Film Chronicle:

Abstract

Film Chronicle: Jefferson Hunter (bio) Labyrinth of Lies, directed by Giulio Ricciarelli (SPE, 2016) Fury, directed by Fritz Lang (Warner Home Video, 2005) Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger (Criterion Collection, 2012) Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder (Kino Lorber, 2014) The Trial, directed by Orson Welles (Amazon Instant Video) The Defenders: Season One, created by Reginald Rose (Shout! Factory, 2016) Have Gun—Will Travel: The Complete Series, created by Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow (Paramount, 2016) The Bride Wore Black, directed by François Truffaut (MGM, 2015) Adam's Rib, directed by George Cukor (Warner Home Video, 2000) The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-ton Megaset, directed by Ian McNaughton et al. (A&E, 2005) Two and a half thousand years ago, in The Eumenides, the concluding work in the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatized the trial of Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. The Furies are the prosecutors, while citizens of Athens make up the jury, Apollo acts as Orestes' counsel, and Athena presides over the trial on the Hill of Areopagus. The themes of the first two plays of the Oresteia, implacable hatred and death-for-death vengefulness, with the Furies following the spoor of Orestes' blood guilt like a pack of hunting dogs, are now replaced by reasoned judgments and an eventual verdict, which exonerates Orestes. Moreover it provides the Furies an honored place in civilized Athenian society and a complimentary, euphemizing name change to the Eumenides, or the Kindly Ones. In other words, the principle of justice prevails. As Aeschylus views it, justice may be imperfect, a work in progress, messy in the way democracy itself is messy, but still a cause for celebration. It is an ideal to which our own courts have aspired ever since. Artistically speaking, The Eumenides establishes the genre of courtroom drama, employing features—the cut-and-thrust of forensic argument, outbreaks of passion on the witness stand, crucial decisions made by the judge, even the sleaziness of certain legal tactics (Apollo introduces dubious scientific evidence)—which have subsequently become standard onstage. And onscreen: over and over again, the cinema has been summoned to the courts. There have been legal films set in small Southern towns (To Kill a Mockingbird), in Manhattan, where what's being bitterly litigated is the custody of a child (the five-Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer), and in Boston, where an ambulance-chasing hack played by Paul Newman brings malpracticing doctors to justice (Sidney Lumet's The Verdict). Films [End Page 266] have depicted court martials (The Caine Mutiny, A Few Good Men, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory) and kangaroo courts set up by criminals to try one of their own (Fritz Lang's M and Joseph Losey's remake of M, where the kangaroo court meets in a parking garage). Environmental degradation has gone on trial (Erin Brockovich), as has discrimination against AIDS victims (Philadelphia) and the theory of evolution (Inherit the Wind, one of numerous film adaptations of a courtroom stage play). Many will have seen Stanley Kramer's Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), which with ponderous earnestness examines the complicity of German jurists in the Nazi regime; fewer the excellent, modestly budgeted German film Labyrinth of Lies (2014), directed by Giulio Ricciarelli. This drama follows the idealistic young prosecutor Johann Radmann as he happens upon Nazis who have risen to positions of power in 1950s Frankfurt and tries to call them to account. Ricciarelli's is actually a pre-courtroom film, that is, one which forswears the drama of a trial to focus instead on the tedious preparations for it, the research in warehouses crammed full of paper records, the slow assembly of a forensic team, and the often fruitless search for witnesses. It also focuses on the psychological damage done to Radmann as he grows more frustrated, even despairing, at the obstacles put in his way. He lives in a West Germany grown prosperous in the Wirtschaftswunder and determined to stand mute about some of its citizens' wartime activities, as the original German title indicates: Im Labyrinth des Schweigens, "In the Labyrinth of Silence." In the end, a kind of justice is achieved, a kind...