American Criminal Trial Films: An Overview of Their Development, 1930–2000
| Date | 01 March 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00175 |
| Author | Nicole Rafter |
| Published date | 01 March 2001 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2001
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 9–24
American Criminal Trial Films: An Overview of Their
Development, 1930–2000
Nicole Rafter*
The history of American trial films – and I am speaking of trial films in
general at the moment, not of the sub-division of criminal trial films -
has been shaped both by changes in public attitudes toward law and
lawyers and by shifts in viewer tastes. These same factors have
necessitated changes in the way we define ‘American trial films’. In
earlier years one could recognize a trial film with relative ease: it was
a drama in which a heroic lawyer or lawyer surrogate solved the film’s
dilemmas in the course of a civil or criminal trial, usually a trial held
within a courtroom. Contemporary movies, in contrast, are more
interested in action than in debate and oratory, and they are more
cynical about the effectiveness of legal processes. Thus they tend to
embed a short trial scene in a longer adventure story, and they seldom
depict lawyers as heroes on the grand scale or courts as places where
fundamental social and moral issues are settled. In sum, the trial film
genre is undergoing major change, if not dissolution.
1
The purpose of this paper is to establish the general lines of development of
an important sub-group within the trial film genre: American criminal trial
films. The research forms part of a larger project on crime in American
movies and the impact of crime movies on United States society.
2
The
paper’s secondary purpose is to formulate generalizations about the
characteristics of United States films that include criminal trials in the hope
that these generalizations may contribute to understanding of the broader,
generic category ‘trial film’. In the following historical overview, I use terms
such as ‘criminal trial films’ and ‘criminal court films’ even though in a few
cases, such as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), the trial takes place outside a
9
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Law, Policy and Society Program, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
02115, United States of America
I wish to thank Charles Alexander Hahn for assistance with this analysis.
1 For remarks on definitions of genre and the issue of on-screen duration, see D.A.
Black, Law in Film (1999) ch. 3.
2 N. Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (2000).
conventional courtroom. In a few other cases, such as Call Northside 777
(1948), the film emphasizes legal processes designed to correct the mistaken
results of an earlier criminal trial. To keep the study manageable in size, I
have limited coverage to Hollywood movies.
3
I also exclude silent movies,
comedies, sci-fis, Westerns, and war films with criminal trials, although I do
cover The Ox-Bow Incident, which has Western elements, and films on
military criminal trials during peacetime, such as Judgment at Nuremberg
(1961) and A Few Good Men (1992).
4
I begin by making some
generalizations about the characteristics of criminal court dramas over time,
after which I discuss the evolution of films of this type, identifying three
developmental stages. I conclude with observations about both the
limitations of criminal trial films and their ideological significance.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MOVIES WITH CRIMINAL TRIALS
Criminal trial films set up a tension between two sorts of law: immutable
natural law or justice on the one hand and fallible man-made law on the
other. They let us know what justice would consist of in the current case and
then use that ideal as a template for what should happen.
5
At the same time
they show us how, in the current case, man-made law fails (or is about to
fail) to reach the goal of true justice, and they proceed to play with the
discrepancy between the actual and ideal.
Criminal trial films usually include an injustice figure, the person
responsible for creating or maintaining the gap between justice and man-
made law. Most criminal trial films also include a justice figure, a hero who
tries to move man-made law ever closer to the ideal until it matches the
justice template. In most criminal trial movies produced before 1980, the
film’s resolution occurs when man-made law becomes identical to the
underlying pattern. The justice figure is usually (but not always) a lawyer;
and in a few criminal court dramas, the position of justice figure is held by
several characters at once. In Marked Woman (1937), for example, a
‘clipjoint hostess’ (Bette Davis) and the district attorney (Humphrey Bogart)
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3 This means skipping Fritz Lang’s M(1931), made in Germany and perhaps the
greatest of all trial films. My concentration on criminal court films also means that I
will not cover such well-known civil trial films as The Verdict (1982), in which
lawyer Paul Newman is rehabilitated, and Music Box (1989), in which lawyer Jessica
Lang discovers a former Nazi in her own family.
4 However, I omit The Caine Mutiny (1954), which is set during World War II.
5 Robert C. Post makes a similar point when his distinguishes between two images of
law in popular culture. Post writes that ‘the concept of ‘‘law’’ itself has assumed a
double meaning. Law is on the one hand the positive enactments of the state. law in
this sense is technical, ambiguous, and complex. It can almost always be circum-
vented . .. (L)awyers stand accused of breaking a different kind of law, the law which
is associated with justice and with our values as a community’ (R.C. Post, ‘On the
Popular Image of the Lawyer’ (1987) 75 California Law Rev. 383).
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001
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