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Volume 30, Number 4 (1996) reprinted by permission of the Law Review© cite as 30 U.S.F.L. REV. 1083 (1996)
By NORMAN ROSENBERG*
DURING THE RELATIVELY brief time in which
students of law have been treating Hollywood films as legal texts, several
interpretive strategies have emerged. Perhaps the most prominent of these,
and the one that probably seems most natural to lawyers, relies on a familiar
approach to case-law analysis: a particular text, now a Hollywood film
rather than an appellate court opinion, stands for a specific legal principle
or some basic truth about the law. In this interpretative practice, legal
films, much like judicial precedents, often come to embody - in an essentialist,
univocal manner - a fundamental, black-letter proposition.1
This essay employs a different mode of legal and cultural analysis and assumes a discursive, anti-essentialist, and pluralist stance toward both Hollywood films and, more broadly, the "field of law."2 As the anthropologist Rosemary Coombe imagines the legal field, it encompasses not simply the professional routines and languages of official legal actors - judges, lawyers, treatise writers, legislators, and law professors - but a broader range of social practices and discourses, including the activities of Hollywood's film system and its portrayals of legal problems and issues. From this perspective, traditional materials - such as court decisions and statutes - no longer serve as the primary and foundational sources of law but must compete for space in the legal field with a variety of other texts. As Coombe suggests, students of law "have much to gain by extending the range of our scrutiny" so as to locate the many different places, including the Hollywood film studios, in which discourses about law get articulated.3 In order better to relate this theoretical approach to specific Hollywood films, this essay proposes one possible (and certainly not the authoritative) reading of Talk of the Town4; in addition, I want to contrast this reading - and, more broadly, an anti-essentialist, pluralist approach to legal materials - to the discussion of Talk of the Town in Robert Post's On the Popular Image of the Lawyer. In the course of an elegant essay that invokes texts as diverse as The Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, the films of John Ford, and "bad lawyer jokes," Post argues that Talk of the Town stands for a "classic American theme" - that "the lawyer," much like the fabled western gunfighter, "must be lawless in order to uphold the law."5 More broadly, "the very thrust" of this film - along with that of such other popular texts as John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and James Fenimore Cooper's novels - is that "the law is founded on force and is parasitic on lawlessness."6 Although Post's interpretation is not "wrong," the format of this symposium allows for an essay that takes a more sustained textual focus on a single film. In addition, this essay will also briefly consider Talk of the Town's cultural and historical context, especially its place in Hollywood's cycle of screwball comedy pictures and its relationship to legal realism and the New Deal Revolution of the 1930s. I. Talk of the Town as a Legal Text Post's essay, which treats Talk of the Town as evidence for a trans-historical theme in legal culture, inevitably can provide only a bare-bones summary of the specific filmic text, a summary that resembles the terse, precisely ordered treatment that an individual appellate court opinion might receive in a legal hornbook. Relevant facts are briefly summarized; major issues identified; and basic principles highlighted. Thus Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), "an eminent and high-toned law school professor who is about to be nominated to the Supreme Court,"7 finds his hopes for a quiet summer of scholarly writing in the small Massachusetts village of Lochester interrupted when he meets Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur), an attractive school teacher, and becomes entangled in the legal problems of an anarchist-philosopher, Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant). The town's industrialist has recently burned down his unprofitable mill for the insurance money and successfully blamed the fire on Dilg. Breaking jail during his trial, Dilg ends up sharing a house with Lightcap and Shelley. After Dilg and Lightcap "spar with each other about the meaning of the law"8 and simultaneously fall for Shelley, the jurist finally realizes "that the law must be practiced as well as preached, that it requires action as well as thought."9 Lightcap acts on his "new insight" about the relationship between theory and practice when he drives to Boston and kidnaps the real arsonist. Post notes that: At the movie's climax Colman enters a courtroom where a mob is about to lynch Grant, and, dragging the arsonist by the scruff of his neck and shooting a pistol into the air, he quiets the mob by telling them that the law is their most precious possession and that they must always respect its processes. This summary, as far as it goes, fairly represents the filmic text;11 yet, Post's approach, implicitly framed as a search for an "essential point" and a "very thrust," tends to convert a multivocal movie into a univocal one by eliding important elements of the filmic text itself.12 In this sense, perhaps the most important omissions from Post's sketch involve Talk of the Town's complex, multilayered representations of lawyers, judges, courts, and the "rule of law" itself. Lawyers, judges, and the judicial system serve different narrative and symbolic roles in Talk of the Town. The foray into Lochester's legal field by Michael Lightcap (a law school dean and Supreme Court aspirant), for example, proceeds in stages. At first, he focuses only on his own scholarly project and refuses to think about what might be happening in Lochester. When he does recognize legal problems that he might address, the task initially seems relatively simple and thoroughly empirical: to determine whether or not Clyde Bracken (Tom Tyler), the mill's foreman, actually did perish in the fire allegedly set by Dilg. If Bracken is simply in hiding, as Lightcap comes to suspect, returning him to Lochester should resolve the problem. Yet as Lightcap's quest proceeds, he realizes that Dilg faces such grave legal consequences only because the mill's owner, Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle), has succeeded in corrupting the town's legal system and the local magistrate, Judge Grunstadt (George Watts). Lochester's legal field, Michael Lightcap finally acknowledges, is in a very unkempt condition. Lightcap, by challenging Holmes' corruption, it might be argued, joins another lawyer, Dilg's activist attorney Sam Yates (Edgar Buchanan). Yates only reluctantly admits to being Leopold's lawyer. The court appointed him to represent Dilg, Yates allows, but Dilg insists that an innocent person needs no attorney. "The state made me the present of a lawyer," he sarcastically remarks. And given the apparent ability of Holmes and Grunstadt to control legal outcomes in Lochester, a traditional lawyer-client relationship does seem pointless. Sam Yates, though, remains passionately supportive of Leopold. While knowingly violating legal obligations by helping to hide a fugitive client, Yates recognizes that confronting the broader political cause, the corruption of Holmes and Judge Grunstadt, is more important than litigating a specific legal case, the rigged prosecution against Leopold. Lightcap joins Yates' cause by a circuitous route. Yates initially had hoped to convince Lightcap, his former law school classmate, to demand that a blue-ribbon commission investigate legal corruption in Lochester, but the stuffy law professor cannot bother with "local affairs" because "the philosophy behind the deed [is] my field." Lightcap eventually, though, must embrace Yates' crusade, and broaden his view of the legal field, if he is to resolve Leopold's case. Law and politics, it seems, cannot be separated. Moreover, it is not simply his debates with Dilg over the nature of law and justice that mark Lightcap's conversion from contemplation to performance but several encounters with the field of legal production. Lightcap's legal re-education, like his journey through the local legal landscape, takes place in several stages. First, he meets Judge Grunstadt, whom he immediately labels as an ignoramus. Lightcap, still harboring his idealistic views about law, is horrified to discover that Grunstadt has already written his opinion in Dilg's case, while the trial is still in progress, and that he is keeping it ready for the time Dilg is recaptured. Later, Lightcap visits the burned-out factory and finds Holmes and Judge Grunstadt staging a media spectacle for newspaper reporters and inciting curious onlookers against Dilg. Finally, he encounters a police officer who brags that when Dilg is recaptured, the police intend to confront the local hotheads, already prepped by Holmes and Judge Grunstadt, with only token resistance should they come to lynch Leopold. At this overdetermined point in the narrative, Lightcap finds it impossible, as he had planned, to turn over Leopold to legal authorities. Instead, Leopold, Nora Shelley, and he set off for Boston, where they find Bracken and forcibly return him to Lochester so that he can testify against Holmes and Grunstadt in the corrupt judge's own courtroom. Talk of the Town offers two specific views, neither flattering, of how Judge Grunstadt's court produces law. After stock footage of a building engulfed in flames, newspaper headlines signal Bracken's apparent death, Holmes' charges against Dilg, and Dilg's trial for murder and arson. A brief, montage sequence depicts Judge Grunstadt's court with imagery drawn from film noir: screaming headlines; neo-expressionist lighting; tilted camera angles; and a stern judge whose banging gavel dominates a close-up shot. Later, after Dilg has been recaptured and returned to Lochester so his trial might continue, the film now represents the courtroom in a series of overhead and medium closeup shots that suggest a cramped, provincial institution that can easily be dominated by a powerful capitalist like Holmes. On the other hand, this tiny courtroom seems far too small a stage for the legal talents of Michael Lightcap, who coolly lectures the lynch mob on their responsibility to safeguard the law. In this sense, the film's legal narrative does not, arguably, "climax" in Judge Grunstadt's court as some commentaries (including Post's) suggest; rather, it seems to reach closure only when Lightcap ascends to the nation's highest tribunal, the Supreme Court of the United States. The concluding sequence in the High Court is carefully crafted. In contrast to the way in which the film had earlier represented Judge Grunstadt's court, the camera generally captures the Supreme Court in long shots and from low angles. From this perspective, both the hallway leading into the Court and the judicial chamber itself appear majestically vast, and they dwarf ordinary citizens. The camera even purports to grant film viewers a privileged look behind the scenes: Justice Lightcap donning his robes, passing through a set of curtains, and walking onto the nation's most prestigious judicial stage for the first time. Even before Lightcap becomes a Supreme Court Justice, Talk of the Town invariably elevates his position in the legal field. While the learned jurist is professing to find some merit in Dilg's legal arguments, Leopold Dilg is abandoning his own anarchist positions. Lightcap's character and accomplishments, Leopold proclaims to Nora, grant Lightcap and his ideas the kind of stature that Dilg, merely a self-taught philosopher, could never legitimately claim. "Who says I'm so right about the law?" Leopold asks Nora. At one point, he even embraces Michael's principle-driven view of the law so fervently that he is willing to end his flight and return to Judge Grunstadt's court. When Nora, terrified for Leopold's safety, objects to Leopold's sudden willingness to obey the letter of the law, he replies in language borrowed from Professor Lightcap. "It's the principle. The law says that where I should be.... Centuries of precedent say the professor is right." Dilg becomes so enthralled by Lightcap that he changes his primary cause from that of ridding Lochester of Holmes' corruption to ensuring that Michael Lightcap join the Supreme Court of the United States. The professor is "quite a man," he tells Nora, with an "important career" that should not be "kicked around" because of Leopold's small problems. After Bracken has been found, Lightcap insists on personally seeing that the Dilg prosecution is halted, but Leopold urges the jurist to slip quietly away from Lochester, lest his involvement in a controversial case harm his chances for a place on the Supreme Court. The film plot, though, makes it clear that Leopold need not worry: Lightcap seems destined for the High Court. The distinguished dean, despite a growing curiosity about common tastes, such as Leopold's Polish-style borscht, remains securely anchored on his legal pedestal. In an important sequence, which occurs while he is altering his view of the legal field, Lightcap also decides to change his personal appearance by shaving his strange-looking beard, a recurring symbol of a conservative, old-fashioned approach to both life and the law. Sans beard, Lightcap is supposed to be a new man.13 Lightcap does become an object of feminine desire, a personal transformation that aids his legal and political agendas. Suspecting that Bracken is alive, Lightcap awkwardly flirts with the foreman's girlfriend, beauty shop owner Regina Bush (Glenda Ferrell). But he has considerably more difficulty feigning to be a debonair playboy than concealing Leopold's whereabouts from legal authorities. In representing Lightcap's brief date with Regina, the filmic text highlights Lightcap's class-conscious snobbery toward her and her cultural tastes; later he expresses revulsion when re- membering that he had danced with "a blond beauty parlor owner" and had even "kissed her in public." As the most traditional of discourses about prominent jurists would have it, Talk of the Town permits Lightcap to uncap his emotions only when he confronts injustice.14 II. The Historical Context of Talk of the Town Talk of the Town, like a number of other films from the late 1930s and early 1940s helps to mark significant changes in the screwball comedy genre. In contrast to screwball classics of the 1930s, such as It Happened One Night,15 Talk of the Town highlights verbal exchanges between two men, Lightcap and Leopold, rather than between a man and an independent woman. Although Nora Shelley can be seen as playing an important intermediary role, representing a feminine force that can simultaneously "soften" the overly serious Lightcap and "harden" the overly irresponsible Dilg, she seems to lack the independence and grit of earlier screwball heroines. Talk of the Town's director, George Stevens, filmed and Columbia Studios previewed two different endings for the film's narrative. Test audiences, after rejecting an ending in which Nora stays in Washington with the new Supreme Court Justice, voted in favor of the present one in which Leopold suddenly yanks a confused, indecisive Nora out of the film frame and back toward Lochester.16 Talk of the Town's place in the screwball genre is marked by an unequal balance between "comical-romantic" and "political" elements. As concerns about the Great Depression gave way to the issues raised by World War II, the genre's comedic emphasis, particularly on the complex interactions between strong female and male characters, gave way to male-dominated narratives that "seem to pay lip service to the spunk of the thirties heroine, only to humiliate her and put her back, in the end, into an inferior, and properly adoring, position in a man's world."17 After Nora and Leopold, the suddenly united couple, disappear, the final shot captures the entrance to the Supreme Court's chambers in a way that, once again, emphasizes the grandeur of the institution Michael Lightcap has now joined. The ending of the film, it almost seems, elevates the Supreme Court so that it comes to share "star" billing with Grant, Arthur, and Colman.18 Because of sequences such as this, some film historians locate Talk of the Town within the "social problem," rather than the screwball comedy, genre. This identification resonates not only with the filmic text but with the leftist politics of one its screenwriters, Sidney Buchman. A member of the Communist Party when he wrote Talk of the Town, Buchman worked on several other politically-conscious film scripts, most notably Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.19 Both Talk of the Town and Mr. Smith can be seen as narratives in which a person with a presumably antiquated, overly idealistic view of law and politics undergoes a dramatic transformation. After personal journeys through the legal system and life itself, both Professor Lightcap and Mr. Smith finally can identify where "real" political power might be located and the corrupt ways in which both public and private actors can wield it. A similar problematic runs through another Capra film, Meet John Doe,20 which also draws from both the screwball and social problem genres. Moreover, Meet John Doe can be linked to Talk of the Town in terms of a similar concern about domestic fascism, a threat that was taken as seriously by leftists in both the legal profession and in Hollywood.21 Yet, as this essay argues, any attempt to represent Hollywood films, particularly those of the 1940s, according any one-dimensional scheme of categorization inevitably represses or excludes other conflicting elements in the filmic text. As the film theorist Dana Polan suggests, one of the most important aspects of Hollywood films of the 1940s is their attempt "to hold different discursive grids - different ways of representing - together in a single, volatile space."22 In this sense, Talk of the Town seems the site of a number of very different discourses, rooted in the context of the New Deal era, about the legal field. As a contemporary piece in the New York Times suggests, for example, the late 1930s and early 1940s were popularly seen, correctly or incorrectly, as a time during which friends and families debated constitutional issues around the breakfast table,23 a scene that is prominently featured in Talk of the Town. In addition, it might be argued that the film also depicts an elite law school dean gradually coming to accept - first through debating Leopold Dilg and, more importantly, through exploring the local legal field - some of the basic claims of the legal-realist jurisprudence of the 1930s and early 1940s. Lightcap's conversation with Judge Grunstadt about the writing of judicial opinions, for example, recalls the insistence of some realists that judges decided cases on the basis of "hunches" or outright prejudices and then wrote opinions that justified their decision. A major problem in the film is also an important one in legal-realist discourses of the late 1930s and early 1940s: How could the legal field be cleared of both the kind of crude political pressures, exerted by private and public actors such as Andrew Holmes and Judge Grunstadt, and simultaneously liberated from allegedly out-of-touch legal theorists, such as the bearded Professor Lightcap, who were reluctant "to abandon the illusory idea of a depersonalized realm of abstract judicial reason" and foundational ethics?24 Given this historical context, one might reconsider any reading that interprets Michael Lightcap's actions as simply a "lawless" challenge to "the rule of law." Since Talk of the Town depicts a prominent law school dean tracking down a person whom legal authorities do not even consider a suspect, forcibly kidnapping him, and dragging him into a court of law, such a reading is plausible. Certainly, the film depicts the remasculinized jurist wielding a pistol and abandoning the idealist position that "the law" is a set of logical, consistent, and trans-historical principles. Yet, its one brief reference to the frontier - gunfighter myth, Hollywood's stock answer to the rule of law trope, seems perfunctory and ill-placed. More important, once Michael fires his pistol to get the crowd's attention, he sets it aside and meets the lynch mob's threat on Leopold's life with only his finely honed eloquence. Lightcap's confrontation with the mob invites a number of possible interpretations. He reproves its members for defiling a court room with "instruments of violence," but he simultaneously chastises himself for once believing that law is "just a set of principles, just so much language printed on fine, heavy paper," something whose relationship to justice can be taken for granted. The law, Lightcap now insists, is everyone's finest "possession," and all citizens are responsible for both using and preserving it. Most important, their duty is not simply that of always respecting its processes (as Post's summary suggests). "The law must be engraved in our hearts and practiced every minute to the letter and spirit. It can't even exist unless we're willing to go down into the dust and blood and fight a battle every day of our lives to preserve it, for our neighbors as well as for ourselves." Here, Lightcap articulates what might be regarded as a radical, democratic alternative to a hierarchical, lawyer-and-judge-centered conception of the legal field. As historians such as Jerald Auerbach have argued, progressive lawyers were proposing a variety of changes in the organization of legal field during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Lloyd K. Garrison, Dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, for example, called for "new kinds of organizations and new centers of cooperative activity" in legal work.25 Similarly, it is possible to imagine Lightcap's speech and actions - from an anti-essentialist, pluralist position - as a reconstruction, rather than as a refutation, of rule-of-law discourses. As Ronen Shamir's recent study of the legal field of the 1930s and early 1940s argues, the rule of law can be seen as "a social construct whose content and form are historically contingent and [as Michael Lightcap's speech in Talk of the Town might have it] discursively negotiable."26 Indeed, as Shamir's book suggests, lawyers of "the Lightcap era" were themselves arguing for a number of different reconstructions of the Constitution, the law, and the legal field itself. Moreover, the political theorist Chantal Mouffe has recently imagined an anti-essentialist, pluralist vision of radical, democratic politics and the rule of law that, arguably, resembles the brief view outlined in Lightcap's speech. According to Mouffe's formulation, a thoroughly democratic polity cannot work so as to eliminate every dispute and antagonism - or even "violence" - of the kind found in Talk of the Town's representation of the political and legal fields. Rather as Lightcap's speech about law proposes, an engaged citizenry must struggle to ensure the rule of law is not a sham. As Talk of the Town has Lightcap coming to realize, "the real threat to democracy is negating the ineradicable character of antagonism and aiming at a universal rational consensus"27 of the kind that Michael Lightcap himself once applauded. Finally, it might even be imagined that Lightcap comes to recognize that, in Mouffe's words, an essentialized view of the rule of law "can lead to unrecognized violence hidden behind appeals to "rationality.'"28 These kinds of radical democratic discourses, however, share filmic (and legal) space with other conflicting legal discourses, especially a hierarchical, elitist, court-centered view of the role of judges and courts and about the nature of the legal field itself. Talk of the Town, as already suggested, consistently privileges Michael Lightcap's integrity, intellect, and social position over those of all other characters within the film, and this valorization seems crucial to establishing a basis for his successful performance before the lynch mob. Seen from this perspective, the contradictions raised by this filmic sequence are not limited to the complex relationship between violence and law; in addition, the sequences in which Michael Lightcap addresses the mob - and the ones that immediately follow it - offer conflicting messages about role of judges and courts within the legal field. Put simply, even if the language of Lightcap's brief speech might be read as propounding a radical democratic view of legal practice, other elements in the larger filmic text suggest a more hierarchical one about the transcendent position of judges and courts within the legal field. Michael Lightcap, who has already been identified as worthy of sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States, completely dominates the sequence in Judge Grunstadt's court room. The mob, to whom he appeals, remains entirely mute. Similarly, Sam Yates, the activist attorney who is more interested in causes than cases, also says nothing, and the camera barely notices him within the crowded mise en scene. Even the other two stars of the filmic drama, Leopold and Nora, are silent. And though the camera does allow each of them closeups, their roles are limited to indicating silent approval and admiration of Michael's speech. Ultimately, all of the "talk of the town" - whether it is the mob grumbling about lynching, Leopold musing about justice, or Sam Yates proclaiming the need for action - pales in comparison to the rhetorical eloquence and legal performance by the eminent outsider, Dean Michael Lightcap. Moreover, this courtroom sequence is immediately followed by a brief montage and then the final sequence in the Supreme Court that, taken together, work to contain the radical democratic discourses in Lightcap's speech about a participatory approach to legal work. Representations of the process by which Lochester's legal field is repaired are limited to newspaper headlines about the operations of an unseen court system: "DILG FREED"; "HOLMES, GRUNSTADT INDICTED." After a series of rapidly-moving newspaper pages, superimposed over an image of "Lady Justice," the film shows a satisfied, still unbearded Michael Lightcap leaving Lochester. Has he, somehow, orchestrated the events announced in the newspaper? These kinds of questions quickly seem irrelevant since Michael - and the film's narrative - is clearly headed elsewhere, away from the local to the national legal field. The montage continues until another headline, this one from a newspaper in Washington, D.C., signals Lightcap's appointment to the Supreme Court and the opening of the new Court session that Nora and Leopold, again as mute spectators, will attend. These final sequences, from the perspective of legal-constitutional history, are ironic in that they roughly parallel a story often found in recent, critical studies: the failure, during the 1930s and early 1940s, of a variety of different challenges to a judge-and-court-centered view of the legal field and the gradual disappearance of claims that, within the broad field of law, judicial decisions might surrender "their privileged status over other forms of social deliberation."29 Thus, Talk of the Town's narrative trajectory, despite some detours, inexorably propels Michael Lightcap to the top of the judicial hierarchy - the Supreme Court of the United States. Similarly, once he reaches the Court, Nora and Leopold seem to have fulfilled their roles as both friends and teachers since only Lightcap is credentialed to work within the Marble Palace. With Lightcap sitting as an Associate Justice, Dilg's pre-Lightcapian approach to the legal field disappears. After watching his distinguished benefactor join the Court, Dilg cheerfully departs for Lochester. His old passion for legal engagement seems to have vanished, replaced by a much more passive, spectator-oriented view of the legal field. "That's all I wanted to see," he tells Nora. "The rest is about law; very boring. He looks fine up there.... The country's in good hands." These are, of course, the hands of same person who had earlier recoiled at the very thought that a "blond beauty parlor owner" had once touched them. Conclusion Although synoptic treatments, such as Robert Post's essay on popular images of lawyers, remain an important form of legal writing, more focused readings, especially of Hollywood films, can better represent the multivocal nature of legal texts. And as students of law increasingly underscore the multiplicity of ways in which legal discourses are produced and highlight the many different sites where they get articulated, a detailed focus on individual texts, including the types of motion pictures featured in this symposium, can be particularly illuminating. Talk of the Town, as this essay argues, does not simply embody, or stand for, some essential point about the law. Rather, a number of very different discourses circulate within this filmic text, much as they circulated within the broader legal field of the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, Talk of the Town suggests the difficulty of finding cinematic forms through which to represent the legal field. Although films rarely, if ever, embody some pure generic type, Talk of the Town - with touches of screwball comedy, the social problem genre, and film noir - seems a particularly unstable hybrid.30 Finally, Talk of the Town suggests how the Hollywood studio system both responded to legal ferment and, in turn, contributed its own discourses to a period of significant upheaval within American legal culture. Radical democratic, even populist, discourses, which posit the need for law to be produced by streetwise experience and through popular struggles, compete with ones that elevate the legal practices and insights of judges who supposedly possess wisdom and insight far above those of ordinary men and women. Significantly, the film's narrative trajectory, particularly at the ending, appears to "tilt" toward a celebratory view of learned judges and the Supreme Court, an inclination that recent legal-constitutional histories find increasingly evident in the elite legal culture of the late 1940s and 1950s. |
