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The Verdict
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THE VERDICT
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Robert McKee
from FILMWORKS
BBC Publications
1993

There's a moment early in The Verdict when the smooth, worldly-wise attorney, Ed Concannon, brilliantly played by James Mason, plans strategy with his firm's junior lawyers. Concannon steps up to a blackboard and writes: 'Research', 'Homework'. The term he does not include is 'Ethics'. But that would never cross his mind, for The Verdict takes place in a world not unlike our own, a world in which integrity has become a liability, not an asset.

The story was first conceived by a Boston attorney, Barry Reed, who then hired a newspaper man to ghost-write it into a novel. Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who produced Jaws among other hits, purchased the novel's screen rights, then put together a package of writer/director James Bridges and actor Robert Redford. Bridges adapted the rather convoluted novel into a screenplay, but then, amazingly, Zanuck and Brown couldn't get studio financing, even with Redford as star. The problem apparently was Bridges' script. So Zanuck-Brown changed horses and brought in David Mamet. Under Mamet's persuasions this overly complicated novel yielded to the supple, elliptical rhythms of the screen.

The producers then approached director Sidney Lumet. It didn't take Lumet long to recognize that within the pages of Mamet's screenplay was the perfect expression of his lifelong theme. From Twelve Angry Men (1957) through The Pawnbroker (1965), Serpico (1973) and Network (1976) to Q and A (1990 ), Sidney Lumet has tried to throw some light into that dark corners where individual integrity and social corruption meet.

He's been called neo-Capra by some, but it seems to me that in all important ways Lumet and Frank Capra are opposites. Capra believed that the system is good, that the problem is those evil-doers who get into power and corrupt it. From Lumet's point of view the 'system' is just the name we give to power, to the arrangement of power in institutions, and from the United Nations down to the family if there's one universal truth in all human institutions it's that power corrupts.

Unlike Capra, therefore, Lumet accepts with bitter resignation the ubiquity and inevitability of corruption. Whereas in Meet John Doe ( 1941 ) and Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), for example. Capra heroes are innocents plunged into desperation and then rescued victoriously by good people, Lumet heroes start in desperation, and if they manage a small victory, they celebrate in isolation. The momentary triumph of good people over the corrupt machine is far less important to Lumet than the choices the lone individual must make as he or she confronts the soul-destroying power of that machine. How we choose, Lumet shows us, defines our humanity - and given the persistence of corruption around us, we define who we are virtually every day.

Hollywood directors like Lumet are drawn to such stories, stories rooted in moral emotions: good/evil, right/wrong, and in this case, justice/injustice, which from my movie-going experience seems to be the issue that draws the most powerful emotions out of any audience, greater even than that of life/death. There is nothing we hate more than injustice, no dream greater than the hope for a just world. Hollywood consistently makes films framed in such absolutes and is therefore often ridiculed for lacking moral sophistication by critics who think that the world is too complex for absolutes, that life is really a matter of fine tuning.

Well, perhaps, but one might also point out that there's something to be said for moral clarity. A thing is defined by what it is not. And too often the belief in fine tuning is merely the gauze of self-deception we draw over the deeply painful choices, hoping they'll go away. But they won't and sooner or later, as the protagonist of The Verdict discovers, life forces us to face moral dilemmas, and there won't be anything subtle about it.

So Zanuck-Brown got the interest of Sidney Lumet, but the director wouldn't commit to the film unless Paul Newman agreed to star as Frank Galvin, and that could have been problematic, in that Galvin is not a very sympathetic character. At the beginning of the film this alcoholic, self-destructive man makes a living by preying on the grieving survivors of fatal car accidents. He lies to his clients, sacrifices their best interests for his own, breaks the law to get evidence ... not a nice guy. But Paul Newman is the kind of actor who doesn't need to be loved by the audience, just understood. He knows the difference between sympathy and empathy, between nice guy and human being. In fact, looking back on Newman's career you see that he's drawn toward the redemption plot, toward characters who come into a film in need of moral reformation - The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961), Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) and Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967). So Newman and Lumet went to work to create the most masterful portrayal of the actor's distinguished career.

It was Newman who came up with the inspired idea that Frank Galvin is a man who cannot breathe, a man who both figuratively and literally is suffocating. If you listen closely to Newman in this film you'll discover that he's given Galvin a unique, character-specific voice - thin, breathless, half-whispered, trembling, choked. Galvin is constantly fighting a head-cold, smokes too much, pants like an asthmatic after a flight of stairs, masks his liquor breath with a drug-store spray. His efforts to resurrect his moral character so terrify him that he has palpitations and severe anxiety attacks. It's as if his life, his past and this case were crushing him, smothering him, squeezing the breath out of him.

To support Newman's meticulous creation, Lumet wrapped his whole directorial vision around the struggle within Frank Galvin. First he devised a system of religious imagery, with the cardinal-red Gothic titles, the stained glass over the bar's pinball machine and blazing fireplaces to suggest the inferno, as if Galvin, like a priest who's lost faith, is matching his wits with Satan in a battle for his soul.

But beyond symbols, Lumet wanted a visual texture, a sensory realization of the character's inner life. Galvin feels claustrophobic, stifled, as if the walls are closing in. So Lumet searched for an aesthetic key that would express this sense of suffocation, and he found it in the paintings of Caravaggio. He and cameraman Andrzej Bartkowiak analysed how Caravaggio handled background vs. foreground, light sources and surfaces. From this study they devised abstract principles to apply to The Verdict. The first was to make the backgrounds bright and the foregrounds dark. When something is brightly lit on screen the effect is to make it come forward, seem closer. And conversely, if it's dimly lit it recedes. So when they put Newman in a dark foreground, the bright background seems to press him toward us, squeezing Galvin, so to speak, against the surface of the screen.

Secondly, Lumet asked production designer Edward Pisoni to construct sets with heavy ceilings, monumental cornices, and barrel arches. He then shot Newman using predominantly low angles. Low angle compositions normally give a character stature, a sense of power, but confining Newman to the lower corners of the screen, particularly the weak left corner, seems to crush him under the weight of these massive sets. Lumet also created frames within the frame to box Galvin inside doorways and under arches.

Because it's about a man trapped in his past, nothing used to dress the sets is new. Art director John Kasarda textured the furniture and walls so we feel that the atmosphere of corruption is rotting the leather, wood, plaster and paint. Indeed, the physical environment is so alive in this film that when Galvin attacks it, it fights back. As he trashes his office, the filing cabinet and picture frame knock him out.

And lastly the colour design. Since the battle for Frank Galvin's soul produces a palpable illness, Lumet and his set decorator, George Detitta, chose muted, almost sickening greens and yellows, both interior and exterior, to complete the effect.

Paul Newman was awarded his fifth Oscar nomination for The Verdict but didn't win. I guess they're going to wait until, like Henry Fonda, Newman is on his death-bed and then finally give this great actor one of those little gold statues.

_______________________________________________________

Galvin: Tch. Well, ... you know, so much of the time, we're just lost. We say, 'Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what is true'. And there is no justice. The - the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time we become dead. We think of ourselves as victims, and we become victims. We become, tch., (sighs), we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. You are the law. Not some book. Not the lawyers. Not the, the marble statue, or the trappings of the court. See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. But they are, they are, in fact, a prayer. I mean, a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, 'Act as if ye had faith and faith will be given to you.' If, ... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves ... and act with justice. And I believe there is justice in our hearts.

From the post-production script of The Verdict

Working as a screenwriter I always thought that 'Film is a collaborative business' only constituted half of the actual phrase. From a screenwriter's point of view, the correct rendering should be 'Film is a collaborative business: bend over '

When one works as a screenwriter, one is told that the job is analogous to being a carpenter - that as much pride and concern as one takes in one's work, one is only working for hire, and the final decision must be made by the homeowner.

The analogy, l think, is not quite correct. Working as a screenwriter-for-hire, one is in the employ not of the eventual consumers (the audience, whose interests the honest writer must have at heart), but of speculators, whose ambition, many times, is not to please the eventual consumer, but to extort from him as much money as possible as quickly as possible. The antagonism between writer and producer is real and essential; and writers tend to deal with it by becoming enraged, leaving the business, or, by suiting up and joining in the game by exploiting the producer for as much money as possible.
From Some Freaks by David Mamet

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THE VERDICT
Director: Sidney Lumet
U.S.A, 1982
Monthly Film Bulletin
February 1983
Volume 50 - Number 589
Richard Combs
Boston. Attorney Frank Galvin has despairingly sunk to the level of ambulance chasing when his old friend and mentor Mickey Morrissey presents him with a case of medical malpractice - a young woman made permanently comatose by the anaesthetic given her during labour - which should restore his fortunes with an easy, out-of-court settlement. Galvin meets the afflicted girl's sister, Sally Doneghy, and her husband Kevin, who after four years are keen to settle the case and move West, but is himself unexpectedly affected by seeing his client in hospital. To Mickey's horror, he turns down an offer of $210,000 (against their claim of $600,000) from Bishop Brophy, whose archdiocese runs the hospital responsible, St. Catherine's, and determines to fight the case in court. Mickey warns him that Towler, the doctor being cited for negligence, is being represented by the highly successful Ed Concannon, though Galvin is confident of his own expert medical witness, Dr. Gruber. But Gruber subsequently disappears (perhaps at Concannon's instigation), and a substitute witness is hurriedly found in Dr. Thompson an elderly black with a reputation for testifying in such cases who is soon discredited in court. Mickey meanwhile tells Laura Fischer, with whom Galvin has taken up, how as a young lawyer Galvin had been discredited for jury tampering in fact carried out by the firm for which he worked. With the case going against them, Mickey and Galvin trace Towler's obstetric nurse Maureen Rooney (the only one of his team not to testify on his behalf), and through her an admissions nurse, Kaitlin Costello Price, now living in New York. Mickey meanwhile learns that Laura is Concannon's daughter, and she is rejected by an angry and suspicious Galvin. On the stand, Kaitlin reveals how Towler ordered her to change an admission form, which he had not consulted prior to the labour, showing that his patient had eaten only one hour before being brought to hospital and was therefore ineligible for anaesthetic. Galvin's case is won, and only his relationship with Laura remains up in the air.

Comment:
For a film with such clear-cut ethical concerns, with the need to bring both medicine and the law to book for their respective malpractices, The Verdict is remarkably suffused with the motifs and atmosphere of the religious. This does have a local justification in that the setting is a Catholic archdiocese of Boston, and one of the parties to the legal dispute, St. Catherine's Hospital, where a young woman is rendered comatose by the anaesthetic she is given during labour, is run by the church. But this is not True Confessions, the interpenetration of the sacred and the profane is not a theme, and the film draws little irony from the bishop's hard-headed calculations about an out-of-court settlement. A sacerdotal mood is unmistakable, however, from the film's title (which is not as matter-of-fact as it sounds, but synonymous with 'the judgement') to its very first shot a slow zoom into Paul Newman's burnt-out ambulance chaser playing pinball in a bar, little more than a silhouette against the fierce clarity of the winter landscape seen through the window, an image lent clarity of a particular kind by the hints of stained glass (an omnipresent architectural detail) picked up in the pinball lights and the red Gothic lettering of the titles.

With its first cut, the film then jumps to a Bressonian play of hands as Frank Galvin peels a bill from a wad of notes, paying off the director of a funeral home before entering to proffer his services to the mourners. Clearly, the religious dimension belongs most to Galvin, as he gradually realises that he can win redemption by taking a case that is brought to him as a favour, a medical malpractice suit that can be settled to everyone's advantage, and fighting it as a cause. That way too, one can soon see, lie hefty chunks of declamatory drama and self-important crusading, taking in themes of universal injustice and personal integrity, the afflictions of the bloody but unbowed liberal spirit, as pompously as director Sidney Lumet has ever done, from The Pawnbroker to Network. Even when characters aren't on the stand, the declamatory note is sustained ("I can't invest in failure any more, Frank", declares the heroine, when Galvin is about to give up before the trial has begun), which at times leaves the uncanny impression that playwright Mamet, writer of Rafelson's coolly elliptical Postman Always Rings Twice, has been possessed by the spirit of Clifford Odets or Paddy Chayefsky.

More than just pretentiousness, or a certain kind of old-fashioned tub-thumping is involved here. The film proves its case, that justice can still triumph if people will only overcome their cynicism or apathy, with the kind of dramatic rhetoric - a deus ex machina secret witness who can win or lose the case for Galvin; the jury's verdict, which ignores the judge's ruling about inadmissible evidence and makes them just a wish-fulfilment extension of the audience (or vice versa) - that doesn't add up to any kind of argument from social cases and existing institutions. Those institutions, according to Galvin's summation speech, are what make people cynical about real justice - to which the film proposes, like Network, that little people everywhere simply stand up and demand that right be done. ('Little people' have already crept perniciously back in an earlier declaration by redemption-bound Galvin: the weak ... have got to have somebody to fight for them.)

But what, in turn, redeems this Network streak are qualities which Lumet, as a prime-time buttonholer and energiser of actors at the expense of his visuals, is not supposed to have. From that opening shot, the religious dimension is incorporated less as a matter of symbolism than of visual design, with figures in a dark foreground played against backgrounds of unambiguous brightness (Andrzej Bartkowiak's photography can suggest a scene streaming with the light of divine revelation, or again the special illumination of stained glass). Galvin's opposite number, Ed Concannon - the self-assured organisation man versus the lonely doubter - is introduced jokily as "the prince of darkness", but the appellation sticks (in seraphically smiling, bow-tied James Mason, Satan with a touch of perfidious Albion), and underlines the split in Bartkowiak's lighting with a hint of Manicheism - or something else from Odets, perhaps, about integrity vs. success. Visually, in fact, The Verdict is not-quite-expressionist, or expressionist without filmic portfolio (since Lumet's urgent, TV-realist approach seems to bypass the cinema altogether, and has usually been decried as no style at all). But one or two characteristically portentous, low-angle shots of Galvin tearing up - or quietly suffering in - his office are as architecturally self-conscious as Citizen Kane, emphasising his strangely monk-like, low-ceilinged, vaulted chamber.

Style, in fact, intersects with the most ordinary on-location realism in the elliptical but sharply crystallised way Lumet builds up his picture of Boston (recalling a similar effect in Prince of the City, where scene-setting economy became thematic abstraction). Lumet's realism comes with its own stylisation built in, to the extent that it is so closely identified with shooting in New York, repository of the 'real', as opposed to the artificiality of Hollywood (another streak of Manicheism). As far as possible in The Verdict, apparently, Lumet dovetailed his actual locations in Boston with stand-in 'locations' in his native city. Allied to this is a fragmentary realism of character, less striking here than in Prince of the City because of the didactic demands of the main roles, but exemplified in one subsidiary character, the doctor who is hurriedly called in for expert testimony when Galvin's star witness disappears. Galvin's shock at finding that his substitute is both black and elderly is covered in a flustered attempt to put a good liberal face on it, which is then filtered through the discoveries that this man's 'expert' opinion can easily be impugned, that he has his own dignity and authority and desire to see right done, and that in the end he will prove technically inadequate on the stand. These shifts of perception, at least, count for more than an attempt to reproduce the ambiguous ending of Prince of the City, with a question mark left hanging over the relationship of Galvin and Laura - a romance that has always been the film's most redundant element.

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The Verdict
US (1982): Drama
Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4
129 min, Rated R, Color
Cast & Credits
Paul Newman - Frank Galvin
Charlotte Rampling - Laura Fischer
Jack Warden - Mickey Morrissey
James Mason - Ed Concannon
Milo O'Shea - Judge Hoyle
Edward Binns - Bishop Brophy
Julie Bovasso - Maureen Rooney
Lindsay Crouse - Kaitlin Costello
Directed by Sidney Lumet and produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown.
Screenplay by David Mamet.

Review
There is a moment in THE VERDICT when Paul Newman walks into a room and shuts the door and trembles with anxiety and with the inner scream that people should get off his back. No one who has ever been seriously hung over or needed a drink will fail to recognize the moment. It is the key to his character in THE VERDICT, a movie about a drinking alcoholic who tries to pull himself together for one last step at salvaging his self-esteem.