The Verdict

We watched The Verdict last evening—a Paul Newman movie from the early 1980s. I haven’t read any of his recently published posthumous memoir/journals but I have seen at least two positive reviews of the publication. Somehow Newman has been in my screens for most of my life. The Verdict was directed by Sidney Lumet with a screenplay by David Mamet. The film also featured Jack Warden, Milo O’Shea and Charlotte Rampling. The Verdict is another lawyer film. In it Newman plays a down and out lawyer, Frank Galvin, who drinks too much who has had run-ins with his old law firm when they did something unsavory but made him complicit. He was almost disbarred and certainly fired. Of course, he is also divorced, so he is basically alone.  Jack Warden has been his assistant and good friend, but fed up with his drinking in the film’s opening scenes he walks out of Galvin ‘s office. But a malpractice case comes Galvin’s way, and at Galvin’s pleading, Mickey returns out of some loyalty to assist in what seems this almost hopeless and originally badly managed case, and the two alone take on what seems a dubious and doubtful medical malpractice case. Newman becomes a solitary moral fighter against a large team from a big law firm that is a led by a slimy, officious and rapacious head-of-firm. He brags that the firm’s philosophy is not about justice; it is about winning. And Concannon is prepared to do anything to achieve that goal. In that quest he hires a spy (Charlotte Rampling) to establish a romantic relationship with Galvin and then to report what Galvin is up to in his preparation for the case. When she tells Concannon that a doctor may be willing to testify against his client he purchases a week’s vacation in the Caribbean for the doctor rendering him unavailable to Newman and team.
            Newman is accusing two famous anesthesiologists of malpractice during surgery that causes aadmittance that now states that the woman ate a full meal nine hours before surgery and the requiring the use of a general anesthesia when indeed the woman had eaten a full meal only one hour before surgery and vomited into her mask and led to her unrepairable death-like condition.
            Newman wins the case under circumstances I found suspicious, and the jury seems prepared to award a large sum of money to the patient’s sister. The (corrupt) and venial judge had declared the testimony of the admitting nurse, Galvin’s only hope, to be inadmissible be stricken from the record. There is no evidence of malpractice! How the jury could find for Newman’s client seems incredible to me, but really that is neither here nor there. This is another case of the lone fighter working for justice, for his client, and a bit of redemption for himself.
            At film’s end I mentioned to E. that I no longer appreciated these films about the struggle of the powerless against the almost always corrupt and immoral power. In this film, as in other like it, the little man wins against the bigger one, but I am no longer interested in keeping company with such characters as Concannon and his law firm, with Judge Hoyle’s corrupt handling of his court and the trial, and specifically his persecution of Newman’s Frank Galvin. And I am uninterested in the mostly young (and greedy) smug associates in Concannon’s law firm who had all graduated from prestigious law schools and are now engaged in perverting justice. I don’t want anymore to be pulled into the muck and swamp of the world of the powerfully rich and ethically immoral. These hero films continue the illusion that right will eventually triumph over wrong and that the virtuous will finally achieve justice and defeat corruption and venality in life. Ha! Hasn’t anybody read the papers lately? Or the history books? The possible charges of Trump and the support that the man still maintains calls the lie to that myth.      
      The night previous we had screened The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Again, justice was the issue: was the removal of Captain Queeq from command justified. Jose Ferrer plays the lawyer, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jewish??) to defend the mutineers, but his participation in that role is conflicted. He despises what they are doing to Queeq who in the past has served the Navy during war time admirably while his accusers were safely ensconced in school. But he chooses to defend them . . . for unclear motives, but Greenwald is lawyer with a conscience and a sense of justice. He despises what he will do and he despises even more what his clients have done. At film’s end he throws a glass of champagne into the face of the cowardly Keefer who has provoked the mutiny but at the trial denies responsibility for it or his participation in it. Greenwald is a lawyer with a conscience and has an ethical foundation. But he is honestly conflicted! I think the quest for justice comes always with doubts and questions.