I doubt you will ever see as thorough an indictment of the American legal system as you are brought in the film And Justice For All. Too often the object of that legal system has been terribly lost in the process.
This film has become my favorite Al Pacino role. I don't think he was ever better on the screen as Arthur Kirkland, an attorney who cares maybe too much for his clients both for his career and his own mental health.
During the course of And Justice For All, Pacino has two clients who for reasons I won't go into here, do not get their proper day in court and both stories end tragically. The clients are Robert Christian as the cross dressing Ralph Agee and Thomas G. Waites as Jeff McCullaugh and both players give stunning performances. The hardest audience heart out there will feel their pain.
Their stories are mixed in with Pacino's running feud with a malevolent judge played by John Forsythe. John Forsythe in this film is not the John Forsythe of Dynasty or Bachelor Father or the disembodied employer of three shapely female private eyes. As it turns out this law and order judge thinks he's quite above the law. And he involves Pacino in his effort to prove his innocence after he's accused of rape.
Life does have a funny way of imitating art and later on the New York State Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler, was brought down in a similar scandal to what Forsythe is accused of here.
Jack Warden is another judge operating out of that same Baltimore courthouse that Forsythe does. He's quite a whack job himself, sitting on a window ledge eating his lunch, wearing a concealed revolver under his judicial robes. It's a crime for the rest of us to do that, but he's another judge who feels himself above the law.
Pacino has some very tender scenes with Lee Strassberg who plays his grandfather and Sam Levene who is Strassberg's friend at the nursing home they reside it. They're all such good players that you don't even think while you're watching them that this is a reunion of Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth. His scenes with them are his link to a world beyond his chosen profession.
The tragedy of And Justice For All is not so much the personal tragedies of Christian and Waites, bad as they are. It is the arrogant abuse of the rules and procedures of our legal system by the very men who are a bound by it as Pacino is. Pacino finds himself so boxed in that the only way he can see justice done is blow up his own career in a now legendary courtroom climax scene.
In the post Watergate Era, And Justice For All found its audience. And its message is still a timely one.
This film has become my favorite Al Pacino role. I don't think he was ever better on the screen as Arthur Kirkland, an attorney who cares maybe too much for his clients both for his career and his own mental health.
During the course of And Justice For All, Pacino has two clients who for reasons I won't go into here, do not get their proper day in court and both stories end tragically. The clients are Robert Christian as the cross dressing Ralph Agee and Thomas G. Waites as Jeff McCullaugh and both players give stunning performances. The hardest audience heart out there will feel their pain.
Their stories are mixed in with Pacino's running feud with a malevolent judge played by John Forsythe. John Forsythe in this film is not the John Forsythe of Dynasty or Bachelor Father or the disembodied employer of three shapely female private eyes. As it turns out this law and order judge thinks he's quite above the law. And he involves Pacino in his effort to prove his innocence after he's accused of rape.
Life does have a funny way of imitating art and later on the New York State Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler, was brought down in a similar scandal to what Forsythe is accused of here.
Jack Warden is another judge operating out of that same Baltimore courthouse that Forsythe does. He's quite a whack job himself, sitting on a window ledge eating his lunch, wearing a concealed revolver under his judicial robes. It's a crime for the rest of us to do that, but he's another judge who feels himself above the law.
Pacino has some very tender scenes with Lee Strassberg who plays his grandfather and Sam Levene who is Strassberg's friend at the nursing home they reside it. They're all such good players that you don't even think while you're watching them that this is a reunion of Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth. His scenes with them are his link to a world beyond his chosen profession.
The tragedy of And Justice For All is not so much the personal tragedies of Christian and Waites, bad as they are. It is the arrogant abuse of the rules and procedures of our legal system by the very men who are a bound by it as Pacino is. Pacino finds himself so boxed in that the only way he can see justice done is blow up his own career in a now legendary courtroom climax scene.
In the post Watergate Era, And Justice For All found its audience. And its message is still a timely one.