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THE LAW IS A ASS for 01/15/2002
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 128
Originally written as installment # 117 and published in Comics Buyer's Guide issue # 713, July 17, 1987 issue
There are moments of epiphany in one's life. They can be big or small. Life-altering or simply becoming older, wiser and discerning enough sometime between the release of Billy Jack and The Trial of Billy Jack that are suddenly to recognize not only that the latter was a really bad movie, but also that, no, they didn't go back and reshoot the former, your one-time impression of it was wrong and itwas a really bad movie, too.
Sometime in my life I had one of those. Sometime between the time I originally wrote this column and now, when I'm revising it, I come to the realization that Brian De Palma is an over-rated director. I'll get to when it was in a second.
But first a few words. Taste is subjective. While I happen to like mine, it may not be yours. So, understand, that my comments about Brian De Palma and his movies may not jibe with your assessment of the man or his movies. You may like them, where I, for the most part, don't. That's cool. It means there's one more thing in your life that gives you pleasure than there is in mine.
That is the case, however, Brian De Palma's movies don't really give me pleasure anymore. While I enjoyed Carrie and Obsession, I've watched De Palma's movies grow from pictures shot in the style of Alfred Hitchcock to pictures which shamelessly rip-off Hitchcock, to movies which are ripping-off everyone. I've come to recognize that Dressed to Kill does more than just evoke the feel of Psycho, it manages to lift most of the important plot points from Psycho and drop them not-so-neatly into a movie that's not nearly as artful as Hitchcock's masterpiece. (Hell, at least when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho, he had the honesty to call it Psycho and admit it was a re-make.) Or that Blow Out is basically a do-over the Michelangelo Antonioni movie Blowup, but with a movie sound man instead of a photographer. De Palma couldn't even bother to change the name of his movie much.
Body Double was my moment of epiphany. I missed it, when it was theatrically released. I was a new father back in 1984, I didn't get to nearly as many movies as I used to. So I missed it. And continued missing it for several years, until--sometime in 1987 or 1988, I saw it was going to be on HBO in the middle of the night and taped it so I could watch it later.
I watched that tape and found myself becoming increasingly annoyed with the movie, as I did. You see, Body Double is little more than an exercise derivativeness which combines the plots of Rear Window and Vertigo--with a little of Psycho's sound track thrown in--puts them into a blender, and spews forth a movie with some style--albeit a style aped from Hitchcock--but no substance. Camera tricks in service of a plot where everyone has to be an idiot for the story to advance.
My moment of epiphany arrived when, with about fifteen minutes to go in the movie, my tape stopped. I had programmed my VCR wrong so the taped ended before the movie did. With about fifteen minutes left in the movie--and understand, we're talking the climax here; the heroine had just been captured by the murderer and the hero had to save her--my tape switched to the middle of an episode of Moonlighting or St. Elsewhere or something that had been on it before. The aforementioned epiphany arrived when I realized that, not only was I not going to see how Body Double ended, but also that I didn't care.
To this day Body Double remains frustrating. Not only because of the flaws I found while watching the movie but, because it receives serious attention instead of being dismissed as the second-rate rip-off it is. I'm sick of that. Just as I'm sick of the apologists who say the train station shoot-out scene of De Palma's The Untouchables is a "homage" to the Odessa Steps scene of Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. When the second version--i.e.., the De Palma movie--tracks so close to the original that many of the shots in are virtually identical, I don't think the apologetic term "homage" should be used.
As for what I've seen of De Palma's work since then, well you'll see about The Untouchables in a minute or two. Bonfires of the Vanities managed to take a book full of unlikeable people and, somehow, make them even less likeable than the book had. But, at least the book was insightful. When the movie wasn't being vapid, it was being just plain silly.
I don't know whether to blame De Palma or the screenplay of Mission: Impossible for taking a good character from the TV show and savaging him. I do know the movie looked like it was a John Woo movie waiting for John Woo to show up--which he wouldn't do until the sequel.
And don't get me started on Mission to Mars. I saw that one for free and still came out of the theater thinking I had overpaid.
Why this screed on Brian De Palma? Well, as I indicated above, today's column is about his movie The Untouchables. And going over it to get it ready for reprinting got me thinking about De Palma's movies again and about how much I've come to dislike them. But that's the nice thing about a forum such as this column. I get to write about my feelings toward De Palma's movies and get it out of my system. Venting, they say, is good for one's well-being and certainly preferable to watching Body Double or The Untouchables again.
******
"The Law is a Ass"
Installment # 128
by
Bob Ingersoll
Gene gave it a thumbs up. Roger gave it a thumbs down. Me, I gotta side with Roger on this one. I tolerated it up to a point. That point being the end, which really spoiled whole movie for me.
I'm talking about the movie version of The Untouchables, which is not, contrary to popular belief, a big-screen version of the old Robert Stack TV series. Sure the story is the same: Eliot Ness, agent for the Treasury Department, goes to Chicago to put Al Capone behind bars. But that's because both the TV series and the movie adapt the book The Untouchables written by Elliot Ness and Oscar Fraley. The movie and the TV series are not, however, the same.
Discussing why, however, requires that I discuss the ending which, as I said, really spoiled the movie for me. And speaking of spoiling...
SPOILER WARNING!
I am about to reveal the ending of the movie The Untouchables. If you haven't seen the movie but, for masochistic reasons of your own, plan to and don't want the ending revealed stop reading this column. Save it until after you've seen the movie--that shouldn't be hard, it runs on some Turner channel about every full moon--then come back and read the column. (What did you think, I was going to say never read it?) If you've already seen the movie, or if you don't care that I'm going to reveal the ending, then proceed.
END OF SPOILER WARNING
As I was saying, other than sharing the same source material, the movie and the TV series aren't really all that similar. For one thing the Eliot Ness of the movie is a loving, naive, introspective, and idealistic young family man. That gives this Eliot Ness at least four emotional states, which is two more than Robert Stack ever managed on the TV show. On the other hand, the TV show managed some degree of historical accuracy in it, which is more than one can say about a movie that had Elliot Ness cold-bloodedly murder Frank Nitti, Al Capone's second-in-command, before the movie's end, when, in real life, Nitti took over and ran the Capone mobs after Capone went to prison for tax evasion. Finally, the TV series starred Elliot Ness, not surprising as Ness co-wrote the book which is the source material about his own exploits. The movie really starred Sean Connery, in his Best-Supporting-Actor-Oscar-winning performance of Jimmy Malone, as it gave him both the best bits of business and the best line in the movie.
However, none of these concerns answers the question, why am I writing about The Untouchables in "The Law Is a Ass?" So let me answer it. Why am I writing about The Untouchables in "The Law is a Ass?" Because Don and Maggie asked me to branch out and write about TV or movies on occasion, if there was something in either that warranted a column. And in The Untouchables there's certainly something that warranted a column, namely the trial scene at the end of the movie that's straight from Wonderland. (Wait, that may not be fair to Wonderland. In Alices's Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice was on trial, the King of Hearts said, "Verdict first, then trial afterwards." So, at least Wonderland's trials had a structure. That's more than you can say for the trial in The Untouchables.
At the end of The Untouchables, Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion and sent to federal prison. Not a big surprise. Every one knows that, or should anyway. That's not why I issued that SPOILER WARNING a few paragraphs ago. No, it's how Capone was convicted that's caused me to write this column.
Here's how.
Eliot Ness gathered information proving Capone received millions of dollars for which he did not file any income tax return. In the trial, Capone's bookkeeper testified about accounts in secret ledgers to bribe city officials; that he personally gave Capone money that had been laundered through dummy corporations; and that Capone didn't declare any of those millions on his taxes.
Ness noticed that Capone was smiling and not at all nervous during the trial. He suspected that something was wrong. It was. Frank Nitty, Capone's hired muscle, had a copy of the jury list in his pocket. Ness deduced that Capone bribed the jury.
Ness took this information to the judge, who ruled that it is not sufficient proof of jury tampering and could not justify dismissing the jury. Ness told the judge that his name was in the secret ledger of bribed officials. It was a bluff. However, considering the state of Chicago politics at the time, not a bad bluff.
In fact, it was a pretty good bluff. The judge actually was on the list and caved in. When court reconvened the judge ordered his bailiff to go to the court room next door, where they were trying a divorce case, and to switch juries.
Yes, I said switch juries. Take the divorce jury out of the middle of the divorce trial and plop it down in the middle of Capone's income tax evasion trial and put the jury who has already heard half of Capone's trial into the divorce.
That couldn't be more wrong, if it were a giraffe in an ant farm.
First we have the question of where this case was being tried. Federal tax evasion cases would be tried in a federal court over in the federal court house. So what was the federal court house doing trying a state civil divorce proceeding in the next room? Not even if the President of the United States himself were getting divorce, would the case be tried in a federal court.
But that's just a jurisdictional question. That was the least of this trial's worries. There were other matters even more problematic. Such as: what was a divorce trial even doing with a jury? Divorce trials don't usually have juries. They're tried directly to the judge who decides the case alone. That's why Voltaire Perkins always got to pontificate so much on Divorce Court in between Colin Male's segues into the commercials. But if divorce proceedings don't have juries, then who were those twelve guys they were going to pull out of the next court room, a pair of matched infields?
I don't know. The movie doesn't explain how a divorce trial would have a jury any more than it explained how they managed that little switch the juries trick.
See, you can't take a jury in the middle of a criminal trial, after its been sworn in and the evidence has started to come in, and switch it with another jury, and continue the trial from the point you left off with that new jury. Well, you can, but not if you want the conviction to withstand the appeal.
What's wrong with switching the jury? Due Process requires that the defendant gets to participate in the choosing of his jury, so that he can be sure that it doesn't have someone who is prejudiced against him. Capone didn't have a chance to participate in selecting this new jury that was just plopped down in front of him. So that would have violated his Due Process rights.
Not that it really mattered. The new jury wouldn't have been able to convict Capone, because it wouldn't have had enough information to decide Capone's guilt or innocence. It had already missed key testimony. For example, it had already missed the all-important testimony of the bookkeeper, the one that proved Capone had extra income which he wasn't declaring on his taxes. How was the new jury going to know what the witnesses, who had testified before they came into the case--like the aforementioned all-important bookkeeper--said?
Nope, that's not how a jury is dismissed in mid-trial. Oh there is a mechanism for dismissing a jury after the trial has started, but this ain't it. Instead, the judge must declare a mistrial made necessary in order to prevent manifest miscarriage of justice--declaring a mistrial in order to dismiss a jury the defendant had bribed would count as a manifest miscarriage of justice, by the way--then the trial starts all over from the beginning. Let me repeat: from the beginning. A new jury is picked, the witnesses all testify anew. It's very long and complicated. Everybody hates it, but that's the only way it can be done.
I appreciate the judge's desire to expedite matters by not having to start all over again. But all he did with his short-cut was to insure that Capone's conviction would overturned by the court of appeals. Funny, did I somehow miss that little fact that Capone's conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, when I read his biography in the encyclopedia?
Immediately after the judge ordered the juries to be switched, Capone's defense attorney realized that their stratagem was discovered. So he went to Plan B. "Your Honor," he announced, "the defense wishes to change its plea to guilty."
Now that was a little precipitous. Like the Johnstown Flood was a little water damage. Okay, maybe the lawyer realized Capone didn't stand a chance with an honest jury so was going to lose. But why speed things up by pleading him guilty? What was his hurry? He wanted to get home for Charlie McCarthy?
Simply put, it couldn't happen. The right to a trial is the defendant's right and the defendant's right alone. No one but the defendant can give up the right and plea guilty. Not the judge. Not the defense attorney. Only the defendant can plead guilty, and only after the judge ascertains that it's what the defendant really wants to do.
So, if the defendant doesn't want to plead guilty, his lawyer can't do it for him and against his wishes. In the movie, Capone didn't want to plead guilty, when his lawyer entered the guilty plea. How do I know? Just one of those subtle little signs of body language any good attorney learns to pick up on after years of experience: Capone punched his lawyer in the mouth right after the plea and complained that he wasn't getting justice, while the guards led him away.
I saw The Untouchables with Tony Isabella. When I pointed out the legal errors in it, he suggested that I seek out the transcript of Capone's tax evasion trial and see what really happened. I thanked him for the suggestion but allowed as how I wouldn't do it.
You see, I've had to sit through many a trial. Trials are dull. This is especially true of tax evasion trials, which tend to be dominated by lots of boring readings from ledger books. I had no reason to believe Capone's real life trial was any different. That being the case, I can understand the movie's need to spice up the real trial somewhat.
Still, there's good ways to spice and bad ways to spice. The Untouchables was one of the bad ways. Kind of like making Szechwan mashed potatoes.
******
BOB INGERSOLL, lawyer, CBG's legal analyst, and general nudge wants to tell you that the word, "Bookkeeper," a word used earlier in this column, is the answer to a trivia question. It and it's companion "bookkeeping," are, according to something I once read, the only words in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters.
Those who want to challenge me and find another, feel free. But remember, no fair using comic book sound effects.
Bob Ingersoll
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