...And Justice for All (1979)

Norman Jewison's 1979 legal drama arrives with the weary authority of a film that has seen the courthouse from every angle and trusts none of them. Al Pacino plays Arthur Kirkland, a Baltimore defense attorney who throws a punch at a judge in the opening minutes and spends the rest of the runtime discovering that the system he serves is a stage set with a rotten floor. Jewison said he wanted to avoid a message picture, and for long stretches he succeeds, substituting absurdity and hysteria for sermon. The result plays like an anthology of grievances stapled to one very loud performance.

The film's social consciousness is present but thin, and mostly incidental. Robert Christian's Ralph Agee, a young black cross-dresser, is the lone minority figure of note, and his fate carries an unspoken racial weight that the screenplay never bothers to name. Christine Lahti's Gail Packer sits on a legal ethics committee, and the central trial concerns the assault of a woman, yet both are filtered through Kirkland's moral collapse instead of any argument about gender. The film's real target is institutional corruption, not class or capital, and its angriest energies are reserved for judges and prosecutors. Jay Porter's psychiatric unraveling and Sam's senility are offered as breakdown, never as identity.

Where the picture does lean forward is in its closing sermon, the famous outburst that has been parodied so often it now plays as self-parody. Kirkland's indictment of the whole proceeding is rousing and blunt, and it wants the audience to cheer. That is the film's truest instinct: not a thesis, but a cathartic yell. Everything else, the senility, the breakdowns, the cross-dressing, the rape trial, exists as texture around the shout. It is a well-acted tantrum about justice, and tantrums rarely organize themselves into ideology.