Hollywood Court and Films

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Hollywood on Trials: Courts and Films, 1930-1960Author(s): Norman RosenbergReviewed work(s):Source: Law and History Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 341-367Published by: American Society for Legal HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/743746 .

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Hollywood on Trials: Courts and Films, 1930-1960

NORMAN ROSENBERG

As long as legal scholarship focused on traditional sources that were considered "distinctively legal,"' a great variety of "legal texts" were consigned to scholars in other disciplines. Thus, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1932) and his classic work The Common Law (1881) appeared safely inside the categorical "box" identified as distinctively legal, while Louis Calhern's portrayal of Holmes and the film The Magnificent Yankee (MGM, 1950) fell outside.

In recent years, however, both the inside/outside distinction and the legal box metaphor have become increasingly suspect. Drawing upon post-structuralist theories, which highlight the discursive and representational dimensions of law,2 a variety of different projects seek to locate the diverse places at which legal rhetoric and imagery are constituted.

This body of work articulates a pluralistic view of legal scholarship-

1. The term "distinctively legal" and the model of"inside" and "outside" modes of legal history are developed in Robert W. Gordon, "Introduction: J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography," Law and Society Review 10 (1975): 9-10.

2. For recent, broadly focused uses of such post-structuralist approaches, see, for example, Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington (with Shaun McVeigh), Postmodern Jurisprudence: The Law of Text in the Text of Laws (New York: Routledge, 1991) and Ann Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 139-54. In addition to the works cited for

Norman Rosenberg is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1993 Convention of the Organization of American Historians. The author wishes to thank other panel members-Michael Grossberg, Eve Kornfield, David R. Papke, and Amy Dru Stanley-and those who attended the session for their comments. He also wishes to thank two readers for this journal, Lary May, David Rabban, Linda Schulte-Sasse, Emily Rosenberg, and Clay Steinman for their expert comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Law and History Review Fall 1994, Vol. 12, No. 2 ? 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



Law and History Review

and of law itself. J. M. Balkin, for example, calls attention to the emerg- ence of "law bites"-those visual texts, such as Court TV, which are circulated through the mass media-that are becoming "the common forms of discourse and benchmarks of expectations about law among the lay public."3 Alan Hunt, though he remains cautious about Michel Foucault's work on law, still agrees that "law has never been a unitary discourse but has always involved a range of discourses connected to and competing with a range of extralegal discourses."4 Jettisoning the legal/extralegal model implicitly retained by Hunt, Rosemary Coombe would go further to look "beyond conventionally defined legal forums" and to consider how discourses about law may be "reproduced, legi- timized and possibly reconfigured in behaviors and interpretations not typically considered legal practices." Urging that students of law rethink "what is distinctively legal about the forms of argumentation we are examining," Coombe suggests attention to discussions of celebrities,5 to disputes that arise in everyday life,6 and to readings of Hollywood films and television.7

specific propositions, see generally, Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Post-Structuralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca: Corell University Press, 1989); Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive So- ciology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992); Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structur- alism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Tim O'Sullivan et al., Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 2d ed. (New York: Rout- ledge, 1994).

3. J. M. Balkin "What Is a Postmodern Constitutionalism?" Michigan Law Review 90 (1992): 1981. For a broad, theoretical argument about the nature of today's post- modem informational setting, see Mark Poster, The Mode of Information (New York, 1990).

4. Alan Hunt, "Foucault's Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval," Law and Social Inquiry 17 (1992): 32. See also, Alan Hunt, Explorations in Law and Society: Towards a Constitutive Theory of Law (New York: Routledge, 1993).

5. See, for example, Jane M. Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image, The Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

6. See, for example, Austin Sarat and Thomas Kears, eds., The Law in Everyday Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).

7. Rosemary J. Coombe, "Room for Manoeuver Toward a Theory of Practice in Critical Legal Studies" Law and Social Inquiry 14 (1989): 115-16. (emphasis added). See also David S. Caudill, " 'Name-of-the-Father' and the Logic of Psychosis: Lacan's Law and Ours" Legal Studies Forum 16 (1993): 433, which invokes the psychological theory of Jacques Lacan to suggest that "legal process and institutions,' in one sense at least, "are just another set of images and texts alongside others in social life.. .; and Rosanne Kennedy, "Spectacular Evidence: Discourses of Subjectivity in the Trial

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Indeed, a new mode of scholarship seeks to investigate motion pictures as legal texts.8 Extending the trend, this article will use recent interdis- ciplinary work in both cinematic and legal studies to cross-examine six films from the heyday of classical Hollywood cinema, the late 1930s to the late 1950s, that focus upon courtroom trials. Although a variety of motion pictures from this era feature courtroom sequences, this article will highlight films that I call "law noirs."9 Adopting a narrative structure

of John Hinckley," Law and Critique 3 (1992): 18, which argues that "law is in an increasingly incongruous position: it vainly attempts to isolate the real in an era in which reality is becoming rapidly indistinguishable from its fictional representations'. For an essay that invokes post-structuralist scholarship to re-examine the eighteenth century, see Saul Cornell, "Moving Beyond the Canon of Traditional Constitutional History: Anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights, and the Promise of Post-Moder Histo- riography," Law and History Review 12 (1994): 1.

8. Although what might be called the law and film enterprise bears some affinity to the more established law and literature venture, there are significant differences between the two projects. First, law and literature work generally focuses on canonized texts, such as Franz Kafka's The Trial and Herman Melville's Billy Budd. See, for example, Douzinas and Warrington, Postmodern Jurisprudence, 205-43 on Billy Budd. Second, as Ian Ward has recently noted, the search for examples of "law in literature" has generally been closely related to reading "law as literature"-that is, to applying the techniques of literary criticism to traditional legal texts. Ian Ward, "Law and Literature," Law and Critique 4 (1993): 43, 44, 58-69. Finally, there are significant differences between "reading" (or "making meaning" of) printed and filmic texts. For a particularly strong argument for this view, see David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. Chapter 11, "Why Not to Read a Film." See also Deborah Knight, "Reconsidering Film Theory and Method," New Literary History 24 (1992): 321.

For legal scholarship that addresses, from different theoretical perspectives, Hollywood films, see the special issue of Legal Studies Forum, entitled "Legal Reelism: The Hol- lywood Film as Legal Text" 15 (1991); Pierre Schlag, "Normativity and the Politics of Form," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139 (1991): 801, 852-70 (on "L.A. Law's Empire"); Robert Post, "On the Popular Image of the Lawyer: Reflections in a Glass Darkly," California Law Review 75 (1987): 379; Anthony Chase, "Lawyers and Popular Culture: A Review of Mass Media Portrayals of American Attorneys," American Bar Foundation Research Journal (1986): 281; and John Denvir, ed., "Legalism Unreeled" (unpublished manuscript). Meanwhile, students of film are becoming increasingly in- terested in representations of law. See, for example, Cynthia Lucia, "Women on Trial: The Female Lawyer in the Hollywood Courtroom," Cineaste 19 (1993): 32.

9. I employ the term law noir to signify a subset of the celebrated film noirs, a body of Hollywood films, first identified by critics in France, that featured narratives about crime and a dark (hence the term noir), critical view of American life and institutions. Although the term noir is sometimes limited to films released during the 1940s and 1950s, I have followed, among others, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., (rev. ed. Woodstock, N.Y.: Over- look Press, 1988) in adopting a broader view of this group of films. Two recent essay collections-Ian Cameron, ed., The Book of Film Noir (New York: Continuum, 1993)

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that recalls film noir itself, I begin with two conventional trial films, Twelve Angry Men (1957) and The Young Philadelphians (1959), released toward the end of the period I want to examine. Then, employing a "flashback" to four law noirs from the 1930s and 1940s-Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Fury (1936), They Won't Believe Me (1947), and Boomerang (1947)-I will contrast the cinematic representations in these law noirs with those in The Young Philadelphians and Twelve Angry Men.

These six films can be viewed in terms of two broad, interrelated issues: first, the ways in which classical Hollywood portrayed the law, especially a court trial, as a means for resolving narrative complications and second, the ways in which films about law represent problematics of "legal translation."10 Put simply, films such as Twelve Angry Men and The Young Philadelphians first highlight a court trial as a means for providing relatively assured and authoritative "closure to a narrative" and second represent a courtroom as a special, public forum in which potentially troubling cultural questions about the specialized discourses of legal professionals can be laid to rest." In contrast, law

and Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993)-provide valuable guides to film noir.

In subdividing the larger film noir cycle to highlight certain sub-cycles, I follow, among others, Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1992) and J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (University of Illinois Press, 1989). For a different approach to this sub-cycle of films, see Norman Rosenberg, "Law Noir," in Denvir, "Law Unreeled."

10. I employ the metaphor of translation to signify the process by which stories and disputes from everyday life become converted-that is, translated-into the specialized discourses that are the domain of legal professionals. For a critical and self-reflexive analysis of the translation metaphor, see Clark D. Cunningham, "The Lawyer as Trans- lator, Representation as Text: Towards an Ethnography of Legal Discourse," Cornell Law Review 77 (1992): 1298. See also Sanford Levinson, "Conversing About Justice', Yale Law Journal 100 (1991): 1855, a critical review of James Boyd White's, Justice as Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

11. For brief introductions to the issue of closure-or the textual strategies by means of which a viewer is encouraged to see the ending as offering a relatively clear resolution of issues and problems raised during the course of a narrative-in Hollywood cinema, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 64-74, esp. 74. Of course, as Bordwell argues elsewhere, the degree to which any film text seems "open" or "closed" is a complex interpretive question. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 192-95. See also, O'Sullivan, Key Concepts, 42- 43 and Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992). In relating the issue of narrative closure to filmic representations of trials, I have benefited immensely from Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. 21-43.

In highlighting the questions of translation and closure, I do not mean to suggest

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noirs raise doubts about the ability of the trial process to achieve satisfactory closure and about the adequacy of legal language itself.

Filmic Representations in the 1950s: Twelve Angry Men and The Young Philadelphians:

The Young Philadelphians and Twelve Angry Men recall the kind of classical Hollywood narrative highlighted by film scholar Dana Polan. Adapting the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to film, Polan suggests that a trial sequence can provide an "assured source of narrative resolution." By appealing to the ideal of a clear, authoritative law, a cinematic trial helps to resolve a film's own narrative ambiguities. By adding the "fundamental aura" of the law to a Hollywood narrative, a trial sequence allows a film to propose "an ultimately epochal test" for both larger cultural values and individual characters.12

The Young Philadelphians epitomizes the pattern that Polan theorizes by employing a legal trial to test the values of Philadelphia's ruling elite and the personal worth of a young attorney, Tony Lawrence (Paul Newman). Though raised in high society, Tony's real father is an Irish- American building contractor, not the socially prominent (but impotent) young man who had been briefly married to his widowed mother. Nurtured by his selfless mother and propelled by his own ruthless ambition, Tony ascends the city's legal ladder by shunning the values of the elite bar and by specializing in the loopholes of the tax code. Suddenly, a sensational murder trial, involving a childhood friend (Rob- ert Vaughan), provides Tony's initial courtroom test.

The trial revives old conflicts. A politically ambitious district attorney, whom Tony had once cheated out of a law-firm clerkship, is prosecuting this made-for-the-tabloids case in which a Korean War veteran is charged with killing his wealthy uncle. Fearing that an aggressive defense strategy, revealing old hatreds between murder victim and defendant, might also bring scandal to the city's elite, prominent Philadelphians pressure Tony

that these are the only two legal issues articulated in these six films. Rather, I raise these two questions as specific examples of the larger claim about the value of using classical Hollywood films as sources for legal studies.

12. Polan, Power and Paranoia, 21-22. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imag- ination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holmquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 388-410. For an extended analysis of Bakhtin's work, as applied to film, see Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

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to help stage a quick, quiet conviction. If he refuses to cooperate, a Mainline patriarch warns, he will reveal Tony's illegitimate birth.

After maximizing the tensions that a trial drama can provide, The Young Philadelphians inscribes the reconciliatory pattern that long dominated classical Hollywood. Tony's private obligations-to his mother, his real father, and his accused friend-and his public responsibilities- to a client, the legal profession, and the cause of justice-only appear to be in conflict.13 Relying upon favors available through his father's political associates and rhetorical skills commensurate with his mother's social status, Tony orchestrates a brilliant courtroom performance. Dur- ing skillful cross-examination, he destroys the credibility of the prosecution's eyewitness, the murder victim's pompous butler, and gets a prominent physician to admit that what seemed to have been a murder was more likely a suicide. The prosecution's case collapses.

The trial demonstrates the healing capacities of the public law system and belatedly establishes Tony as the moral center of the Lawrence family.'4 The acquittal of Tony's client allows old and young Philadel- phians to reaffirm common values.'5 Moreover, the self-absorbed tax attorney's foray onto the public legal stage helps him find a social conscience, a discovery that allows a reconciliation with a long-time love (Barbara Rush). In the film's final shot, the couple embrace in the courtroom, suggesting the power of legal trials to resolve both public and private difficulties.

Although Twelve Angry Men (1957) adopts a very different frame for representing the courtroom process-its very title suggests conflicts not touched upon in The Young Philadelphians-the film ultimately suggests an equally affirming view of the law. Denying the film audience any view of the trial itself, Twelve Angry Men concentrates upon jurors who must determine the guilt or innocence of a young man charged with murdering his father. As jury-room debates become heated, the search for clear meanings and stable points of reference appears futile.

The legal process, however, provides a unique forum for overcoming both individual passions and interpretive difficulties. Even in the absence

13. Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), passim.

14. For an analysis of this narrative pattern, in which both public and patriarchal law come together at the end of a film, see Polan, Power and Paranoia, 24-25, 31.

15. Here, The Young Philadelphians articulates a view of law and society also found in elite legal culture of the 1950s: that legal conflicts could easily be settled because of "the existence of a basic societal consensus on fundamental values." See Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Or- thodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 251.

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of a preexisting social consensus and in the presence of contested evidence, the process of "reasoned" deliberation can generate a verdict that satisfies diverse, once-contending interests.16 If people will talk through contested meanings, differences over translating ambiguous social evidence into legal propositions can be narrowed and, ultimately, settled. More important, the specialized legal discourses of the lawyers and the judge, which are not heard directly but only presented sec- ondhand through the jury's own debates, are so lucid that they can be translated into the language of lay jurors. Finally, Twelve Angry Men suggests that jury deliberations may even provide a microcosm of a larger democratic process. In the film's final shot, after a not guilty verdict has been forged, the rain and darkness that have been a constant backdrop to the jury's deliberations give way to sunshine and clearing skies.17

Stranger on the Third Floor and Law Noir

Law noirs from the late 1930s and 1940s offer much less celebratory views of law than Twelve Angry Men and The Young Philadelphians. To consider only one possible historical counterpart, these earlier films might be read, as popular texts about law, alongside the more familiar texts associated with the legal realism of the 1930s.'8 Although legal realism,

16. As Anthony Chase notes, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw the "complete integration of the virtuous-lawyer archetype in popular culture-an elaborated image unprecedented... within the existing history of mass cultural iconography" "Lawyers and Popular Culture" 284.

For another powerful and popular narrative, stressing both the ability of the legal process to achieve closure and the dynamics of a successful legal translation, see Anthony Lewis, Gideon's Trumpet (New York: Random House, 1964). For a reading that seeks to highlight gaps within Lewis's narrative, see Norman L. Rosenberg, "Gideon's Trum- pet: Sounding the Retreat from Legal Realism," in Lary May, ed., Recasting America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 107.

17. Both elite legal and broader cultural discourses of the 1950s called for faith in the process for settling political and legal differences. Although this could be linked to a consensus-oriented view, it could also stand on its own. See Horwitz, Transformation, 251. For a broad, political reading of Twelve Angry Men, which nicely stresses the elitist strains in the film, see Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 10-20.

18. I want to emphasize that I am not advancing any claims about intentionality, causation, or origins. I would, for example, resist any interpretation that suggests law noirs reflected legal realism. I am suggesting that, in a number of ways, the filmic discourses in law noirs seem to parallel those found in certain modes of critical legal realism. Without trying to suggest precisely how these culturally constructed textual

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like film noir, signifies a diverse set of discourses,'9 one important strand of realism looked critically at the language with which courts tried to represent "real-life" disputes. Perhaps the most famous critical essay in this vein, by Felix Cohen, located professional legal texts within "a special branch of the science of transcendental nonsense." Legal writing, Cohen argued, featured words and phrases that were "necessarily circular, since those terms are themselves creations of law." Rather than adequately representing the social and economic contexts of specific disputes, legal discourses added "precisely as much to our knowledge as Moliere's physician's discovery that opium puts men to sleep because it contains a dormative principle." In a somewhat different vein, realist Jerome Frank focused upon trial courts, highlighting their alleged failure to capture even the simplest facts of the causes that came before them.20

In addition, law noirs might also be read in light of recent literature that critically examines traditional legal materials from the perspective of people whose "stories" become legal "cases."21 Building upon the

categories might link up, I see a value in talking about both law noirs and critical realism within broad-based discussions about cultural discourses that spanned, in various forms, the period from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s, a project much too ambitious for this article.

19. This point is nicely developed in N. E. H. Hull, "Networks and Bricolage: A Prolegomenon to a History of Twentieth-Century American Academic Jurisprudence," American Journal of Legal History 35 (1991): 307

20. Felix Cohen, "Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach," in The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen, ed. Lucy Cohen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 45, 46, 75. Jerome Frank, Courts on Trial(1949: repr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).

The literature on legal realism is immense. Edward A. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), 74-94, 159-78 remains the best starting point. My own view relies heavily upon Gary Peller, "The Metaphysics of American Law, California Law Review 74 (1985): 1152, esp. 1194-1240. See also, Joseph Singer, "Legal Realism Now," California Law Review 76 (1988): 465; William N. Eskridge, Jr. and Gary Peller, "The New Public Law Movement: Moderation as a Postmodern Cultural Form," Michigan Law Review 89 (1991): 707. William W. Fisher III, Morton J. Horwitz, and Thomas Reed, eds., American Legal Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) is an important new documentary collection.

21. See, for example, the special issue on "Legal Storytelling" Michigan Law Review 87 (1989): 2073; and, more broadly, Pierre Schlag, "The Problem of the Subject," Texas Law Review 69 (1991): 1627. For a pointed colloquy over the politics of storytelling, see Mark Tushnet, "The Degradation of Constitutional Discourse," Georgetown Law Journal 81 (1992): 251; Gary Peller, "The Discourse of Constitutional Degradation," ibid., 313; and Mark Tushnet, "Reply," ibid., 343. The classic account of storytelling in the courtroom remains W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman, Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom: Justice and Judgment in American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981).

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idea that doing law involves telling stories, some scholars employ the metaphor of translation to emphasize the active, constitutive role of language during the process in which the real life concerns of "outsiders" are represented in the specialized forms required by the legal discourses of"insiders."22 According to law professor Clark Cunningham, the translation metaphor, "by implying that law is a language foreign" to people who come before courts, suggests that their "stories will 'inevitably' be transformed through the lawyer's representation." Since "no sentence can be perfectly translated from one language to another," how do meanings change?23 Might the narratives constructed in legal proceed- ings serve to silence, rather than to give voice to, people who find themselves involved with law?24 How might attention to representation and translation offer interesting perspectives on the difference between practicing law and doing justice? These kinds of contemporary questions, are also embedded in many law noirs of the late 1930s and 1940s.

Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), for example, depicts a trial system that is literally off kilter. Borrowing some of the expressionist devices found in German cinema of the 1920s-including tilted camera angles, flashbacks, voice-overs, and unconventional lighting patterns-the film visualizes the trial system as systematically unbal- anced.25 Two conventionally filmed segments frame a noir-like legal

22. This approach characterizes an important theme in recent legal writing, especially in various feminist discourses and in "Critical Race Studies." See, for example, Mary Joe Frug, Postmodern Legal Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1992); Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). As a number of writers have emphasized, however, these "outsider" perspectives, though important as a means of scrutinizing "insider" accounts, are themselves socially constructed and historically contingent. See, for example, Mark Kelman, "Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 798, esp. 808-11, and Katherine T. Bartlett, "Minow's Social-Relations Approach to Difference: Unanswering the Unasked," Law and Social Inquiry (1992): 437, 464- 67. For a demonstration that the same set of legal sources can generate different legal stories, see Peter Charles Hoffer, "Text, Translation, Context, Conversation" American Journal of Legal History 37 (1993): 409.

23. Cunningham, "The Lawyer as Translator," 1299. 24. See, for example, Martha Minow, "Speaking of Silence," University of Miami

Law Review 43 (1988): 493 (reviewing Kristin Bumiller, The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988]).

25. In this sense, the film parallels the realist critique of Jerome Frank who warned that virtually anyone could "be indicted and mistakenly convicted." Frank, Courts on Trial, 12-13.

Both Stranger on the Third Floor and Fury (directed by Fritz Lang), came from film makers who had worked in Germany and fled Nazism for the United States. One might

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nightmare. A young reporter named Mike Ward (John McGuire) will both report upon and testify in a sensational murder trial. By testifying that he saw Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr.) standing over the body of a slain coffee shop owner, Mike helps the prosecution secure a murder conviction and a death sentence against the defendant.

Mike's public obligation to testify in court brings personal catastrophe. His fiance Jane (Margaret Tallichet) immediately worries that the need for money to complete their wedding plans and Mike's own desire for journalistic fame may have scripted his testimony. What has he really seen? Could the public legal process have translated his personal vision incorrectly? Soon, Mike begins to doubt his own eyes and mind until, in a surreal dream sequence, he imagines that he himself is unjustly convicted, on the basis of testimony similar to that he had given against Briggs, of murdering his irritating neighbor, Mr. Meng. The nightmare proves prophetic. Mike finds that his neighbor's throat has been slashed and that he is the prime suspect. The police discount Mike's story about seeing a mysterious stranger (Peter Lorre) near Meng's room and arrest Mike for this second murder.

Mike's arrest underscores the way in which Stranger on the Third Floor posits the indeterminacy of trial court evidence. As Mike's testimony in the Briggs case becomes an issue, for example, he appears increasingly defensive. "It's not a question of my word against his," he tells other reporters. "It's what I saw with my own eyes." Similarly, he counters Jane's doubts by insisting that "I did see" Briggs standing over the murder victim. "What am I supposed to do?" he asks. Later, a cynical reporter consoles him. "If the courts had to have an eyewitness for everything, no one would be convicted." The evidence against Briggs, though entirely circumstantial, is still entirely "reliable."

Of course, it is the reliability of what people testify to having seen- and the representation of these visions within courtroom rituals-that Stranger on the Third Floor critically interrogates. Briggs's trial, for example, features an inept defense attorney, a judge who awakens from a snooze to rule upon a lawyer's motion, and at least one juror who shares the judge's daytime sleeping habits. Later, an indifferent district attorney curtly dismisses Mike's theory that a mysterious stranger is responsible for both homicides.

read these films about law and mob behavior alongside broader anti-fascist discourses of the 1930s. For examples of law-review articles that also use such discourses, see Karl Lowenstein, "Legislative Control of Political Extremism in European Democracies I," Columbia Law Review 38 (1938): 591, and David Riesman, "Democracy and Defa- mation: Control of Group Libel," Columbia Law Review 42 (1942): 727.

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Hollywood on Trials

These critical representations of law and courts lend credence to Mike's fears of joining (if not replacing) Joe Briggs on death row. During several flashback sequences, Mike worries that his own past statements, when translated into courtroom testimony, might mark him as Meng's murderer. "It'd be a real pleasure" to cut Meng's throat, he remembers telling a friend. But, "it was just talk, just something you say. You can't convict... on that," Mike's voice-over claims. Thus, Mike joins other noir protagonists in recognizing the possibility that their own speech, when represented and translated into legal discourse, may return to haunt them.26

The film's lengthy, expressionist-influenced nightmare sequence underscores the problematics of legal translations. The inept defense attorney, the befuddled judge, and the cynical reporters all reappear to construct a nightmarish scenario in which Mike is arrested, tried in the press, convicted in court, sentenced to death, and led to the electric chair. As in the case in which he had just testified, Mike's imaginary trial seems a bizarre mix of legal incompetence and faithful adherence to "neutral" process. "Make them hear me," he shouts to sleeping jurors and a disinterested judge. Later, his fiance's straightforward testimony, about his threats against Meng, sardonically mirrors his own in the Briggs case. "I'm sorry Michael," Jane tells him. "I had to tell the truth."

Finally, after Mike's arrest, the legal system seems incapable of cor- recting its own errors. While he tries to tell his story-one that film spectators share-the politically ambitious district attorney is photographed staring into a mirror, examining his own reflection; he goes about an elaborate shaving ritual that seems as far removed from justice as the courtroom rituals in other parts of the film. By aligning Mike's vision of the stranger-and his view of the district attorney-with that of film spectators, Stranger on the Third Floor tries to make his terror their own. The paranoiac, off-kilter style by which Stranger on the Third Floor depicts Mike's noir dream, it seems, manages to offer a better representation of the trial process than the film's "normal," day-lit sequences.27

26. See, for instance, Force ofEvil (MGM, 1948), a film directed by Abraham Polonsky. On this important law noir, see Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 116-19, 134-48; Christine Noll Brinckman, "The Politics of Force of Evil: Analysis of Abraham Polonsky's Preblacklist Film," Prospects 6 (1981): 357; and Norman Rosenberg, "The Culture of Free Expression and the 'Popular' First Amendment' in Freeing the First Amendment, ed. David Allen and Robert Jensen (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).

27. Several years later, the same noir techniques are employed in Sullivan's Travels (1941) to represent an actual trial.

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Ultimately, it is Jane, in pursuit of her marriage to Mike, who must seek a private solution to what are represented as fundamental, public problems with legal and courtroom discourses. With legal authorities disinterested in other leads, Jane must locate the stranger, an escaped mental patient, by herself. Chasing Jane into the street, the stranger is run down by a truck but lives long enough to confess the killings wrongly attributed to Briggs and Mike.28

Fury and the Challenge of Law Noir

Fury (1936), the initial Hollywood effort of the Austrian emigre Fritz Lang, offers another example of early law noir.29 Although the film is best known for its indictment of lynching, the bulk of its narrative deals with a spectacular, if highly improbable, trial for murder.

As in Stranger on the Third Floor, faulty translations by legal officials interrupt a young couple's marriage plans. A would-be groom, Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy), is detained by a sheriff on suspicion of being part of a gang of kidnappers. Denied any chance to tell his own story,30 Joe falls victim to a frenzied mob that overpowers the sheriff and sets fire to his jail. Belatedly discovering Joe's plight, his fiance Catherine Grant (Sylvia Syndey) rushes to the jail, only to glimpse Joe at a flame- enveloped window. When the mob dynamites the building, the explosion blacks out the screen and, presumably, kills Joe. The media confirms Joe's demise: Newspaper headlines scream that the FBI has caught the kidnap gang and that an innocent person has been lynched, while a newsreel camera crew records Joe's "final" moments for movie theater audiences.

28. In the film's brief, conventionally lit and photographed, ending, the reunited couple hail a taxi to take them to their new apartment and are ushered into the cab by the recently released Joe Briggs.

29. One of Lang's best-known German films, M (1931), focuses on the hunt for a crazed killer of children (Peter Lorre, again) and concludes with two trials. The first, before a jury of the killer's criminal peers, seems headed for the type of mob justice featured in Fury until legal authorities intervene. In a brief final sequence, judges file into a courtroom while three mothers sit outside. "This will not bring our children back to life," one sighs, as the visual image suddenly fades away. Thus, M ends with no ending and provides no closure for the question that had been posed in the murder's first trial: Should a homicidal killer be executed by a court of law or sent to a sanitarium, from which he might escape or be released?

30. The sheriff rebuffs all of Joe's attempts to plead his case. When Joe realizes that Catherine can verify his story, he hesitates to take this simple step because be fears that she, like he, will be misidentified as a member of the kidnapping ring. Forced into silence, Joe discovers that the legal system cannot protect him.

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Film viewers, however, soon know better when Fury reveals Joe has miraculously escaped from the burning jail. Joe's return is cinematically framed so that he speaks directly to the film audience while he is denouncing, to his brothers, both his "killers" and the larger society.3' Deeply embittered, Joe embraces a familiar legal remedy, self-help.32 Together with his brothers, Tom and Charlie, Joe plots secretly to assist, while remaining legally dead, a conscientious district attorney who is prosecuting twenty-two members of the mob for Joe's "murder."

Joe will not trust the specialized discourses of lawyers to translate his ordeal into law; instead, he and his brothers, Tom and Charlie, will manipulate the trial system and the language of the law for personal revenge. Holding up a page from "a law book," indicating that lynchers can be tried for murder, Joe promises that he will give his tormentors "a legal trial, in a legal court room. They'll have a legal judge and a legal defense. They'll get a legal sentence and a legal death."33 Just when Joe's machinations are about to result in guilty verdicts, however, Joe walks into the courtroom, embraces Catherine, and halts the pro- ceedings.

By focusing on Joe's decision to stop the trial, Fury can be read in ways that affirm courts and law. Because Joe and Catherine reunite in a public courtroom, film scholar Bruce Kawin argues that their reunion "is also a social gesture, a coming to terms with the larger forces of social order and the law." It "clarifies the healing of the culture ...

31. This shot, which is used again in the film's final sequence, reverses the normal

viewing position in which spectators gaze at people on the screen, not vice versa. Such a shot, it can be argued, tends to pull film spectators into the film so that they are positioned, for example, alongside the lynch mob. See Reynold Humphries, Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in his American Films (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 36. The film's dialogue also tries to implicate film spectators in Joe's ordeal. While sneaking back home, Joe tells his brothers, he sat for hours in a movie theater, watching newsreels of "myself gettin' burned alive," while the packed house cheered. "They like it," he snarls. "They get a big kick out of seeing a man burned to death, a big kick."

32. On self-help as a legal remedy, see Marc Galanter, "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change," Law and Society Review 9 (1974): 125-35.

33. Before revealing Joe's scheme, Fury consciously rejects other legal options. Early on in the production process, studio heads at MGM turned back a script in which the lynching victim was a lawyer who could employ his special professional skills to redress his grievances. Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America, 20. Similarly, in the final version, Joe scoffs at the idea of hiring a lawyer to pursue members of the mob. What would the law do? Prosecute them for "disturbing the peace" or "setting fire to a jail?"

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implies a comprehensive system of values.... and shows the resetting of the moral order that was fractured at the lynching."34

Though plausible, this reconciliatory reading must repress discordant elements within the filmic text itself. Joe does concede that, before he and Catherine rebuild their life together, the law will have plans for him; but he emphatically rejects the legal system as a source of desirable values. More important, a reconciliatory reading such as Kawin's seems at odds with the many ways in which Fury challenges the representational capacity of the specialized discourses upon which legal translations and, ultimately, the rule of law must rest. To highlight these critical dimensions and to suggest how students of law might approach filmic texts, I want to examine, in some detail, the ways in which Fury represents, cinematically, the courtroom process and legal discourses.

Breaking with the "mouthpiece" film genre of the early 1930s, Fury avoids the familiar tale of witless judges and corrupt lawyers;35 rather, its legal characters are dedicated professionals who perform relatively competently and honestly. Instead, Fury suggests the indeterminacy of language and the problematics of legal translation. It is the difficulties of representation, during the course of any trial, rather than corruption or incompetence, that threaten to turn a legal performance into tragedy. Even the best-intentioned law enforcers, Fury suggests, may not com- prehend the context of their discourses. Boldly and ingeniously strug- gling to correct a grievous wrong, the district attorney unknowingly aids Joe's scheme, prosecuting a murder trial at odds with what film spectators know to be the reality of the case; whatever their other crimes, these defendants could not have committed murder.

Fury also details the enterprising district attorney's efforts to impeach testimony from corrupt and uncooperative witnesses, who blatantly perjure themselves to provide the defendants with phony alibis. Even the sheriff bows to community pressure and claims he cannot identify the people who stormed his jail. When it appears, however, that the mob has stymied the trial process, just as they had earlier thwarted the sheriff's attempt to hold Joe for trial, the district attorney reveals legal evidence apparently untainted by bias. He summons the newsreel foot-

34. Bruce F Kawin, How Movies Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 39. Such a reading is also consistent with the "meta-theory" of classical Hollywood narratives, offered in Ray, A Certain Tendency.

35. For a good example of this important cycle of legal films, see The Mouthpiece (Warner, 1932); See also, Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 18-29.

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age of Joe's "death" as a potent, new form of evidence and converts the courtroom into a motion picture theater.36

Just as one wing of the legal realist movement invoked social-science data in hopes of stabilizing legal discourse,37 Fury posits newsreel footage as thoroughly empirical evidence. Though problematic in terms of veri- similitude-this kind of photographic proof would have likely been inadmissible in any courtroom in 1936--this narrative turn is crucial to the film's complex legal logic. In contrast to testimony of what people merely claimed to have seen, Fury ironically offers the camera's "ob- jective" eye as omnipotent and all-seeing. As freeze-frames from newsreel footage of the riot show the defendants to be part of a murderous mob and the defense witnesses to be perjurers, they also reveal images (such as several of the defendants cutting fire hoses) previously un- available, even to the film audience watching Fury itself.

Bolstered by this evidence, the prosecution's case seems unassailable. After seeing a stop-action shot of her husband's murderous intent and realizing his alibi has collapsed, a courtroom spectator faints dead away, further accentuating the power attributed to documentary imagery.38 Yet, the motion picture machinery only appears sovereign.

By dramatizing what happened outside the jail so powerfully, it paradoxically allows the defense to undermine the prosecution's assumptions about what must have occurred inside. Seizing on the lack of visual evidence from Joe's cell, the defense can raise doubts about his "death." Catherine's claim of having seen her fiance at a flame-en- shrouded window offers dramatic but unreliable testimony. How can anyone really know that Joe perished in the fire?39 Has not the newsreel

36. In this sense, Fury vividly undercuts the traditional practice of trying to represent trials almost solely in terms of oral testimony and cross-examination. As legal scholar J. D. Jackson argues, characterizing "courtroom interaction in terms of drama and theater... helps to emphasize the importance of the visual over the oral." Jackson, "Law's Truth" 45.

In a broader sense, the use of newsreel footage in Fury presages the use of visual evidence in the Rodney King case. See Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993).

37. See, for example, Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 31-35, and John Henry Schlegel, "American Legal Realism and Empiricist Political Science: From the Yale Experience," Buffalo Law Review 28 (1979): 459.

38. On the importance of the documentary form in the 1930s, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

39. Fury thus highlights the extent to which trials may be seen less as a process that seeks "the truth" and more as one that involves different, even irreconcilable, "language

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just exposed the fallibility of what people claim, even under legal oath, to have seen? In her agitated state, might Catherine only have imagined seeing Joe at a window? Without stop-action pictures to authenticate them for the community, her personal recollections may only represent the "hallucination" of a "tortured mind," argues a defense attorney. The assumption that Joe could not have survived the fire-bombing cannot go unchallenged in a courtroom, concludes the defense. "[U]nder the law, lives cannot be taken on assumptions but on facts."4 The defense's arguments shake Catherine's testimony, render the newsreel footage problematic, and prompt yet another turn in the trial narrative. Since the district attorney has produced neither Joe's body nor any "articles known and proved" to have been worn by him, the defense moves for dismissal of all murder charges. Before Judge Hopkins can rule on this motion, however, new evidence appears. Taking the witness stand himself, the judge testifies to having received a special delivery package with a fire-charred ring and a note claiming the band had been

games." In this sense, the defense team's appeal to eyewitness testimony might be said to parallel that of Holocaust revisionists who seek similar, first-hand evidence of exe- cutions in the Nazi gas chambers. Such a position, Jean-Francis Lyotard argues, cannot be answered within a single rule of judgment but requires a shift to a different language game. On some of the broader issues involved here, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). For a critique of Lyotard's general approach, see Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 70-85.

40. The cross-examination of Catherine exemplifies the complex view of the trial process offered in Fury. In one sense, the defense attorneys attack the claim, based either on newsreel footage or Catherine's testimony, that no one could have survived the fire-bombing at the jail. By opposing this common-sense deduction, the defense correctly aligns itself with facts constructed by the film itself.

In another sense, though, their critique relies upon the gendered argument that an hysterical woman is a likely candidate for hallucinations. The diegesis itself underscores this: When Joe's brothers first question Catherine about what she might be able to offer in the way of testimony, she remains mute until one of the brothers lights a cigarette; seeing the flame before his face, she flashes back to the jail scene, momentarily even mistaking the brother for Joe himself.

Finally, if Fury, at this juncture, hails traditional legal over mass-media evidence, the use of this approach by the defense soon creates a trap for its own clients. See infra. The insistence that representations, whether in the legal system or in the mass media, are part of a lengthy chain of images, rather than a process of holding up a mirror to social "reality," may be seen a persistent theme in Fritz Lang's work. See Stephen Jenkins, "Lang: Fear and Desire," 75, 117-18 in Jenkins, ed., Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look (London: British Film Institute, 1981); see also the discussion of Lang's final Hollywood film in Douglas Pye, "Film Noir and Suppressive Narrative, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt," in The Book of Film Noir, 98-109.

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recovered from the burned-out jail. Regretting the lynching, but fearing reprisals from the community, the sender wants to remain anonymous.

Catherine returns to the witness stand to authenticate the ring as Joe's. Her reaction, however, to a word in the note, one Joe constantly misuses, cues film viewers to the likelihood that Joe himself has supplied the ring and that Catherine now suspects this to be the case. Reminded that she is still sworn to tell the truth, Catherine haltingly identifies the ring as Joe's.

Emotion carries the day. Catherine's testimony prompts one of the defendants to confess her role in the fire, to implicate the others, and to beg Catherine for forgiveness. "Ladies and Gentleman of the jury," the district attorney smugly proclaims, "there is your answer to this case." With another of the film's "fact-and-fiction" newspaper headline proclaiming "Gallows Loom for Lynchers," members of both the legal and mass media establishments remain oblivious to how the entire trial has, in effect, been staged.41 Only Joe's intervention saves the defendants.

Indebted to the Perry Mason genre of legal fiction and to female- centered melodramas, these sequences also remain consistent with Fury's legal logic and its critical representations of the trial system. If one sees the trial, for example, as a multiple set of language games, rather than a search for some ultimate truth, the appearance of the ring satisfies the defense's insistence that trials must turn upon facts, not assumptions. Paradoxically, Joe's manufactured evidence provides precisely what the defense itself had demanded-"articles known and proved to have been worn" by Joe-and offers empirical evidence of his "death."42

Equally important, the ring sequence undermines the authority of Judge Hopkins. First, it strips away his neutrality, a fact visually highlighted when, for the first time, he is photographed away from his pedestal on the bench. By stepping down to testify, if only to the fact of the ring's arrival, the judge participates in Joe's revenge drama. Perhaps most significant, at the end of the film, Fury's representational structures deny the judge any effective voice or role; after Joe materi- alizes in the courtroom, he dominates the narrative's conclusion.43

41. Fury consistently treats media representations no more reverentially than legal discourse. See Humphries, Fritz Lang, 68-70.

42. One might note here, perhaps with irony, Mark Kelman's argument that, even though judgments about the plausibility of evidentiary claims are "doubtless as much about aspirations as interpretations" most of us are ultimately "closet positivists." Kelman, "Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness;' 817.

43. On the symbolic importance ofjudges to the conclusion of trials, see J. D. Jackson, "Law's Truth" 47. For a comparison of the ways in which judicial authority is represented in Fury and a later law noir, Knock on Any Door (1949), see Norman Rosenberg, "Law Noir," in Law Unreeled.

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Fury also separates Joe's decision to stop the trial from any concerns about either law or justice. Even when Catherine finds Joe's hideout and joins his brothers in pleading that the defendants have suffered enough, Joe remains unmoved. "They could stand seeing me burned to death, but they can't stand an honest trial." A few hours alone, however, trying to celebrate his triumph by himself, convinces Joe he cannot live without Catherine. Isolated in a seedy room, Joe cries out, "Don't leave me alone!"

Joe remains aloof from the law, even when he enters the courtroom to halt the trial. He strides to the bench with the gait of a western gunfighter, pushes aside the symbol of legal authority, and speaks the film's final lines before a silent judge. Fury, however, eschews the familiar gunfighter trope.44 Skillfully integrating dialogue with camera shots that alternate between Joe and Catherine, this final sequence represents Joe's decision to save the defendants as having nothing to do with legality or even some higher-law, gun-fighter code of justice. Although he once had concern for both law and justice, the fire burned those kinds of "silly things" out of him. "I came here today for my own sake." The desire for revenge, Joe has realized, is consuming his own very being. His suffering, not that of the defendants, dictates his decision; Joe simply cannot stand the thought of losing Catherine and enduring a harsh world in which neither law nor social institutions, other than marriage, seem to play even ameliorative roles.

Thus it is Joe and his personal relationship with Catherine-and not the judge-and his relationships with the law that dominates the film's concluding scene.45 Now that his brothers and fiancee reject him, Joe will abandon his scheme, but he still disdains any moral obligation to revere law or even bow to its legitimacy.46 The flames had consumed his old faith in legal process. He simply acquiesces to the brute force of legal discourse, which, as Fury reminds, carries the power to inflict pain and even death.47

44. Much like Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Paramount, 1963), in other words, Joe Wilson is potentially positioned as a person who stands above the process of law for a higher form of justice. Yet, at least in my viewing of the film, Wilson declines such a role. On Liberty Valence, see, for example, Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 384-413.

45. Until the brief final shot, when Joe and Catherine embrace at the foot of the silent judge's bench, the camera shots (except for a quick pan down the front row of defendants) alternate between Joe and Catherine.

46. On this point, see Milner S. Ball, "Obligation: Not to the Law But to the Neighbor," Georgia Law Review 18 (1984): 911, esp. 925-27.

47. Robert Cover, "Violence and the Word;' Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601.

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Finally, it might be noted, Joe's on-screen battle with legal language parallels the larger filmic text's own struggle to surmount the limitations of Hollywood's own private legal system dominated by the Production Code.48 Here, the film's most prominent representational problems in- volve lynch law and race. Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s deal with lynching in nearly every context except violence against Af- rican-Americans in the South.49 Joseph Breen, who oversaw enforce- ment of the industry's Production Code, insisted that Fury make no reference to vigilante justice in the South. In addition, officials at MGM, the most conservative of the Hollywood factories, deleted images of the relationship between race and law from the final release copy. As a visual commentary upon the district attorney's denunciation of lynch law, for instance, director Fritz Lang claims to have shot a brief scene in which an elderly black man, listening to the trial on a car radio, nods approvingly. Studio heads excised the scene.50

Nonetheless, the final cinematic text does manage, albeit furtively, to hint at the racial dimensions of lynching. Early in the film, for instance, a brief and highly intrusive sequence, which does nothing to advance the narrative, features an African-American woman singing a blues song. Later, as Joe's lynch mob is leaving a bar, where it has been gathering courage, and is surging toward the jail, Fury briefly shows a young black man, mistaking their intent, fleeing in terror. Both media and legal discourses, Fury reminds, are always rooted in institutional structures of power.

Law Noir and Postwar Legal Culture: They Won't Believe Me and Boomerang

Fury's critical representations of law and its unconventional cinematic styles reappear in scores of postwar film noirs. Especially in the law

48. As J. P. Telotte and others suggest, film noirs, while speaking "in a manner that asks us to accept their own form of discourse," often reflexively point "to the limitations under which they too work." Telotte Voices in the Dark, 28.

Several recent, revisionist studies have looked at Hollywood's system of legal censorship. See, for example, the symposium entitled "Hollywood, Censorship, and Amer- ican Culture," edited by Francis G. Couvares, in American Quarterly 44 (1992): 509; and Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

49. See, for example, Black Legion (Warner, 1936), Young Mr. Lincoln (Twentieth Century Fox, 1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (Twentieth Century Fox, 1943).

50. Neve, Film and Politics in America, 2; Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America, 32.

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noir sub-cycle, these postwar noirs become increasingly complex (and bizarre) in both their stories and plots.51 As historians and film scholars have suggested, film noirs occupy an important place in postwar culture. Historian Warren Susman, for example, views them against the backdrop of profound anxieties about postwar life, claiming that they express repressed fears. "It is specifically the noir movie that shows the audience that its desires, which they can now fulfill in the modem world of abundance, social welfare, and security, are fundamentally dangerous and filled with evil possibilities." In a related vein, writer-director Abra- ham Polonsky argues that noirs, invariably shot on lower budgets than other films, allowed greater freedom to explore controversial issues, such as the law, than other Hollywood forms.52

Thus, law noirs can offer legal historians important cultural texts by which to chart a variety of hopes and fears about law and courts. In Hollywood, as elsewhere, the postwar era brought increasing visibility to legal tribunals; the nation's courts became sites at which deep di- visions over issues such as racial discrimination and communism, to name only two, came together.53 Was a court the appropriate forum for bringing closure, for instance, to conflicts over the speech rights of political dissidents and the national security needs of the country? Could legal tribunals translate passions over the crusade against racial discrimination into authoritative, neutral principles?54 During the 1940s

51. According one approach to film, the "story" comprises the series of events as they supposedly occurred within a motion picture's representation of time and space, and the "plot" involves the narrative strategy, such as the use of flashbacks, by which story elements are enunciated. See Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 65-67.

52. Warren Susman, "Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America," in Recasting America, 30; Polonsky, a former lawyer who wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), is quoted in Neve, Film and Politics, 150.

53. On litigation seeking to end racial discrimination, see Mark Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); on trials involving leftist political speech, see Peter Stein- berg, The Great "Red Menace" (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1984); and Michael Bel- knap, Cold War Political Justice (1977). On battles located in Hollywood, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). For an intriguing look at how one set of postwar films represented the law of the national security state, see Robert J. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

The postwar period also saw continued debate over the institution of the jury trial itself. See, for example, Harry Kalven, Jr., and Hans Zeisel, The American Jury (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1966), esp. 3-11.

54. See, for example, Learned Hand, The Bill of Rights (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1958), passim; Herbert Weschler, "Toward Neutral Principles of Consti- tutional Law," Harvard Law Review 73 (1959): 1.

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and 1950s, these and many other disputes over the role of courts and legal trials raged alongside parallel debates, inscribed within the cinematic codes of law noirs.

They Won't Believe Me (1947) and Boomerang (1947), for example, suggest the increasingly complex struggles, waged within specific filmic texts, over the questions of closure and translation, issues first raised in pre-World War II films such as Fury and Stranger on the Third Floor

Filled with legal metaphors and framed in a courtroom setting,55 They Won't Believe Me involves a trial for murder. Charged with killing his lover, Verna Carlson (Susan Hayward), Larry Ballantine (Robert Young) takes the witness stand, presumably to testify his way out of a noir-like legal nightmare. Narrated almost entirely from the witness stand, with first-person voice-overs and several lengthy flashbacks, the film shows the philandering defendant "trapped" in a loveless marriage to wealthy Greta Ballantine, who "uses" her money to lure him away from extra- marital affairs.56 Despite Greta's surveillance, Ballantine risks an affair with Verna, playing "a game that I never had a chance of winning," he later admits.

Ballantine's fate becomes tangled in an intricate web of legally gen- erated assumptions about what "must" have happened to Greta and to Verna. As Ballantine and Verna drive toward Reno, seeking a quick divorce for Larry and thus breaking his formal and informal marriage contracts with Greta, a car crash kills Verna and leaves Larry uncon- scious. When Larry awakes, he discovers that the police, following the legal logic of the marriage contract, wrongly assume Verna's charred body to be that of Greta, Ballantine's wife. With Greta now legally dead, Larry goes back to California to convert the law's mistaken theory about Greta's fate into reality. Upon his return, though, Ballantine discovers a distraught Greta has already committed suicide. Larry hides her body and resumes his playboy lifestyle, until his boss (long jealous of Larry's relationship with Verna) and one of Larry's own former lovers convince the police that Ballantine probably killed the missing Verna. The police soon find a body and, since Greta has been declared legally dead as a result of the car crash in Nevada, mistakenly (but, again,

55. Like other postwar noirs, including The Killers (United Artists, 1946) and Out of the Past (RKO, 1947), this film is filled, for example, with contractual metaphors. See, for example, the discussion in Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, passim, esp, 110-12, 245-46 n. 29.

56. Law noirs, despite some critical stances toward legal discourse, exemplify, indeed accentuate, familiar codings of gender. See, generally, E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (British Film Institute, 1981), and Elizabeth Cowie, "Film Noir and Women;' in Shades of Noir, 121-66.

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within the logic of Larry and Greta's marriage contract) assume Greta's remains to be those of the missing Verna. In contrast to Fury, where defendants were indicted for killing someone who was still alive, Larry Ballantine is charged with killing a person who was, in reality but not legally, already dead.57

Even though Ballantine gets the opportunity to tell his story in court, he fears gambling on a jury verdict.58 After hearing his improbable account, his former lover regrets her role in bringing him to trial and tries to be reassuring: The jury will "believe you... some of them." Ballantine's response is classic noir. "I listened to my own story. I brought in my own verdict." While grim-faced jurors file into the court room, Ballantine tries to climb out a window, and a deputy fatally shoots him. Although Ballantine is lying dead on the courtroom floor, the judge still orders his clerk to read the verdict-which turns out to be "innocent"-in order "to complete the record."

The lengthy trial, concluded by the reading of a moot decision over the body of a dead man, then, seems of little legal or moral consequence. Larry Ballantine's testimony seems less a way of talking himself out of legal trouble than a means of talking himself through psychological trauma. In this film, the public courtroom primarily serves as a space in which Larry Ballantine can seek, unsuccessfully in the end, his own "talking cure" for personal, psychological guilt.59 Larry's testimony to himself proves more important than any of the public discourse in the court and jury rooms.60

Recalling Fury's meticulous examination of evidentiary issues, Boom- erang offers even more complex representations of the trial process than They Won't Believe Me.6' Shot on locale in Connecticut and "based on a true story" that (the film's off-screen narrator [Reed Hadley] empha- sizes) "could have happened anywhere," the movie begins with the

57. The postwar comedy, Don Juan Quilican (1945) offers a variation on this same story.

58. Larry Ballantine's attitude parallels that of the legal realist Jerome Frank who wrote that "a legal right is usually as bet, a wager, on the chancy outcome of a possible future lawsuit." Frank, Courts on Trial, 27.

59. See Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Talking Power: The Politics of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 59 if.

60. In contrast to the young reporter in Stranger on the Third Floor, Larry Ballantine, much like Joe Wilson in Fury, provokes his own court ordeal by defying or challenging the law. In this sense, a number of the male protagonists in the noirs seek to do battle with the law. For an argument along these lines, which employs a Lacanian-influenced psychoanalytic approach, see Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, 143-46.

61. Although my own reading differs in several respects, I still rely upon Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 139-45, especially for Boomerang's relationship to the noir cycle.

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search for the person who murdered a beloved Roman Catholic priest, Father Lambert. The hunt for the killer reveals deep fissures within the community; the capture of John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), an embittered World War II veteran, and the pre-trial preparations of State Attorney Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews) only exacerbates these divi- sions. The community's political leaders, for example, have little interest in whether or not Waldron actually committed the crime, and they manipulate the case for their own political advantage.

Standing against political pressures, State Attorney Harvey becomes a heroic legal figure. Beginning with "as close to a perfect case as I have ever seen," he presents the evidence to a superior court judge, the official charged with binding Waldron over for a jury trial. Without warning, however, Harvey suddenly announces that he "thinks" Waldron is innocent and asks for a nolle prosequi. In chambers, the judge scolds Harvey for ignoring his public duty to prosecute the case and warns that he had "better do a great deal more than think" when he presents the rest of his exculpatory evidence.

Harvey's public performance vindicates his personal convictions. Al- though he holds an apparently unbeatable trump card-knowledge of the "fact" that Waldron's gun cannot discharge when held at the angle from which Father Lambert's killer had presumably fired-Harvey plods, step-by-step, through all the evidence. Using flashback scenes that depict his staff testing crucial links in the evidentiary chain, Boom- erang aligns viewers with Harvey's claim that all of the eyewitness testimony is inconclusive. In addition, film spectators see Harvey re- futing other elements of his own case, including the ballistic tests. Still, he pronounces the evidence "inconclusive." Only when an assistant points Waldron's gun at Harvey's own head, pulls the trigger, and has it misfire, can the case conclude. Waldron is quickly released.

Boomerang inscribes a number of elements from both film noir and its law noir sub-cycle. Many of its filmic techniques, especially the flashbacks, suggest noir: the story of an innocent person trapped in a tangled web of evidence recalls both Fury and Stranger on the Third Floor, and the representations of the corruption, rivalries and cynicism surrounding a small-town trial further suggest the former film. In addition, John Waldron closely resembles the burned-out World War II veterans who populate a number of postwar noirs. Finally, the film's climactic trial sequences fail to bring the kind of narrative closure found in more celebratory films such as The Young Philadelphians or Twelve Angry Men. Because of their efforts to pressure Harvey, the Reform Party falls into disarray, and the Conservative Party seems poised for a return to power. Moreover, as Waldron walks out of the courthouse,

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the omniscient narrator reveals that the "case was never solved" and still remains "open on the police books."62

In several important ways, Boomerang differs from other law noirs, especially in its celebration of Henry Harvey's legal performance.63 The film, for instance, shows Harvey rising above ordinary politics. In this sense, it inscribes one of the major discourses in postwar legal culture- the insistence that law and politics are entirely separate realms.4 Boom- erang's concluding sequence underscores this position by noting that State Attorney Harvey never became governor, the political reward dangled by the Reform Party in exchange for a quick conviction. Over the background strains of "America the Beautiful" the omniscient nar-

62. The Hollywood film system compensates for this failure to find Father Lambert's killer. At crucial points in the trial sequences, the camera gives the film spectators privileged sight of a man identified only as "Jim," a character unknown to all the diegetic characters except the deceased Father Lambert. Increasingly, Jim seems to be the real killer. It is the media, rather than the law, that announces the end of the chase: The same newspaper that features Waldron's release, on the front page, carries a small item, on the back page, about the man identified only as Jim being killed in a car crash, while fleeing police who were chasing him for speeding. For a discussion of this turn, see Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 143-45.

Twelve Angry Men (1957), of course, also ends without a conviction, but it offers a significantly different narrative trajectory than Boomerang. In Boomerang, the problem is a very broad one: Is a small-town justice system adequate to the task of apprehending and convicting the killer of a beloved religious leader whose death has left a "gaping hole in the community." In contrast, Twelve Angry Men may conclude so smoothly because its narrative focus is narrower: Will a jury find a specific defendant guilty or innocent? Indeed, with the logic of the Hollywood studio system, the answer is virtually guaranteed once the film's star, Henry Fonda, opts for acquittal.

63. Boomerang was directed by Elia Kazan, who appeared before House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 to admit his own Communist Party past and to name names, and produced by Louis de Rochemont, who had overseen the March of Time series and turned to feature films with another semi-documentary, House on 92nd Street (Twentieth Century Fox, 1945), a film that combined noir styles with an paean to the FBI. Boomerang, Kazan claimed, tells "how an initial miscarriage of justice was righted by the persistence and integrity of a young district attorney, who risked his career to save an innocent man. This shows the exact opposite of the Communist libels on America." Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Com- mittee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Viking, 1971), 493.

On Kazan's political and cinematic turns, see Thomas J. Pauly, An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1983). A later film directed by Kazan, On the Waterfront (Columbia, 1954) is perhaps the strongest filmic statement, from the cold-war period, on the necessity to cooperate with legal tribunals.

64. See, for example, the essays in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, ed. David Kairys (rev. ed., New York: Pantheon, 1990).

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Hollywood on Trials

rator reveals that the character of Henry Harvey was modeled on that of Homer Cummings, who "rose to one of the highest legal offices in the land, attorney general of the United States." Most important, Boom- erang articulates its legal narrative in ways that contain important tensions in postwar culture. Though it falls short of constructing a story in which a court trial provides an entirely secure closure and magically reconciles seemingly irreconcilable interests, the film nonetheless en- dows State Attorney Henry Harvey with considerable potency.65 More- over, even though the hearing may not have closed the book on the story of Father Lambert's murder, it does assume a more important narrative role than courtroom sequences in other law noirs.66 If Boom- erang never quite imputes stable, authoritative meanings to the evidence offered in court-the omniscient voice-over admits that "some people" always considered Waldron guilty-State Attorney Harvey can still translate Waldron's claims of innocence effectively enough to satisfy legal standards of proof. In this important sense, Boomerang points toward films such Twelve Angry Men and The Young Philadelphians, popular legal texts that unabashedly celebrate court trials for providing closure to controversial stories and, through the magic of courtroom process, for enunciating translations that seem to represent, fairly and accurately, the stories from daily life.67

65. For a broad argument, drawing upon psychoanalytical theory, about the "crisis" of male potency in postwar films, see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992), 52-121.

66. In addition to the films discussed in the text, for examples of noirs that offer highly critical views of the courtroom process, see Leave Her to Heaven (Twentieth Century Fox, 1945); Scarlett Street (Universal, 1945); The Postman Always Rings Twice (MGM, 1946); The Locket (RKO, 1946); The Strange Love ofMartha Ivers (Paramount, 1946); Nora Prentiss (Warner, 1947); The Lady from Shanghai (Columbia, 1947); The File on Thelma Jordan (Paramount, 1949); Angel Face (RKO, 1952); and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (RKO, 1956), a complex and compelling low-budget quickie that was Fritz Lang's final Hollywood effort. In addition, it might be argued that other postwar law films, including the popular gender-role comedy Adam's Rib (MGM, 1949), feature important trial sequences that fail to resolve, as in Polan's classical pattern, narrative complications.

67. The appearance of films such as Twelve Angry Men, of course, did not mean that all traces of law noir vanished. For example, I Want To Live (1958), the "true-life" account of a woman (Susan Hayward) executed for a murder she very likely did not commit, displays a number of markers of noir. Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that Graham "is compelled to endure a grim succession of legal maneuvering that puts the Chinese water torture to shame." New York Times, November 19, 1958, 45.

Still, films such as Twelve Angry Men and The Young Philadelphians seem to represent a powerful, perhaps dominant trend during the 1950s and early 1960s. Other films in

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Conclusion

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., anticipated (and also inspired) several generations of legal historians by urging attention to the experience rather than the logic of law. Now, by adapting post-structuralist approaches to legal studies, historians have the opportunity both to expand ideas about what counts as experience and to cross-examine experience every bit as critically as Holmes did logic. How do historians find and, then, interpret "evidence of experience," especially if they approach legal texts as constitutive, rather than simply reflective, of law and legal culture?68

Beginning with legal films of the 1950s and flashing back to law noirs of the late 1930s and 1940s, this article suggests that motion pictures from Hollywood's classical era provide evidence of important struggles over the critical questions of representation and closure. In what ways do the discourses of legal professionals translate, and in what ways can they conclude stories from "real" life, accounts that are themselves discursive and contingent rather than natural and foundational? Can courtroom discourses render these accounts into forms that satisfy both the rule of law and ideals of justice? As with other texts, legal films,

which courtroom conflicts resolve narrative conflicts include On the Waterfront (Co- lumbia, 1954); Inherit the Wind (United Artists, 1959); Peyton Place (Twentieth Century Fox, 1957); and Sergeant Rutledge (Warner, 1960).

In addition, the popular Perry Mason series featured narratives in which courtrooms provided the special place in which the famed lawyer-detective finally solves his cases. See Anita Sokolsky, "The Case of the Juridical Junkie: Perry Mason and the Dilemma of Confession," Yale Journal of Law and Humanities (1990): 189. On the importance of the confessional form in mass, commercial culture, see Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Finally, perhaps the most dramatic representations of courtroom closure in legal texts of the 1950s are offered in the television classic Dragnet. Once Joe Friday (Jack Webb) apprehends his suspect, an off-screen narrator promises that the Dragnet will soon return with the results of a court trial. Following a commercial break, the defendants' images reappear, the court's sentence is announced, and Webb's "MARK VII" logo signifies a satisfactory conclusion to another "real-life" legal narrative. On Dragnet, see David Marc, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 73-79.

68. See, for example, Michael Grossberg, "Legal History and Social Science: Fried- man's History of American Law, the Second Time Around," Law and Social Inquiry 13 (1988): 359; Susan S. Silbey, "Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law," Law and Social Inquiry 17 (1992): 39; Hoffer, "Text, Translation, Context, Conversation"; and Alan Hunt, Explorations in Law and Society: Toward a Constitutive Theory of Law (Routledge, 1993), esp. 301-33.

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especially the law noirs, offer evidence that, as Joan Scott argues (in another context), "is already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted."69 Hollywood films may help to illuminate the construction, contestation, and reconstruction of the legal discourses of the mid-twentieth century.

69. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 797.



Hollywood Court and Films

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