Screen:

...Does this picture provide any pleasure for anyone other than Alan Dershowitz...

...Von Billow's face is partially obscured by the darkness of the car's curtained interior...

...Talk about reversals of fortune...

...See Anatomy of a Murder for a superb example of how a movie can succeed in making legal tactics both clear and dramatic...

...Does one of Dershowitz's idealistic aides nevertheless denounce her mentor for selling out...

...But to do that we need one or the other or both of two kinds of information: the physical, circumstantial evidence that convicts or acquits people in court...

...Glenn Close does her best with Sunny, but the character spends so much of her time nagging or drugged that the audience's attention would shift to Irons even if his performance were lousy...

...And the car drives off...

...The hearts of the filmmakers are not in the scenes of legal strategy but in the flashbacks to the von Billows' marital warfare...

...Reversal of Fortune may be cloudy as drama and as legal explication, but it's a bodacious bit of hagiography...

...By the time this issue of Commonweal reaches readers, White Hunter, Black Heart will have disappeared from most theaters...

...Which, to say the least, it is not...

...The lad-a legal groupie if there ever was one-follows his father about with shining eyes and offers his dad wholehearted support at every turn of the case...

...Don't worry: the movie proceeds to steamroll those doubts out of existence...

...Instead of drowning his theme in effects (technical wizardry, violence, sex shocks, sick jokes) the way most directors do these days, Eastwood tenaciously and subtly pursues it, scene after scene, until it bears fruit in a believable and tragic climax, And what is that theme...

...if Claus is guilty or not...

...and/or the psychological information that any good novelist or dramatist gives us, the nonverifiable evidence that acquits or convicts the characters in our hearts...

...For now I will only say that I found it, for all its minor and easily spotted flaws, an exciting, muscularly filmed, thoroughly dramatized work...

...In one scene, Dershowitz stands on a sidewalk talking to his client who is seated in a limo...

...The lawyer remarks, "You're a very strange man...

...And it certainly sustains the entertaining but superficial approach Kazan and Schroeder take to their grim subject matter...

...And it's this film that has been savaged or ignored by (mostly) liberal critics who have spent half their working lives indicting Clint Eastwood as the spiritual heir of Attila the Hun...

...The self-deceiving nature of the Hemingwayesque artist (in this case a film director modeled on John Huston) who is liberal and macho, democratic and antiracist in his ideas, condescending and destructive in his practice...

...But director Barbet Schroeder does not lead up to the news in any suspenseful way, does not shape his narrative in such a manner that we greet the laboratory analysis with some of the excitement that the lawyers feel...

...Does anyone in the audience have reservations about a busy pro bono, civil libertarian lawyer taking on the case of such an egregious overdog as Claus von Biilow...

...Dershowitz is approached to take the case while he is agonizing over the fate of two innocent clients, and throughout the course of the movie we are reminded that the large fee he collects from Claus will finance their defense and those of other legal victims...

...Does an ex-girlfriend now contributing to the defense accuse Dershowitz of dismissing her ideas for emotional reasons...

...Replies von Biilow in his British-Teutonic accent from hell: "You have no idea...

...The ambiguities of innocence and guilt may seem to be the subject of this movie, but its creators really have other things on their minds...

...To understand clearly how Dershowitz assembled and executed his defense, I guess we'll have to read his book, on which the Nicholas Kazan script is based...

...To be sure, after lawyer Alan Dershowitz (well played by Ron Silver) takes the case, he and his battery of student assistants vow to destroy the validity of every bit of evidence the State of Rhode Island had used to convict their client...

...SCREEN SUNNY & CLAUS 'REVERSAL OF FORTUNE' & 'HUNTER' Adapting a gimmick from Sunset Boulevard (William Holden's corpse explaining the events leading up to Holden's murder), Reversal of Fortune begins in the hospital room of Sunny von Biilow, a Newport socialite rendered brain dead by an overdose of insulin...

...How wrong I was and how right, Irons's performance is indeed a caricature, a cartoon...

...Jeremy Irons's virtuosic performance of Claus sounds the keynote of the movie...

...You tell me...

...At its best, Reversal of Fortune is an expensive-looking, competently directed, well-acted guilty pleasure...

...In his mouth the vowel A becomes a long, shuddering yawn, the N's are lingering sneers, and the S 's could be the sibilants of a cultured, reasonable serpent (and maybe they are...

...richard alleva...

...But that's not the only way this movie serves Alan Dershowitz...

...Jeremy Irons's Claus von Biilow is simply the latest addition to that portrait gallery of which Erich von Stroheim is the eternal curator: The Men You Love to Hate...

...Indeed, it does...

...It won't sustain a two-hour movie...

...Two of Sunny's children accuse their stepfather Claus of attempted murder for money...

...If you've ever wanted to spy on the decadent rich, gape at the spacious luxury of Newport mansions, hear a quietly seething millionairess calmly urge her husband to fill his empty evening with a visit to his mistress-only to have him reply with elegant insouciance, "I doubt if she'll be in on a Saturday night"-then hasten to Reversal of Fortune...

...The audience I was in giggled, a collective giggle that had a note of relief in it...

...It's a cartoon...

...Some of this evidence is adduced on screen, but little of it is discussed or visualized with the lucidity or the suspenseful sense of point-counterpoint needed to make it or its validation fascinating to a lay audience...

...In the movie, two legal assistants race on screen and breathlessly announce the news...

...With these sounds in his arsenal, imagine what Irons does with the line, "Ah...my prawns," when von Biilow is served his favorite seafood...

...In his first substantial scene, Irons enters a living room to greet his future attorney...

...But it is a hugely absorbing, even spellbinding cartoon...

...But Claus insists that Sunny was self-destructive enough to overdose herself, and that the guilty verdict of his initial trial resulted from a frame-up...

...In another movie, that line might have provoked faint shudders in viewers...

...Sunny tells us that we will watch the course of von Biilow's efforts to clear himself, and then...

...But what we actually hear is, "Ah, Ah lahnnnnnn...

...The marital quarrels are played for nasty laughs and Irons makes us chuckle at the squirmings of an elegant scoundrel...

...I thought to myself, "No, this can't possibly work...

...Schroeder and company aren't exploring decadence or showing how wealth and leisure bring out the poison in conjugal partners...

...Can workaholic Alan be a good father to his apparently motherless son...

...Irons doesn't give us a portrait in depth, but what would this movie do with a portrait-in-depth...

...Yes, our leading macho-man movie star, Dirty Harry himself, has made the best antimachismo film I have ever seen...

...If monsters are this amusing, why fuss about innocence or guilt...

...Reversal of Fortune conveys little of either sort of knowledge...

...Speaking from some mental limbo (I presume), Sunny's voice poses the central question of the movie: who administered the drug and under what circumstances...

...The italicized words indicate what sets Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Peter Viertel's novel apart from and above most of the American movies released this year...

...Dershowitz denies this and who are we going to believe, the rather dour actress who plays the assistant as a grievance-collector or regular-guy-only-with-brains Ron Silver...

...In actuality, the turning point in the von Biilow case was effected in a chemistry lab...

...She (and we) are overwhelmed by his rebuttal that the defense of von Biilow is a major civil libertarian blow struck on behalf of rich and poor alike...

...The salutation, as written, is, "Ah, Alan...