The Talkies/Ms. Polhemus, She Dead
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES MS. POLHEMUS, SHE DEAD After nearly a century of it, do we still thrill to that Heart of Darkness stuff—how thin the veneer of civilization over the savage substance of our hearts,...
...It's that her corruption is undiscriminating—blind, as justice is supposed to be—and not part of the normal give and take between prosecutors, police, and defendants...
...There is a scene after Bleek's downfall in which he is shown in his once well-kept and ordered apartment, lying on the floor and positively gibbering in the midst of an appalling debris reminiscent of Giant's normal living conditions...
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...She is the perfect extramarital affair...
...and what saves him from the law is not his ideals but primitive and extralegal loyalties...
...Her only loyalty was to herself...
...POLHEMUS, SHE DEAD After nearly a century of it, do we still thrill to that Heart of Darkness stuff—how thin the veneer of civilization over the savage substance of our hearts, etc., etc...
...They released a remake of Lord of the Flies earlier this year, but I didn't see it...
...Neither did anyone else, to judge by the length of its run...
...By the time our attention is focused on it we are concerned instead with Detective Lipranzer's withholding it as evidence in the belief that Rusty is guilty...
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...Why did the murderer leave the glass with Rusty's fingerprints on it at the scene of the crime...
...We want her to succeed, of course, but at the same time we can't help noticing that the law at its most effective is precisely an instrument for breaking down the basic loyalties that we may, in the end, decide are more important than abstract ideas of equity...
...Only a black man could get away with such a portrayal today, and Lee deserves credit for not sentimentalizing negritude or wallowing in victimization...
...Where Throw's novel tries to tackle too many big issues, the screenplay by Frank Pierson James Bowman is American correspondent for the Spectator of London...
...That's why nobody loves a stool pigeon...
...Edward Teller Founding Director, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory "Fascinating reading, it debunks so many of today's scare-story myths that it ought to be required reading for decision-makers all over the world, but especially in Washington, D.C...
...For the ghetto culture from which he is never quite able to extricate himself is inhospitable to discipline and rule...
...Of course, it is too good to last...
...Donald Hodel Former Secretary of the Departments of Energy and Interior Dr...
...His girlfriend will not let him alone during the time he has set aside for practice, his band resents his dominance and the rules that express it, and his personal loyalty to the ne'er-do-well gambler, Giant, ultimately costs him his career...
...Presumed Innocent has problems...
...Presumed Innocent is now at the top of the paperback best-seller list—as its successor, The Burden of Proof,' sits atop the hardback list—but the 'Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.95...
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...The film ends with a bang: the murderer's confession, where the sense that we are in a primitive world in which the only thing that matters is personal loyalty is doubly reinforced...
...Yet its doubts about what it really means to be civilized do not seem to me to be despairing either...
...His act of loyalty in defiance of truth and justice casts into ironic shadow the pretentious voiceover about such things that begins the movie as the camera by James Bowman pans around an empty jury box...
...Here the web of tribal and familial loyalties has an almost warm and reassuring feel—which is really what shocks us about it: the icy individualist, Carolyn Polhemus, is expendable to us as well...
...In doing so they have changed a page-turner about a respectable prosecutor's sexual obsession, the secret lives of two different women, and the suspense and horror of being on trial for your life, into an elegant meditation on law and loyalty...
...Author Scott Throw's Sabich was a guy with a stoic exterior and a rich interior life...
...The collapse of individual order sums up Bleek's surrender to the anomie of urban black culture...
...asks Giant when Bleek decides that he's got to fire him...
...the glass sticks out like a sore thumbprint...
...Not necessarily...
...Yet there may still be some life in that Marianas trench of meaningfulness...
...T hat family loyalty remains prob- 1 lematical in the book adds something to the pleasure of the amateur psychologist but blurs a lot of connections that the film allows to stand out...
...Dixy Lee Ray takes on the scaremongers who preach environmental catastrophe by pointing out the (often ignored) facts on such issues as Acid Rain, the Greenhouse Effect, Radiation, Pesticides, and Nuclear Waste...
...He is constantly making appeals to Bleek's loyalty...
...Ray is the recipient of the United Nations Peace Prize, was voted Woman of the Year by Ladies' Home Journal in 1973, and was named by Harper's as one of the ten most influential women in the United States in 1977...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 The character of Carolyn Polhemus, the murder victim, is crucial here...
...real highbrow will pick the movie...
...It is not that she is corrupt—everybody is...
...Presumed Innocent also takes these primitive arrangements as the norm, but, because it begins with the assumption of something more enlightened and civilized, its vision has the power to shock...
...Even the saccharine ending, in which we see Bleek's young son learning the trumpet and something of his father's discipline, seems less glib than it would in another context...
...Trashing the Planet is the one book readers need to get a sure, common sense grasp on the contentious issues where science and politics overlap...
...As in Presumed Innocent, personal and family loyalty is the enemy of law and rule, as well as of the individualism of the ambitious...
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...That in itself is enough of a reason for her death so far as Lipranzer is concerned...
...Ultimately, Rusty's personal drama is less interesting, and Throw's insistence in the novel on following his marriage onto the rocks appears banal in comparison with the movie's terrifying final impression of a family united and able to absorb the knowledge of the horror that has sustained it...
...It could be better paced, and Harrison Ford in the role of prosecutor/defendant Rusty Sabich, looks almost wooden—perhaps the film is too true to the book in this respect...
...Although it is capable of irony about black aspirations, Mo' Better Blues doesn't allow itself to doubt that they are achievable through escape from an essentially primitive and extralegal set of social arrangements based on status and group loyalty...
...By applying a set of rules to his own life and his band, he has risen to success in the jazz world...
...But that hardly matters...
...His Mo' Better Blues is long, boring, and self-indulgent, but it does manage to cast a different light, from the point of view of a black ghetto culture with few pretensions to Rusty's civilized ideals, upon the Hobbesian darkness...
...In the film there is no discernible motive...
...In the novel, the question of motive is uppermost...
...The loyalty of defense counsel Stern and Prosecutor Raymond Horgan to Judge Lyttle, of deputy prosecutor Tommy Molto and pathologist Kumagai to Nico della Guardia, and of Rusty himself to Horgan and Lipranzer, undermines the ideal of justice at every point...
...Frederick Seitz Past President of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society "A shocking review that should be read by everyone who wants to be an informed votee —Dr...
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...Carolyn's moral ambiguity in this exercise is lost upon the admiring Rusty, but she derives her strength and something of her sexiness from the fact that she embodies what the law is essentially all about: it is divorced from personal loyalties...
...The results are not uninteresting...
...Lipranzer's extralegal conception of justice prepares us for the astonishing denouement, which in the novel precedes it and gets lost amid a lot of anticlimactic motive-mongering...
...All his problems, however, can be seen as different manifestations of the blackcommunity's values, which he has had to rise above in order to be successful...
...This constant, disingenuous appeal to brotherly solidarity comes across as delightful self-mockery in a film in which both Lee and his sister star and for which his father wrote the music, but there is a serious point to it as well...
...Dixy Lee Ray is the straight-shooting former governor of Washington state and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission...
...No ties, no doubts, no regrets...
...Doesn't our friendship, dating back to the third grade, mean anything to you...
...The lady was bad news," as Lipranzer says—because she operated entirely outside the system of loyalties that binds all the other characters...
...Denzel Washington plays a jazz trumpeter, Bleek Gilliam, who has learned something about the value of order and discipline...
...Of course it does, replies his friend: if it weren't for that I would have fired you long ago...
...Here, progress is inevitably slow and measured in generations...
...Giant represents the drag of ghetto culture upon talented black individuals...
...I f the rule of law is irrelevant to Pakula, something like it (if not precisely it) remains ideal to Spike Lee...
...He has problems with women, problems with jealousies and indiscipline, and problems with the inept management of an old school friend named Giant, played by Lee...
...Established 1947 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 37...
...Trashing the Planet deserves wide circulation in schools and throughout the public as an antidote to much false doctrine that is widely disseminated today...
...What is most strange by the end of the movie is not that Rusty's ideals remain intact but that they were so naive —as if we would even want disinterested justice...
...Tivo of this summer's hit films, Presumed Innocent and Mo' Better Blues, reverse the usual procedure and, instead of taking civilized folk to a more primitive world, bring the primitive into the midst of civilization—from which, of course, it never really departed...
...Without the lyrical and philosophical tendency he is a man who, as Dorothy Parker said of Katharine Hepburn, runs the gamut of emotion from A to B. But Presumed Innocent is one of those films that is better than the book, and for the usual reason...
...It is the law of his childish idealism, which is so blind to the truth that it nearly crushes him...
...The film cliche of Horgan, marveling that Rusty is "still holding onto the shreds of [his] ideals," is given a new twist when his cynicism is not only not reproved by the film but taken even further than he could imagine...
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...That is why Pakula rearranges the ending to allow two characters' loyalty to Rusty to take precedence over the law...
...In the only courtroom scene apart from Rusty's trial, Carolyn induces a small child to betray his mother and send her to prison for abusing him...
...and Alan J. Pakula, the film's director, does well to cut the lyricism and a lot of other excesses, mainly of the lawyerly or cops 'n' robbers kind...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
