The Verdict

The way I do this, or did this when I was a young cinephile, is by picking someone and working through all of their films.

Well, not all of them, usually if the reviews all stink I’ll avoid the thing. But this method is how I ended up seeing almost all the Clint Eastwood flicks, and Scorsese’s cannon and most of the Spielberg entertainments. I’ve grown up with Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino so I’ve watched all of those (well I skipping some the Kevin Smith stuff.)

It’s, theoretically, a director’s medium, but in several cases there are writers I try not to miss, David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin especially.

Along the way I tracked down most the highpoints of director Sidney Lumet’s career. So Serpico, of course, and 12 Angry Men and his last great work (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) I think I caught in a theater in 2007. Lumet is one of the great directors of his generation but his style is grounded in documentary and realism.

He doesn’t draw attention to himself.

Dog Day Afternoon certainly has its directorial flourishes but Lumet is usually content to let the story work on its own terms.

There are directors I mostly dislike precisely because they won’t ever let me forget I’m watching a movie and that they directed it.

Anyway, The Verdict is one of those all-timer Lumet movies that should be up there with the best of his work. Paul Newman, playing an old, drunken, failure of a lawyer is given a case by his former law partner.

The movie will eventually explain why Newman (Frank Galvin) is so down and out and then Galvin will, of course, break all the rules in order to win this thing as he finally shakes back to a sober and productive life.

It’s a movie where a lawyer goes to the hospital, sees his pitiful client, and essentially vows to himself that he will cross heaven and hell to see righteousness prevail.

Material like that shouldn’t work. But Newman and Lumet make it work. Apparently, there were several versions of this script but Lumet went back to an older version written by a playwright who had only one other movie credit to his name.

That playwright was David Mamet and the other credit was the Jack Nicholson version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

I didn’t realize it was Mamet until I got to a scene where Newman meets with the opposition. They want to buy him and his clients off. Which is exactly what a good lawyer should do. The whole point of the thing is to take a settlement.

But, as I said earlier, he met the client and made a vow and now, even to his own shock, he can’t take the blood money.

The opposition then points out that Newman doesn’t have a lot of options.

“How’s your law practice?” one of them asks.

“Not too good. I only got the one client,” Newman responds.

And, that’s when I knew this was a Mamet script. Witty but with dialogue that can cut straight to the heart. There’s a betrayal in here too about midway through the movie. And the way it is presented, and the dialogue around it, is unique.

Mamet and Lumet come from the same school of movie making. Show it and don’t tell it and whatever you do don’t overwrite it. The beauty of poetry, haiku, street magic and filmmaking is in doing as little as possible to get a powerful response out of the audience.

Anyway, if you are in the mood for a lawyer picture then this is a top notch lawyer picture. If you want to make a night of it I suggest A Civil Action, which has John Travolta and Robert Duval, and teaches the opposite lesson about lawyers and empathy.

And The Rainmaker which is the best of the John Grisham adaptations and has Matt Damon being earnest, Danny DeVito being sleazy and John Voight being haughty. It might be the best lawyer movie ever made.

The Verdict stands with them. It’s a great one.