The Good
A great movie featuring terrific performances by everybody involved.
The Bad
I wish there had been a documentary on this release where real lawyers talk about this movie and if it got things right or not.
The Verdict is the story of Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) and how he got his soul back. A drunk and an attorney, Galvin gets set up with a case that isn’t meant to go to trial. He is supposed to settle out of court and take his big third of the money. This is what everyone, including the family of a girl that he is defending, wants him to do. The girl had been pregnant, she was given the wrong anesthetic and she became a vegetable and her baby died. Frank is all set to take the money and run.
However, something weird happens along the way. After viewing the girl in the Catholic Hospital she is in, Frank suddenly gets religion. He isn’t going to take the money. He is going to win this case. With everyone telling him he is crazy, Frank soldiers on and is aided by his former law teacher Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden). Truthfully, Galvin seems to get his butt kicked in court every day (before the trial starts he even tries to get out of it) yet even when he thinks he can’t win the case, he returns to that courtroom and in the end shows everyone that the truth can, and will, prevail.
Features
Disc One
Sidney Lumet does most of the talking here (in fact these guys did their commentaries separately, it seems). He opens up by talking about the film’s characters and depression, and how whenever he has been depressed he used a game like pinball to tell him how his day was going to go. If he did well, he would have a good day and if he did poorly, well, you get the point. Lumet spends a lot of time talking about the actors on screen and gushing over how good they are. He also discusses the theme of religion in the movie, and even relates a cute story about the late James Mason being very excited when he heard he was up for an Academy Award for his role as Ed Concannon.
Disc Two
5 Featurettes
They have put five extras on the second disc and since they cover somewhat similar ground, I decided that I would do them as basically one chunk for this release. The featurettes they have provided are:
The Making of The Verdict
Paul Newman: The Craft of Acting
Sidney Lumet: The Craft of Directing
Milestones In Cinema History: The Verdict
Hollywood Backstories: The Verdict
Basically, I sort of moved around through most of these featurettes and by doing that I got a thumbnail look at this show. In the The Making of The Verdict piece, we get an old featurette that seems like it was made when this movie was being shot. Paul Newman talks about the character being unlikable and how he’s having a great time making the film. In the Sidney Lumet: The Craft of Directing featurette, he discusses not having a rhyme or reason to how he chooses his movies, he merely goes off of instinct. He talks about how a director’s job is to determine what makes it on to the big screen and how the writer is equally important in that capacity. For those who love gossip, check out the Hollywood Backstories: The Verdict featurette to find out all the troubles this film had just to get off the ground and how at one point it didn’t have an ending. There’s some great stuff here for the casual fans and cinephiles alike.
Still Galleries
Video
Widescreen - 1.85:1. I had the pleasure of watching this movie on a small TV and a large TV and I was amazed at how well the transfer held out. This movie goes through a range of colors. Some are really harsh, others are dimly lit, and then you have exteriors that seem to be capturing the character in an almost engulfing environment. Lumet shoots things in a very straight forward way. He will use full frame shots to showcase each actor’s entire performance, and as a viewer I found that this really took me deeper into the film. I didn’t notice any patches of the screen that looked like they had been overly compressed in any way.
Audio
Dolby Digital. Subtitled in English and Spanish. Close Captioned. English - Stereo and Mono. Spanish and French Mono. Considering the gravelly tone that Newman puts on in this movie, and how much of it is played through all the character’s expressions, I didn’t really notice the soundtrack that much. In fact, it seems like Lumet has gone out of his way to use ambient sounds and let that speak for the film. There is a lot of dialogue but this movie plays like a procedural in that we get information as our characters get it. Overall, the audio was good but nothing about it really stood out for any reason.
Package
This packaging comes with a glossy shot of Paul Newman giving a steely gaze on the front of this slip over. The back serves up some shots from this movie, all of which are very dark in tone. There is a description of what this film is about, a Special Features listing, and technical specs. The actual DVD cover looks exactly the same and both discs in this two disc Collector’s Edition are stored in one amaray case.
Final Word
I loved this movie.
I had heard about The Verdict for a long time, but I kept getting it confused with Absence of Malice. I loved how this movie was shot, I loved how the actors simply acted without looking as though they were giving performances. I feel that Sidney Lumet is one of the greatest directors alive. It doesn’t seem like he’s ever been embraced or even had the success that Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have been afforded, but Lumet has to be one of the steadiest directors to ever step behind the camera. He doesn’t do anything splashy but he really doesn’t need to. The stories he tells are so rich and so full of character dynamics, it is very easy to get caught up in the cinematic world that he is putting across.
To put it as bluntly as I possibly can, The Verdict is a movie that needs to be in your DVD collection.
The Verdict was released December 8, 1982.
