"Let's kill all the lawyers," wrote Shakespeare in one of his earliest plays, and ever since that time, members of the legal profession have been frequent subjects of barbs in the popular media. There have, to be sure, been popular entertainments that presented a positive view of the legal profession, from "Inherit the Wind" to the "Perry Mason" television show. But at least in the last couple of decades, negative portrayals have been more frequent. Lawyers have routinely been portrayed, and--perhaps even more strikingly--judges as corrupt.
The following discussion will take an analytical view of the negative portrayal of judges and lawyers in four films of recent years, "And Justice For All" (1979), "From the Hip" and "Suspect" (both 1987), and "Presumed Innocent" (1990). Of these films, the first and last were both highly prominent and well-reviewed major productions; "And Justice For All," starring Al Pacino, is one of the blackest of black comedies, while "Presumed Innocent," with Harrison Ford, is listed in the Video Movie Guide as a suspense film. "Suspect" (starring Cher) was a slightly more modest film, listed as a drama, while "From the Hip" (Judd Nelson) is a rather obscure comedy verging from slapstick to moments of seriousness. In genre and scale, they thus are typical of a fairly wide spectrum of recent Hollywood productions.
Our concern in examining these films will be not only with the element of legal or judicial misconduct as specific plot points in these films, but with broader elements of negative portrayal with respect to legal professionals, e.g., showing them stylistically as cold, arrogant, indifferent to justice, or, to use a term the popular culture has linked to the legal profession, "sharks." It should be recognized at the outset that the latter is highly subjective; whether a character is portrayed as honest or dishonest is in each of these films an objective feature of the plot, but whethe...