot of questions - Are people responsible, Is convicting a judge different than convicting an average citizen, questions like that.

It's uncomfortable, though, because the Nazis are supposed to be sympathetic. If there's one thing that everyone's certain of, it's that the Nazis were unquestionably wrong. I don't like watching anything that suggests that maybe they weren't. It doesn't sit well with me. The movie does, ultimately, decide that the judges were guilty. The point of the whole movie, though, was that everyone's responsible for the tragedy in some way, because everyone just ignored it. I suppose that's a fair point.

The theme of the movie really overshadowed all of the rest of it for me. I suppose that the acting must have been good, because I didn't notice it at all. Spencer Tracy was in it, which was nice - Everyone likes Spencer Tracy. The cinematography was actually pretty weird - There was a lot of sudden zooms into people's faces. Sort of made me motion sick, actually. Really this movie's strength is it's content - that's what makes it stand out. Also, there's some footage of an actual concentration camp hidden in there, so be warned.

Genre #6 - Courtroom Dramas

This genre is the strangest to me. It seems, you know, oddly specific. Not that it isn't a legitimate type of movie or anything, but it seems weird that they have such a detailed division of film like this and not, say, war movies. That's right - No war movies list, and yet: Courtroom Drama. It's very strange to me.

I'm not going to lie - I'm slugging through this genre a little bit. The thing about Courtroom Dramas is that a lot of the action is just people talking to each other, which isn't all that interesting in film ten times in a row. So I'm hoping I'll be able to get some momentum going and get through this quickly, so I can move on to the ever so exciting Westerns. Woo hoo.