“When I was overseas during the war, Your Honor, I learned a French word. I’m afraid that might be slightly suggestive.”
For 1959, this is one coarse, salacious movie, peppered with manky chit-chat and innuendo in a subtle but all-out disruption of the Hays Code, James Stewart’s folksy lawyer our champion. It’s an entirely provocative movie.
James Stewart meeting Lee Remick for the first time, Duke Ellington’s jazz score accompanying the lawyer’s stride, is almost like a soft-core porno scene. I burst out laughing at how self-aware and, well, funny it is. Genre convention is acknowledged and upended in this flick through the art of taking the piss, but it’s also just cool – cool to look at, listen to. Even the poster is cool.
As courtroom dramas go, it grips for every minute. The instructive aspect of the picture ensures its continued significance as a spearhead in movies concerning the legal system, profession, and the court, the fallibility of the human element.
And Joseph Welch, who plays the avuncular but quietly authoritative judge, is the best judge I’ve ever seen in a movie and he wasn’t even an ‘actor’:
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 