GIDEON'S TRUMPET (1980)

Straight-forward & first-rate, this fact-based tv-movie on a consequential moment in legal history stemming from a small-timer’s court experience gets a lot of things right.  Clarence Earl Gideon, denied representation on a breaking & entering charge, forced to act as his own lawyer, winds up sentenced to five years for chump change because of his prior convictions.  From prison, he petitions the U.S. Supreme Court where his hand-written letter is pulled from the slush pile, voted on & assigned to future Associate Justice Abe Fortas for argument.  This could all have been dry as toast on screen, but David Rintels, who wrote the one-man Clarence Darrow play Henry Fonda performed on B’way (and around the country; his Tony winner) and John Houseman, who’d produced it, reunited to make this as a modest tv movie.  (Houseman also acts as Chief Justice; that’d be Earl Warren, not that Houseman does an impersonation.  Same for the line-up of famous old-codgers playing the Associate  Justices: Sam Jaffe, Dean Jaggar, William Prince, et al.)  The limited budget shows here & there, but much of the plainness built into the production works toward verisimilitude unusual for a 1980 tv pic.  With only a couple of grandiose uplift music cues to spoil the rough-hewn quality director Robert Collins is trying for.  Even José Ferrer, no shrinking violet when it comes to grabbing attention, makes an exemplary, fiercely intelligent Abe Fortas.  Though in looks & vocal cadence, he’s more a ringer for popular author Gerald Green (HOLOCAUST; LAST ANGRY MAN) then for Fortas.  No real surprises here, well none other than a final chance to see Fay Wray in a neat little part as Gideon’s landlady, but a remarkably good tv movie, something of an oxymoron at the time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: If you wondered what the hell Southern accent Daniel Craig was shooting for in KNIVES OUT/’19, just listen to Lane Smith as the lawyer Gideon hires for his retrial.  Pure Tennessee Rotary Club from Lane, and just about perfect.  Somebody get Craig a tape before shooting on KNIVES II starts up.

DOUBLE-BILL: The last time Fonda had an ultra-realistic prison gig was in Alfred Hitchcock’s habitually underrated, masterfully sober-sided THE WRONG MAN/’56.