“If you don’t know me by now, you will never never ever know me …”
Some movies wind up deep in your heart, even if you don’t realize it the first time you see them.
“Class Action came out in March 1991, and I honestly don’t remember if I saw it in a movie theater or on cable television. Given the time and my personal situation, there’s a good chance I went to the movies to see it. I was living about two miles from the Buena Park Mall in Orange County, California, and one of my favorite pastimes when I had a weekday off was to go to the mall and catch two afternoon movies.
I don’t remember loving “Class Action” when I first saw it, although the movie had several elements that appealed to me. I enjoy courtroom dramas, and I’ve pretty much always liked Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, She had been in several big movies in the ’80s, including “Scarface” and “The Color of Money,” but the first time she really impressed me was as one of the leads in James Cameron’s “The Abyss.”
In “Class Action” she played young attorney Maggie Ward, who had been at war with her famous lawyer father Jed Ward for most of her life. He was a famous liberal lawyer who took on the lost causes, while she was on the partnership track at a massive San Francisco corporate firm.
The class action suit of the title pits father against daughter in a battle over unsafe automobiles and it climaxes with a wonderful courtroom scene where Maggie realizes she is on the wrong side of the issue.
It ends with Maggie and her father dancing to that wonderful song by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
The DVD was part of a set of four called Legal Legends, and only one was a movie I hadn’t seen before. “Compulsion” was a fictionalized version of the Leopold and Loeb case, with Orson Welles as a fictionalized Clarence Darrow who went into the trial knowing the best he could possibly accomplish was to save the two young killers from the death penalty.
He succeeded, largely because the judge realized that no one under the age of 21 who pleased guilty had ever been executed in Illinois.
Nathan Leopold’s memoir, “Life Plus 99 Years,” was published in 1959 and I believe I read it two or three years later. It was a fascinating story and I believe it was my first true crime book I read.
Courtroom dramas don’t make the highest regarded movies. I picked up a magazine at the drugstore today — The 100 Best Movies of All Time.It was sort of ridiculous (I’ll write about that tomorrow) and it had only one courtroom drama of sorts on the list. “Twelve Angry Men” (1957) was a truly great movie and it came in as No. 22.
It was more a jury room drama, since the entire film was about jury deliberations. For a movie with very little physical action, it was still compelling.
There have actually been some wonderful courtroom dramas, and nine of this top 10 didn’t even make the top 100 in the book. Those nine featured fur Oscar winners for Best Actor or Actress — Jodie Foster in “The Accused,” Dustin Hoffman in “Kramer vs Kramer,” Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia” and Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
That last one is another movie that lives deep in my heart.