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Hollywood on Trials: Courts and Films, 1930–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Norman Rosenberg
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Extract

As long as legal scholarship focused on traditional sources that were considered “distinctively legal,” a great variety of “legal texts” were consigned to scholars in other disciplines. Thus, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1932) and his classic work The Common Law (1881) appeared safely inside the categorical “box” identified as distinctively legal, while Louis Calhern's portrayal of Holmes and the film The Magnificent Yankee (MGM, 1950) fell outside.

In recent years, however, both the inside/outside distinction and the legal box metaphor have become increasingly suspect. Drawing upon post-structuralist theories, which highlight the discursive and representational dimensions of law, a variety of different projects seek to locate the diverse places at which legal rhetoric and imagery are constituted.

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Articles
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Law and History Review , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 341 - 367
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1994

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References

1. The term “distinctively legal” and the model of “inside” and “outside” modes of legal history are developed in Gordon, Robert W., “Introduction: J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography,” Law and Society Review 10 (1975): 9–10.Google Scholar

2. For recent, broadly focused uses of such post-structuralist approaches, see, for example, Douzinas, Costas and Warrington, Ronnie (with McVeigh, Shaun), Postmodern Jurisprudence: The Law of Text in the Text of Laws (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar and Norton, Ann, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 139–54.Google Scholar In addition to the works cited for specific propositions, see generally, Poster, Mark, Critical Theory and Post-Structuralism: In ffSearch of a Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Lentricchia, Frank and McLaughlin, Thomas, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Game, Ann, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert, and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; and O'Sullivan, Tim et al., Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar

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4. Hunt, Alan, “Foucault's Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval,” Law and Social Inquiry 17 (1992): 32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also, Hunt, Alan, Explorations in Law and Society: Towards a Constitutive Theory of Law (New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

5. See, for example, Gaines, Jane M., Contested Culture: The Image, The Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).Google Scholar

6. See, for example, Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas, eds., The Law in Everyday Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).Google Scholar

7. Coombe, Rosemary J., “Room for Manoeuver: Toward a Theory of Practice in Critical Legal Studies,” Law and Social Inquiry 14 (1989): 115–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (emphasis added). See also Caudill, David S., “‘Name-of-the-Father' and the Logic of Psychosis: Lacan's Law and Ours,” Legal Studies Forum 16 (1993): 433Google Scholar, which invokes the psychological theory of Jacques Lacan to suggest that “legal process and institutions,” in one sense at least, “are just another set of images and texts alongside others in social life …”; and Kennedy, Rosanne, “Spectacular Evidence: Discourses of Subjectivity in the Trial of John Hinckley,” Law and Critique 3 (1992): 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which argues that “law is in an increasingly incongruous position: it vainly attempts to isolate the real in an era in which reality is becoming rapidly indistinguishable from its fictional representations.” For an essay that invokes post-structuralist scholarship to re-examine the eighteenth century, see Cornell, Saul, “Moving Beyond the Canon of Traditional Constitutional History: Anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights, and the Promise of Post-Modern Historiography” Law and History Review 12 (1994): 1.Google Scholar

8. Although what might be called the law and film enterprise bears some affinity to the more established law and literature venture, there are significant differences between the two projects. First, law and literature work generally focuses on canonized texts, such as Franz Kafka's The Trial and Herman Melville's Billy Budd. See, for example, Douzinas and Warrington, Postmodern Jurisprudence, 205–43 on Billy Budd. Second, as Ian Ward has recently noted, the search for examples of “law in literature” has generally been closely related to reading “law as literature” — that is, to applying the techniques of literary criticism to traditional legal texts. Ward, Ian, “Law and Literature,” Law and Critique 4 (1993): 43, 44, 58–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Finally, there are significant differences between“reading”(or “making meaning” of) printed and filmic texts. For a particularly strong argument for this view, see Bordwell, David, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, esp. Chapter 11, “Why Not to Read a Film.” See also Knight, Deborah, “Reconsidering Film Theory and Method,” New Literary History 24 (1992): 321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For legal scholarship that addresses, from different theoretical perspectives, Hollywood films, see the special issue of Legal Studies Forum, entitled “Legal Reelism: The Hollywood Film as Legal Text,” 15 (1991); Schlag, Pierre, “Normativity and the Politics of Form,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139 (1991): 801, 852–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar (on “L.A. Law's Empire”); Post, Robert, “On the Popular Image of the Lawyer: Reflections in a Glass Darkly,” California Law Review 75 (1987): 379CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chase, Anthony, “Lawyers and Popular Culture: A Review of Mass Media Portrayals of American Attorneys,” American Bar Foundation Research Journal (1986): 281Google Scholar; and John Denvir, ed., “Legalism Unreeled” (unpublished manuscript). Meanwhile, students of film are becoming increasingly interested in representations of law. See, for example, Lucia, Cynthia, “Women on Trial: The Female Lawyer in the Hollywood Courtroom,” Cineaste 19 (1993): 32.Google Scholar

9. I employ the term law noir signify a subesst of the celebrated film noirs, a of hollywood films, fist identified by critics in france, that featured narratives about crime and a dark (hence the term noir), critical view of American life and institutions. Although the term noir is sometimes limited to films released during the 1940s and 1950s, I have followed, among others, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Wardcrime and a dark (hence the term noir), critical view of American life and institutions. Although the term noir is sometimes limited to films released during the critical view of American life and institutions. Although the term noir is sometimes limited to films released during the 1940s and 1950s, I have followed, among others, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Wardcrime and a dark (hence the term noir), critical view of American life and institutions. Although the term noir is sometimes limited to films released during the 1940s and 1950s, I have followed, among others, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth WardI employ the term law noir to signify a subset of the celebrated film noirs, a body of Hollywood films, first identified by critics in France, that featured narratives aboutcrime and a dark (hence the term noir), critical view of American life and institutions. Although the term noir is sometimes limited to films released during the 1940s and 1950s, I have followed, among others, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., (rev. ed. Woodstock, N.Y.: Over look Press, 1988) in adopting a broader view of this group of films. Two recent essay collections — Cameron, Ian, ed., The Book of Film Noir (New York: Continuum, 1993)Google Scholar and Copjec, Joan, ed., Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993)Google Scholar — provide valuable guides to film noir.

In subdividing the larger film noir cycle to highlight certain sub-cycles, I follow, among others, Krutnik, Frank, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar and Telotte, J. P., Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (University of Illinois Press, 1989).Google Scholar For a different approach to this sub-cycle of films, see Norman Rosenberg, “Law Noir,” in Denvir, “Law Unreeled.”

10. I employ the metaphor of translation to signify the process by which stories and disputes from everyday life become converted – that is, translated – into the specialized discourses that are the domain of legal professionals. For a critical and self-reflexive analysis of the translation metaphor, see Cunningham, Clark D., “The Lawyer as Translator, Representation as Text: Towards an Ethnography of Legal Discourse,” Cornell Law Review 77 (1992): 1298.Google Scholar See also Levinson, Sanford, “Conversing About Justice,” Yale Law Journal 100 (1991): 1855CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a critical review of White's, James Boyd, Justice as Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).Google Scholar

11. For brief introductions to the issue of closure — or the textual strategies by means of which a viewer is encouraged to see the ending as offering a relatively clear resolution of issues and problems raised during the course of a narrative – in Hollywood cinema, see Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin, Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 64–74Google Scholar, esp. 74. Of course, as Bordwell argues elsewhere, the degree to which any film text seems “open” or “closed” is a complex interpretive question. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 192–95. See also, O'Sullivan, Key Concepts, 42–43 and Branigan, Edward, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar In relating the issue of narrative closure to filmic representat 1940s and 1950s, I have followed, among others, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Wardcrime and a dark (hence the term noir), ions of trials, I have benefited immensely from Polan, Dana, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. 21–43.Google Scholar In highlighting the questions of translation and closure, I do not mean to suggest that these are the only two legal issues articulated in these six films. Rather, I raise these two questions as specific examples of the larger claim about the value of using classical Hollywood films as sources for legal studies.

12. Polan, Power and Paranoia, 21–22. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holmquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 388–410.Google Scholar For an extended analysis of Bakhtin's work, as applied to film, see Stam, Robert, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

13. Ray, Robert, A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), passim.Google Scholar

14. For an analysis of this narrative pattern, in which both public and patriarchal law come together at the end of a film, see Polan, Power and Paranoia, 24–25, 31.

15. Here, The Young Philadelphians articulates a view of law and society also found in elite legal culture of the 1950s: that legal conflicts could easily be settled because of “the existence of a basic societal consensus on fundamental values.” See Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 251.Google Scholar

16. As Anthony Chase notes, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw the “complete integration of the virtuous-lawyer archetype in popular culture—an elaborated image unprecedented … within the existing history of mass cultural iconography.” “Lawyers and Popular Culture,” 284.

For another powerful and popular narrative, stressing both the ability of the legal process to achieve closure and the dynamics of a successful legal translation, see Lewis, Anthony, Gideon's Trumpet (New York: Random House, 1964).Google Scholar For a reading that seeks to highlight gaps within Lewis's narrative, see Rosenberg, Norman L., “Gideon's Trumpet: Sounding the Retreat from Legal Realism,” in May, Lary, ed., Recasting America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 107.Google Scholar

17. Both elite legal and broader cultural discourses of the 1950s called for faith in the process for settling political and legal differences. Although this could be linked to a consensus-oriented view, it could also stand on its own. See Horwitz, Transformation, 251. For a broad, political reading of Twelve Angry Men, which nicely stresses the elitist strains in the film, see Biskind, Peter, Seeing Is Believing (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 10–20.Google Scholar

18. I want to emphasize that I am not advancing any claims about intentionality, causation, or origins. I would, for example, resist any interpretation that suggests law noirs reflected legal realism. I am suggesting that, in a number of ways, the filmic discourses in law noirs seem to parallel those found in certain modes of critical legal realism. Without trying to suggest precisely how these culturally constructed textua categories might link up, I see a value in talking about both law noirs and critical realism within broad-based discussions about cultural discourses that spanned, in various forms, the period from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s, a project much too ambitious for this article.

19. This point is nicely developed in Hull, N. E. H., “Networks and Bricolage. A Prolegomenon to a History of Twentieth-Century American Academic Jurisprudence,” American Journal of Legal History 35 (1991): 307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Cohen, Felix, “Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach,” in The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen, ed. Cohen, Lucy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 45, 46, 75.Google ScholarFrank, Jerome, Courts on Trial (1949: repr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

The literature on legal realism is immense. Purcell, Edward A., The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), 74–94, 159–78Google Scholar remains the best starting point. My own view relies heavily upon Peller, Gary, “The Metaphysics of American Law,” California Law Review 74 (1985): 1152Google Scholar, esp. 1194–1240. See also, Singer, Joseph, “Legal Realism Now,” California Law Review 76 (1988): 465CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eskridge, William N. Jr, and Peller, Gary, “The New Public Law Movement: Moderation as a Postmodern Cultural Form,” Michigan Law Review 89 (1991): 707.CrossRefGoogle ScholarFisher, William W. III, Horwitz, Morton J., and Reed, Thomas, eds., American Legal Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar is an important new documentary collection.

21. See, for example, the special issue on “Legal Storytelling,” Michigan Law Review 87 (1989): 2073; and, more broadly, Schlag, Pierre, “The Problem of the Subject,” Texas Law Review 69 (1991): 1627.Google Scholar For a pointed colloquy over the politics of storytelling, see Tushnet, Mark, “The Degradation of Constitutional Discourse,” Georgetown Law Journal 81 (1992): 251Google Scholar; Gary Peller, “The Discourse of Constitutional Degradation,” ibid., 313; and Mark Tushnet, “Reply,” ibid., 343. The classic account of storytelling in the courtroom remains Bennett, W. Lance and Feldman, Martha S., Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom: Justice and Judgment in American Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

22. This approach characterizes an important theme in recent legal writing, especially in various feminist discourses and in “Critical Race Studies.” See, for example, Frug, Mary Joe, Postmodern Legal Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; Williams, Patricia, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Minow, Martha, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar As a number of writers have emphasized, however, these “outsider” perspectives, though important as a means of scrutinizing “insider” accounts, are themselves socially constructed and historically contingent. See, for example, Kelman, Mark, “Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 798, esp. 808–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bartlett, Katherine T., “Minow's Social-Relations Approach to Difference: Unanswering the Unasked,” Law and Social Inquiry (1992): 437, 464–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a demonstration that the same set of legal sources can generate different legal stories, see Hoffer, Peter Charles, “Text, Translation, Context, Conversation,” American Journal of Legal History 37 (1993): 409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Cunningham, “The Lawyer as Translator,” 1299.

24. See, for example, Minow, Martha, “Speaking of Silence,” University of Miami Law Review 43 (1988): 493Google Scholar (reviewing Bumiller, Kristin, The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988]).Google Scholar

25. In this sense, the film parallels the realist critique of Jerome Frank who warned that virtually anyone could “be indicted and mistakenly convicted.” Frank, Courts on Trial, 12–13.

Both Stranger on the Third Floor and Fury (directed by Fritz Lang), came from film makers who had worked in Germany and fled Nazism for the United States. One might read these films about law and mob behavior alongside broader anti-fascist discourses of the 1930s. For examples of law-review articles that also use such discourses, see Lowenstein, Karl, “Legislative Control of Political Extremism in European Democracies I,” Columbia Law Review 38 (1938): 591CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Riesman, David, “Democracy and Defamation: Control of Group Libel,” Columbia Law Review 42 (1942): 727.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. See, for instance, Force of Evil (MGM, 1948), a film directed by Abraham Polonsky. On this important law noir, see Shadoian, Jack, Dreams and Dead Ends (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 116–19, 134–48Google Scholar; Brinckman, Christine Noll, “The Politics of Force of Evil: Analysis of Abraham Polonsky's Preblacklist Film,” Prospects 6 (1981): 357CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosenberg, Norman, “The Culture of Free Expression and the ‘Popular’ First Amendment,” in Freeing the First Amendment, ed. Allen, David and Jensen, Robert (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

27. Several years later, the same noir techniques are employed in Sullivan's Travels (1941) to represent an actual trial.

28. In the film's brief, conventionally lit and photographed, ending, the reunited couple hail a taxi to take them to their new apartment and are ushered into the cab by the recently released Joe Briggs.

29. One of Lang's best-known German films, M (1931), focuses on the hunt for a crazed killer of children (Peter Lorre, again) and concludes with two trials. The first, before a jury of the killer's criminal peers, seems headed for the type of mob justice featured in Fury until legal authorities intervene. In a brief final sequence, judges file into a courtroom while three mothers sit outside. “This will not bring our children back to life,” one sighs, as the visual image suddenly fades away. Thus, M ends with no ending and provides no closure for the question that had been posed in the murder's first trial: Should a homicidal killer be executed by a court of law or sent to a sanitarium, from which he might escape or be released?

30. The sheriff rebuffs all of Joe's attempts to plead his case. When Joe realizes that Catherine can verify his story, he hesitates to take this simple step because be fears that she, like he, will be misidentified as a member of the kidnapping ring. Forced into silence, Joe discovers that the legal system cannot protect him.

31. This shot, which is used again in the film's final sequence, reverses the normal viewing position in which spectators gaze at people on the screen, not vice versa. Such a shot, it can be argued, tends to pull film spectators into the film so that they are positioned, for example, alongside the lynch mob. See Humphries, Reynold, Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in his American Films (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 36.Google Scholar The film's dialogue also tries to implicate film spectators in Joe's ordeal. While sneaking back home, Joe tells his brothers, he sat for hours in a movie theater, watching newsreels of “myself gettin' burned alive,” while the packed house cheered. “They like it,” he snarls. “They get a big kick out of seeing a man burned to death, a big kick.”

32. On self-help as a legal remedy, see Galanter, Marc, “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” Law and Society Review 9 (1974): 125–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Before revealing Joe's scheme, Fury consciously rejects other legal options. Early on in the production process, studio heads at MGM turned back a script in which the lynching victim was a lawyer who could employ his special professional skills to redress his grievances. Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America, 20. Similarly, in the final version, Joe scoffs at the idea of hiring a lawyer to pursue members of the mob. What would the law do? Prosecute them for “disturbing the peace” or “setting fire to a jail?”

34. Kawin, Bruce F., How Movies Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 39.Google Scholar Such a reading is also consistent with the “meta-theory” of classical Hollywood narratives, offered in Ray, A Certain Tendency.

35. For a good example of this important cycle of legal films, see The Mouthpiece (Warner, 1932); See also, Bergman, Andrew, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 18–29.Google Scholar

36. In this sense, Fury vividly undercuts the traditional practice of trying to represent trials almost solely in terms of oral testimony and cross-examination. As legal scholar J. D. Jackson argues, characterizing “courtroom interaction in terms of drama and theater… helps to emphasize the importance of the visual over the oral.” Jackson, “Law's Truth,” 45.

In a broader sense, the use of newsreel footage in Fury presages the use of visual evidence in the Rodney King case. See Gooding-Williams, Robert, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

37. See, for example, Kalman, Laura, Legal Realism at Yale (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 31–35Google Scholar, and Schlegel, John Henry, “American Legal Realism and Empiricist Political Science: From the Yale Experience,” Buffalo Law Review 28 (1979): 459.Google Scholar

38. On the importance of the documentary form in the 1930s, see Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

39. Fury thus highlights the extent to which trials may be seen less as a process that seeks “the truth” and more as one that involves different, even irreconcilable, “language games.” In this sense, the defense team's appeal to eyewitness testimony might be said to parallel that of Holocaust revisionists who seek similar, first-hand evidence of executions in the Nazi gas chambers. Such a position, Jean-Francis Lyotard argues, cannot be answered within a single rule of judgment but requires a shift to a different language game. On some of the broader issues involved here, see Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).Google Scholar For a critique of Lyotard's general approach, see Norris, Christopher, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 70–85.Google Scholar

40. The cross-examination of Catherine exemplifies the complex view of the trial process offered in Fury. In one sense, the defense attorneys attack the claim, based either on newsreel footage or Catherine's testimony, that no one could have survived the fire-bombing at the jail. By opposing this common-sense deduction, the defense correctly aligns itself with facts constructed by the film itself.

In another sense, though, their critique relies upon the gendered argument that an hysterical woman is a likely candidate for hallucinations. The diegesis itself underscores this: When Joe's brothers first question Catherine about what she might be able to offer in the way of testimony, she remains mute until one of the brothers lights a cigarette; seeing the flame before his face, she flashes back to the jail scene, momentarily even mistaking the brother for Joe himself.

Finally, if Fury, at this juncture, hails traditional legal over mass-media evidence, the use of this approach by the defense soon creates a trap for its own clients. See infra. The insistence that representations, whether in the legal system or in the mass media, are part of a lengthy chain of images, rather than a process of holding up a mirror to social “reality” may be seen a persistent theme in Fritz Lang's work. See Stephen Jenkins, “Lang: Fear and Desire,” 75, 117–18 in Jenkins, , ed., Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look (London: British Film Institute, 1981)Google Scholar; see also the discussion of Lang's final Hollywood film in Douglas Pye, “Film Noir and Suppressive Narrative, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,” in The Book of Film Noir, 98–109.

41. Fury consistently treats media representations no more reverentially than legal discourse. See Humphries, Fritz Lang, 68–70.

42. One might note here, perhaps with irony, Mark Kelman's argument that, even though judgments about the plausibility of evidentiary claims are “doubtless as much about aspirations as interpretations,” most of us are ultimately “closet positivists.” Kelman, “Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness,” 817.

43. On the symbolic importance of judges to the conclusion of trials, see J. D. Jackson, “Law's Truth,” 47. For a comparison of the ways in which judicial authority is represented in Fury and a later law noir, Knock on Any Door (1949), see Norman Rosenberg, “Law Noir,” in Law Unreeled.

44. Much like Doniphon, Tom (Wayne, John) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Paramount, 1963)Google Scholar, in other words, Joe Wilson is potentially positioned as a person who stands above the process of law for a higher form of justice. Yet, at least in my viewing of the film, Wilson declines such a role. On Liberty Valence, see, for example, Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 384–413.Google Scholar

45. Until the brief final shot, when Joe and Catherine embrace at the foot of the silent judge's bench, the camera shots (except for a quick pan down the front row of defendants) alternate between Joe and Catherine.

46. On this point, see Ball, Milner S., “Obligation: Not to the Law But to the Neighbor,” Georgia Law Review 18 (1984): 911, esp. 925–27.Google Scholar

47. Cover, Robert, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. As J. P. Telotte and others suggest, film noirs, while speaking “in a manner that asks us to accept their own form of discourse,” often reflexively point “to the limitations under which they too work.” Telotte Voices in the Dark, 28.

Several recent, revisionist studies have looked at Hollywood's system of legal censorship. See, for example, the symposium entitled “Hollywood, Censorship, and American Culture,” edited by Couvares, Francis G., in American Quarterly 44 (1992): 509CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jacobs, Lea, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).Google Scholar

49. See, for example, Black Legion (Warner, 1936), Young Mr. Lincoln (Twentieth Century Fox, 1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (Twentieth Century Fox, 1943).

50. Neve, Film and Politics in America, 2; Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America, 32.

51. According one approach to film, the “story” comprises the series of events as they supposedly occurred within a motion picture's representation of time and space, and the “plot” involves the narrative strategy, such as the use of flashbacks, by which story elements are enunciated. See Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 65–67.

52. Warren Susman, “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America,” in Recasting America, 30; Polonsky, a former lawyer who wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), is quoted in Neve, Film and Politics, 150.

53. On litigation seeking to end racial discrimination, see Tushnet, Mark, The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on trials involving leftist political speech, see Steinberg, Peter, The Great “Red Menace” (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1984)Google Scholar; and Michael Belknap, Cold War Political Justice (1977). On battles located in Hollywood, see Ceplair, Larry and Englund, Steven, The Inquisition in Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).Google Scholar For an intriguing look at how one set of postwar films represented the law of the national security state, see Corber, Robert J., In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

The postwar period also saw continued debate over the institution of the jury trial itself. See, for example, Kalven, Harry Jr, and Zeisel, Hans, The American Jury (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1966), esp. 3–11.Google Scholar

54. See, for example, Hand, Learned, The Bill of Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), passimCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weschler, Herbert, “Toward Neutral Principles of Consti tutional Law,” Harvard Law Review 73 (1959): 1.Google Scholar

55. Like other postwar noire, including The Killers (United Artists, 1946) and Out of the Past (RKO, 1947), this film is filled, for example, with contractual metaphors. See, for example, the discussion in Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, passim, esp, 110–12, 245–46 n. 29.

56. Law noirs, despite some critical stances toward legal discourse, exemplify, indeed accentuate, familiar codings of gender. See, generally, Kaplan, E. Ann, ed., Women in Film Noir (British Film Institute, 1981)Google Scholar, and Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women,” in Shades of Noir, 121–66.

57. The postwar comedy, Don Juan Quilican (1945) offers a variation on this same story.

58. Larry Ballantine's attitude parallels that of the legal realist Jerome Frank who wrote that “a legal right is usually as bet, a wager, on the chancy outcome of a possible future lawsuit.” Frank, Courts on Trial, 27.

59. See Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, Talking Power: The Politics of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 59 if.Google Scholar

60. In contrast to the young reporter in Stranger on the Third Floor, Larry Ballantine, much like Joe Wilson in Fury, provokes his own court ordeal by defying or challenging the law. In this sense, a number of the male protagonists in the noirs seek to do battle with the law. For an argument along these lines, which employs a Lacanian-influenced psychoanalytic approach, see Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, 143–46.

61. Although my own reading differs in several respects, I still rely upon Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 139–45, especially for Boomerang's relationship to the noir cycle.

62. The Hollywood film system compensates for this failure to find Father Lambert's killer. At crucial points in the trial sequences, the camera gives the film spectators privileged sight of a man identified only as “Jim,” a character unknown to all the diegetic characters except the deceased Father Lambert. Increasingly, Jim seems to be the real killer. It is the media, rather than the law, that announces the end of the chase: The same newspaper that features Waldron's release, on the front page, carries a small item, on the back page, about the man identified only as Jim being killed in a car crash, while fleeing police who were chasing him for speeding. For a discussion of this turn see Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 143–45.

Twelve Angry Men (1957), of course, also ends without a conviction, but it offers a significantly different narrative trajectory than Boomerang. In Boomerang, the problem is a very broad one: Is a small-town justice system adequate to the task of apprehending and convicting the killer of a beloved religious leader whose death has left a “gaping hole in the community.” In contrast, Twelve Angry Men may conclude so smoothly because its narrative focus is narrower: Will a jury find a specific defendant guilty or innocent? Indeed, with the logic of the Hollywood studio system, the answer is virtually guaranteed once the film's star, Henry Fonda, opts for acquittal.

63. Boomerang was directed by Elia Kazan, who appeared before House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 to admit his own Communist Party past and to name names, and produced by Louis de Rochemont, who had overseen the March of Time series and turned to feature films with another semi-documentary, House on 92nd Street (Twentieth Century Fox, 1945), a film that combined noir styles with an paean to the FBI. Boomerang, Kazan claimed, tells “how an initial miscarriage of justice was righted by the persistence and integrity of a young district attorney, who risked his career to save an innocent man. This shows the exact opposite of the Communist libels on America.” Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968, ed. Bentley, Eric (New York: Viking, 1971), 493.Google Scholar

On Kazan's political and cinematic turns, see Pauly, Thomas J., An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1983).Google Scholar A later film directed by Kazan, , On the Waterfront (Columbia, 1954)Google Scholar is perhaps the strongest filmic statement, from the cold-war period, on the necessity to cooperate with legal tribunals.

64. See, for example, the essays in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, ed. Kairys, David (rev. ed., New York: Pantheon, 1990).Google Scholar

65. For a broad argument, drawing upon psychoanalytical theory, about the “crisis” of male potency in postwar films, see Silverman, Kaja, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992), 52–121.Google Scholar

66. In addition to the films discussed in the text, for examples of noirs that offer highly critical views of the courtroom process, see Leave Her to Heaven (Twentieth Century Fox, 1945); Scarlett Street (Universal, 1945); The Postman Always Rings Twice (MGM, 1946); The Locket (RKO, 1946); The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Paramount, 1946); Nora Prentiss (Warner, 1947); The Lady from Shanghai (Columbia, 1947); The File on Thelma Jordan (Paramount, 1949); Angel Face (RKO, 1952); and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (RKO, 1956), a complex and compelling low-budget quickie that was Fritz Lang's final Hollywood effort. In addition, it might be argued that other postwar law films, including the popular gender-role comedy Adam's Rib (MGM, 1949), feature important trial sequences that fail to resolve, as in Polan's classical pattern, narrative complications.

67. The appearance of films such as Twelve Angry Men, of course, did not mean that all traces of law noir vanished. For example, / Want To Live (1958), the “true-life” account of a woman (Susan Hayward) executed for a murder she very likely did not commit, displays a number of markers of noir. Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that Graham “is compelled to endure a grim succession of legal maneuvering that puts the Chinese water torture to shame.” New York Times, November 19, 1958, 45.

Still, films such as Twelve Angry Men and The Young Philadelphians seem to represent a powerful, perhaps dominant trend during the 1950s and early 1960s. Other films in which courtroom conflicts resolve narrative conflicts include On the Waterfront (Columbia, 1954); Inherit the Wind (United Artists, 1959); Peyton Place (Twentieth Century Fox, 1957); and Sergeant Rutledge (Warner, 1960).

In addition, the popular Perry Mason series featured narratives in which courtrooms provided the special place in which the famed lawyer-detective finally solves his cases. See Sokolsky, Anita, “The Case of the Juridical Junkie: Perry Mason and the Dilemma of Confession,” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities (1990): 189.Google Scholar On the importance of the confessional form in mass, commercial culture, see White, Mimi, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).Google Scholar

Finally, perhaps the most dramatic representations of courtroom closure in legal texts of the 1950s are offered in the television classic Dragnet. Once Joe Friday (Jack Webb) apprehends his suspect, an off-screen narrator promises that the Dragnet will soon return with the results of a court trial. Following a commercial break, the defendants' images reappear, the court's sentence is announced, and Webb's “MARK VII” logo signifies a satisfactory conclusion to another “real-life” legal narrative. On Dragnet, see Marc, David, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 73–79.Google Scholar

68. . See, for example, Grossberg, Michael, “Legal History and Social Science: Friedman's History of American Law, the Second Time Around,” Law and Social Inquiry 13 (1988): 359CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Silbey, Susan S., “Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law,” Law and Social Inquiry 17 (1992): 39Google Scholar; Hoffer, “Text, Translation, Context, Conversation” and Hunt, Alan, Explorations in Law and Society: Toward a Constitutive Theory of Law (Routledge, 1993), esp. 301–33.Google Scholar

69. Scott, Joan W., “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 797.CrossRefGoogle Scholar