Crime and Punishments

BLEEDING-HEART Liberals and knee-jerk conservatives alike (getting the epithets out of our way at the start) inhabit, apparently, two separate but equally simple Americas, one squishy soft, the other tough and punitive. We are talking now of the theories of criminality and jurisprudence and penology; for want of a less grandiose term, the concepts of Justice. If someone has worked up a litmus test of ideological purity, it must surely contain a question or series of questions designed to ferret out the respondents’ views about the causes of crime and the nature of criminality and the ideal system of punishment. Opinions about capital punishment are useful though not quite definitive indicators, as are attitudes toward toughening or “liberalizing” the conditions of prison life. As in reality, so, too, in the popular arts, notably television and the movies. The views from Hollywood Boulevard, to sum up various production centers in an inaccurate but familiar phrase, shift on these matters roughly as, though usually just slightly later than, the views on them from Main Street do. On the tube we pass through our season of “Mortimer Gentle, Public Defender,” into our season of “Firmshoes, D.A.” And back again. In the movies we float between Dirty Harry and Dog Day Afternoon, and variants thereof.

Recently, however, two films came before the public offering somewhat more ambiguous pictures of Justice, movies notable not only as cinema but as pop philosophy. Both And Justice for All and The Onion Field depict the sorry state of our systems of criminal justice, but neither quite fits the stereotypes so comforting to ideologues of either major persuasion. Each presents a rich diet for reflection, each is marred by ambition bolder than realization, and each deserves more than the passing glance sufficient for the bulk of today’s cinema fare.

Norman Jewison’s ... And Justice For All is a cornucopia of vignettes of the American legal profession in our time, centering on the activities of a slightly rumpled, splendidly idealistic young attorney named Arthur Kirkland (Al Pacino), the name itself redolent of high aspirations (the Round Table’s master) and virtue (the Church, the kirk) and America (this land is your land, this land is etcetera). I wouldn’t push the name game too far, lest this smack of graduate school pomposity, but the reader can play around with the monickers to some advantage.

Kirkland defends, among others, a black drag queen, Ralph Agee (Robert Christian), and a white, somewhat wilted flower-child, Jeff McCullaugh (Thomas Waites), and in time he is maneuvered into defending a hard-assed, insufferably cold judge named Fleming (John Forsythe). Kirkland is also the somewhat reluctant buddy of a self-destructive, iconoclastic jurist named Rayford (Jack Warden), a fellow given to eating his lunch from a paper bag while sitting on the ledge outside his chambers, high above the streets of Baltimore, and given also to dragging his friends off for early morning helicopter rides, the fun of which excursions derives from taking the ‘copter just a little bit beyond the halfway point of the fuel supply and then heading back to the airport and seeing if he can land before crashing. Judge Rayford’s theory of life is that it “sucks.”

So does the judicial system, Jewison-style. Kirkland’s law partner, Jay Porter (Jeffrey Tambor), gets his client, a killer, acquitted, and turns up at Kirkland’s flat teetering on the edge of hysteria, revealing that the freed killer went from his trial directly out into the night to kill two kids. Porter next appears at a Thanksgiving dinner party, shriving in a manner more familiar to an earlier age than to ours: he has shaved his head. Porter soon falls apart and takes to tossing plates and cups at passersby in the courthouse corridors. This, obviously, is not the sort of movie that makes its points subtly.

Judicial rulings are “me-shugenah,” in the words of one aggrieved plaintiff. The Negro chap with the penchant for dresses and blond wigs is promised an easy release by his attorney, Kirkland, but when our hero accompanies his plate-tossing law partner to the hospital in a straitjacket, he leaves the Black’s defense in the hands of a colleague who screws up royally; the terrified and now sentenced transvestite next wards off his fate behind bars by hanging himself in his cell. Legalman (I borrow Robert Ringer’s phrase) is hardly infallible; nor, for that matter, is he terribly interested in his clients. By Legalman I mean, of course, the concept of Lawyer in this film, not the boy wonder, Kirkland, who is swell. Jeff McCullaugh, the young fellow whom Judge Fleming keeps from liberty owing to a piddling technicality, is also a victim of this system that can’t manage to separate the innocent wheat from the criminaloid chaff. McCullaugh goes berserk, barricades himself in a prison office with two guards as hostages. During the frenzied visit by his attorney, Kirkland, McCullaugh’s head moves momentarily into the rifle sights of guards stationed across the court-yard. Another dead client. Kirkland has quite a time of it losing his clients, in between neat little beddie-bye scenes with his lady friend, Gail Packer (Christine Lahti), an attorney upon whom Kirkland lavishes both his interpretation of affection and his never-ending sermonettes on truth, beauty, and the (hoped-for) American way of justice.

But to the central feature of this melodrama: the strange case of Judge Fleming, whose character we are shown, and whom we are thereby instructed to dislike instantly, by the prominent, if seemingly casual, display of an Ike button and a gilded GOP elephant atop his desk. (The film is stuffed to here with cute visual teases like that; the symbology becomes a tad overbearing after about twenty minutes of it.) Fleming, the sanctimonious upholder of the Law, has been arrested for raping a woman and beating her brutally. He is not the most popular man on the bench, and getting him good is the first order of business for everybody, including the prosecutor, who shows far less interest in questions of guilt or innocence than he does in trotting out his football imagery, evidently a handy way for us to see that the man is as vile as Judge Fleming. Since Judge Fleming and attorney Kirkland cordially dislike each other, the judge insists that Kirkland serve as his attorney, overcoming Kirkland’s reluctance by threatening him with disbarment, this owing to a minor infraction of something or other in the lawyers’ code of ethics: Kirkland long ago betrayed a client’s confidence, revealing to the cops that his client was a psychotic sadist.

The lawyer impressed into service to a judge he despises comes to believe in his loathsome client’s innocence when the judge passes a polygraph test and when an eyewitness turns up to verify the presence at the scene of the crime of a different man, thus, presumably, absolving Kirkland of the crime. But Fleming, we soon learn, is into kinky sex (another of Kirkland’s clients provides him with photographs of the judge in undies and chains, a female victim cringing at his feet beneath his whip, and of the head of the Ethics Committee, to which Kirkland’s attorney girl friend belongs, the third participant in the merry orgy). Queried by his enraged lawyer about all this, Judge Fleming calmly acknowledges that he is guilty, that he has had the lie detector test fixed and the eyewitness account falsified, and that he fully expects his attorney to get him off. Flash now to the trial, and fill in the blanks.

An outline tends, I admit, to strip ...And Justice For All of its richness. It is a rapid sweep across the whole terrain of contemporary America’s judicial chessboard: the evil judge, the crazy judge, the greedy lawyers and the guilt-ridden lawyer and the decent lawyer, the pathetic black victims and the pathetic white victims of a Law that bears little resemblance to Justice, the compromisers and the idealists—the works. It succumbs to an evidently irresistible urge by its makers to bang our heads against the actualities of a hopelessly inadequate legal system, overdoing by half the instances that would make its point sufficiently.

And yet it presents a half-dozen performances that achieve something closely approximating excellence, and leaves us at the end with a double-whammy: the climax at the Judge Fleming trial toys with us, thrills us, and leaves any of us who bother to contemplate what comes after The End with the realization that nothing, absolutely nothing, is changed or will change or can change.

It is a message of despair, Quixote tilting against the windmills of a rigidity utterly impervious to truth. Have you heard of a mistrial?

...And Justice For All drains the viewer of any lingering sentimentality about the situations in our prisons, in our judicial chambers, in our law offices, in our courtrooms, while not depriving us of some faint belief in the fundamental decency of some few practitioners of the profession called The Law. It is both an absurdist fantasy about crime and the punishments for various crimes, and a shrill, superficially nutty shriek for reform.

How will our straw-man twins, Mr. Liberal and Mr. Conservative, like it?

About as much as they’ll like The Onion Field, the latest in Joseph Wambaugh’s books translated to the screen. Formerly a policeman, then author of The New Centurions and The Choirboys, both of which came to sickly life on the screen in atrocious versions of the novels on which they were based, Wambaugh decided this time to write his own screenplay and participate actively in the movie’s production. The Onion Field is the true story of two cops and two hood-lums, whose lives converge one night. The cops (Ted Danson and John Savage) stop the thieves (James Woods and Franklyn Seales) in a chance encounter, are apprehended by the bad guys and taken out into the country, where the loony crook (Woods) kills one of the cops (Danson) and almost captures and kills the other (Savage). The killers are at length apprehended, tried, sentenced to death, and rescued from that fate by ole debbil technicality. In short, the appeals system prolongs the case for seven years. Meanwhile, the surviving cop, consumed by guilt—he comes to believe that he was responsible for his partner’s death—becomes a petty criminal himself, is busted from the force, nearly kills his baby, or himself—the scene leads us to expect either slaughter, or both—and only slowly is patched back together with the help of his wife and others.

It is a movie as unlikely to please anybody who prefers his stories neat as is ...And Justice For All. Except for the police officer who is killed, and who is portrayed as a nice, dour fellow who relaxes by playing sorrowful dirges on the bagpipes of his ancestral people, and whose early elimination from the movie denies us a protracted examination of his essence, the lead characters are fully rounded, neither perfectly awful nor perfectly fine. Savage (Hair; The Deer Hunter) infuses his role, that of officer Karl Hettinger, with power and complexity and vulnerability. He is, of course, clean-cut, but he is not a saint at the start tormented by forces outside himself. In fact he did stupidly allow the criminals to capture him and his partner, violating everything he had learned in the police academy; in fact he did will his own dismissal from the force and allow his own doubts to bring him to the thin ledge jutting out over catastrophe. But Savage’s Hettinger is a man for whom the viewer feels a mixture of compassion and disdain: he is a cop whose will to do the right thing is less firm than his muddle-headed tendency to goof.

And the two criminals are, if anything, even less easily pigeonholed. The Black, Jimmy (Seales), is a two-bit thief who succumbs to his white partner’s wife, later succumbs in every way to his white partner; and the latter, Powell (Woods), demonstrates not only a madman’s sense of the apt-ness of viciousness but also the brilliant man’s ability to use the law against justice. He is, moreover, something of a part-time bisexual, to whom Jimmy bows down, in prison, as disciple and as fellator. As the years pass, as Hettinger disintegrates, the two convicted men mature, mellow, master the processes of endless delay, until at last the black man is something of a prison yard philosopher and the white man has become a laid-back instructor, tutoring other convicts in the details of a legal system seemingly tailor-made for the perpetuation of injustice and the ironic transformation of the roles of criminal and victim.

The Onion Field can be seen as a ringing cry of anguish against the prison system, or as a stirring indictment of the crazy mass of contradictions and stupid-ities of the rules of law, or— and I would opt for this—as a horrifying question mark: at the end we still do not know whether Jimmy participated in the shooting, whether Hettinger could have saved his partner, whether Powell has transcended his awful past and been “rehabilitated,” thus serving as Exhibit A in the case against capital punishment, or whether he has simply learned better than most to practice the good citizenship of slipping through loopholes. The film abounds in telling bits of action and snatches of conversation that Wambaugh, the former policeman, must know to be true. As Jimmy and Powell are led into death row, one voice—a guard? a prisoner?—calls out: “Dead men coming through.” As we spend some time in their row of cells with our convicts and their neighbors, we watch one Black take off all his clothes and slash his wrists, and another couple holding hands, and still others cow-ering in terror, and more men pulled inside their own skulls, doing their time by blotting out time itself. We watch a paunchy and vulgar defense attorney pulling every little trick imaginable out of his hatful of them, ignoring a judge trying to stifle him, throwing the full panoply of obfuscatory motions into a hearing that seems itself to be but one piece in a huge mosaic of obfuscation. The film is overly generous in ladling out its enigmas and unnecessarily gentle in tying up a few of its lesser loose ends. But it leaves the central paradox unresolved. The Law, this charlatan’s bag of statutes, is all we’ve got, but The Law embodies injustice, and so where to now? You might be interested in knowing that the real-life models for this story served a long stretch in San Quentin before they earned their parole. Meanwhile, the death penalty was invalidated by the Supreme Court, only, very recently, to return to active service in a few states. Sirhan Sirhan, by the way, comes up for parole shortly, and Dan White will be out feeding the pigeons in Union Square by 1984.

LR’s film critic is Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex County (Massachusetts), critic-at-large for WNAC-TV (CBS) in Boston, and host of “The David Brudnoy Show” on WHDH- AM, also in Boston.