THE VERDICT (1982)

Easy to forget that between THE STING/’73 and his late career reboot via FORT APACHE THE BRONX/’81, Paul Newman suffered a near decade of duds.  Only SLAP SHOT/’77 breaking a steady decline that included two of Robert Altman’s worst, and a pair of Irwin Allen stinkers.  (THE TOWERING INFERNO/’74 made a lot of cash, but have you seen it?)  An unprecedented personal renaissance followed, finally getting Newman Oscar’d, alas for Martin Scorsese’s pointless HUSTLER update, THE COLOR OF MONEY/’86, and even more acclaim for this dirge-like prestige item from Sidney Lumet.  A Perry Mason episode with iron-poor blood, Newman’s an exhausted drunk of a lawyer with one active case: Medical Malpractice against a Catholic-owned hospital on a birth gone wrong.  Tossing aside a generous settlement; he knows he’s got a case he can win and, more importantly, find personal redemption with.  Putting himself above his grieving clients somehow the honorable thing to do.  And he’d lose the works if it weren’t for an Irish colleen of a deus ex machina, lit brilliantly by the sun (the only brightly lit thing in the pic), the role a gift (?) from scripter David Mamet (making like Arthur Miller in judgmental righteousness) to then wife Lindsay Crouse.  Now living in NYC, she’d been Admitting Nurse on delivery day.  If Mamet only knew how to plant last-minute ‘reveals’ and plot points without making such a thud on the soundtrack.  A lot of good acting went into this thing; Newman fine, of course, and both Jack Warden (Team Underdog) and James Mason (Team Wealthy Defense) standouts in sheer professionalism.  How this ever got taken seriously beyond me.  (Novelist Barry Reed never had another movie credit.)  Overriding all this courtroom stuff and Boston Catholic diocese skulldruggery is a mysterious romance between Charlotte Rampling (working her Lauren Bacall look to beat the band) and Newman whose exhaustion presumably turns her on, but is a dead giveaway that something fishy is going on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  So many more worthy late Newman gigs; beginning, as mentioned, with SLAP SHOT and FORT APACHE, ending with NOBODY’S FOOL/’94.  Try one of those.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/03/slap-shot-1977.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/fort-apache-bronx-1981.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/nobodys-fool-1994.html