So how much of law school was devoted to watching movies? And which ones? I’m guessing My Cousin Vinny, The Verdict, The Paper Chase?
Not that much, actually. I only remember seeing The Castle in class. Oh wait, we also saw To Kill a Mockingbird in Professional Ethics class.
The ones you mentioned, and plenty of others dealing with legal topics (e.g. Inherit the Wind), were available in the library, however. You could borrow them for a week or so, or you could watch them in the library, which had players and TVs. You used headphones in the library, of course.
Too bad. I was hoping my extensive experience with Dick Wolf dramas would give me a leg up in law school; perhaps even skipping the first year.
This movie, originally entitled The American Way, was pulled, re-cut and re-released as Riders of the Storm.
Given that the movie, starring Dennis Hopper, is concerned with…
…a crew of misfit Vietnam veterans highly trained in psychological warfare and armed with a B29 equipped as a flying pirate TV station creating havoc for the broadcast networks and authorities as they fly the country on a crusade to bring radical philosophies and classic audiovisuals to a conservative and media brainwashed viewing public.
On the verge of retirement they are compelled to mount one last campaign to destroy a demographically engineered presidential candidate who would see the country brought to war again.
…this movie might have been ahead of its time.
We were watching A Star Is Born (1937) last night. Near the beginning, someone suggests that Esther Blodgett needs a dose of sulphur and molasses. That reminded me of this one:
Brimstone And Treacle (1982).
The play features a middle-aged middle-class couple living in a north London suburb whose life has been catastrophically affected by a hit-and-run accident which has left their beautiful undergraduate daughter totally dependent upon them. Their lives are dramatically changed by the arrival of a mysterious young stranger.
The ‘mysterious young stranger’, Martin Taylor, was creepily portrayed by Sting.
Circle of Iron, 1978, Starring David Carradine, Roddy McDowell, Christopher Lee…written by and meant for Bruce Lee. A rather odd movie involving martial arts. I think I saw it one night on ‘Joe Bob Briggs’ Drive-In-Theater’ on cable tv.
It was on Silver Screen recently.
You reminded me of another Sting movie — Julia and Julia, starring Kathleen Turner and Gabriel Byrne. Should stay forgotten. Seriously.
The Cassandra Crossing Richard Harris gives it his all, but a huge cast does not necessarily a good movie make.
There’s a Jack Nicholson thriller that nobody but me seems to remember, The Pledge, with Jack as a detective tracking down a murderous pedophile.
The similarly-named J-horror flick The Grudge came out, IIRC, around the same time and got tons of attention online, which was kind of annoying since it was so easy to misread the name, click on threads and be disappointed.
I’ve never seen that particular movie, but I remember when it came out because it is based on the renowned Swiss post-war author Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel “Das Versprechen” (The Pledge). The novel was first adapted in the same year as “It Happened In Broad Daylight” with Heinz Rühmann in the lead role and Gert Fröbe as the villain. I read and saw both the novel and the film as a very young man and was impressed. It’s a strong story.
I’ve seen it, and I liked it quite a bit. I mostly loved the people in the town. Not overly sweet, either.
The Legal Eagle recommended The Rainmaker, an early film made from a Grisham novel. I watched it based on his recommendation, and I liked it quite a lot. It was nice to have the Eagle vouch for its accuracy.
I read The Rainmaker as a book before I saw the movie and thought it was terrible, in that the insurance firm was so comically corrupt and the case so obviously stacked against it.
I’m not a fan of Grisham’s writing so I’m not surprised that the book was clunky, but the movie was not that heavy-handed. The emphasis was on Matt Damon’s character, less on the insurance company. Although it was the courtroom scenes that Legal Eagle was praising especially.
I’ve been looking at movies that seem like they were made soon after WWII when some of the smarter people were asking “we saved the world from fascism, only for it to be taken over by phonies.”
The Hucksters, remembered for the scene where Sidney Greenstreet hocks green phlegm onto the table to illustrate the power of advertising, is about a scheme to exploit a war widow to sell soap.
“What’s America to us? A blank space between New York and Hollywood where people buy soap.”
Champagne for Caesar: an outraged bookworm determines to bankrupt (yet another) soap company by defeating their quiz show.
“If it is noteworthy and rewarding to know that 2 and 2 make 4 to the accompaniment of deafening applause and prizes, then 2 and 2 making 4 will become the top level of learning.”
Callaway Went Thataway: A cowboy serial’s revival is a hit, but its original star is missing so a lookalike is foisted upon the public. Then the original reappears, falling-down drunk. The myth of the American West was so sacrosanct that even its Hollywood incarnation was off-limits. So this parody had to carry the disclaimer:
This picture was made in the spirit of fun, and was meant in
no way to detract from the wholesome influence, civic mindedness and the many charitable contributions of Western idols of our American youth, or to be a portrayal of any of them.
The Great Man, often overshadowed by the similarly-themed A Face in the Crowd, or Bud Schulberg’s other creation Sammy Glick, but in some ways more nuanced. A beloved radio & tv icon dies, and while crafting his eulogy, the reporter discovers what a true stinker he’d really been. No sympathetic Rosebud here, but the question hangs until the very end: expose the truth or, as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would prefer it a few years later, “print the legend.” Extra points to this movie in showing that both options were guided by cynical opportunism.
Maybe its different in the USA but here in the UK nobody has a clue about the distilled 1967-ness that is The President’s Analyst
In class, none. Outside, our law library had a section of legal-oriented movies we could check out. The usual ones were there like The Paper Chase, To Kill a Mockingbird, Anatomy of a Murder, and The Verdict. I got them to add Rashomon and Paths of Glory.
Raise your hand if you remember The Atomic Kid, starring Mickey Rooney.
I don’t, but for some reason your post reminded me of Condorman, a forgotten movie starring Michael Crawford.
1n 1984 the film Runaway was planned as a major multi-million sci-fi release about out of control robots written and directed by Michael Crichton and starring Tom Selleck, Kirstie Alley, and Gene Simmons.
It was overshadowed by another small indie film the same year about out of control robots directly by a largely unknown director staring some giant Austrian bodybuilder who talked funny.
Mind if I steal that?