Frank assures them they have a strong case. Meanwhile, Frank, who is lonely, becomes romantically involved with Laura Charlotte Rampling , a woman he meets at a local bar. Frank visits the comatose woman and is deeply affected.
He then meets with the Bishop of the Archdiocese of Boston Edward Binns , which owns the Catholic hospital where the incident took place. Everyone, including the presiding judge and the victim's relatives, is stunned by Frank's decision Frank fails to communicate the offer to his client's family before rejecting it.
His opponent, the high-priced attorney Ed Concannon James Mason , has at his disposal a large legal team that is masterful with the press; the presiding judge Milo O'Shea makes deliberate efforts to obstruct Frank's questioning of his expert; and no one who was in the operating room is willing to testify that there was any negligence.
Frank's big break comes when he discovers that Kaitlin Costello Lindsay Crouse , the nurse who admitted his client to the hospital, is now a preschool teacher in New York. Frank travels there to track her down, leaving Mickey and Laura working together in Frank's Boston office. Frank confronts Costello, asking, "Will you help me? Meanwhile in Boston, Mickey is looking for cigarettes in Laura's handbag and discovers a check from Concannon's law firm. He infers that she is a mole, providing information on their legal strategy to the opposing lawyers.
Mickey flies to New York to tell Frank that Laura has been betraying them. He suggests to Frank that it would be easy to get the case declared a mistrial, but Frank decides to continue. Shortly thereafter, Frank meets Laura, who has also traveled to New York. In a display of cold fury, Frank strikes her in the face, knocking her to the floor. In an emotional scene, Costello testifies that, shortly after the patient had become comatose, the anesthesiologist one of the two doctors on trial, along with the Archdiocese of Boston told her to change her notes on the admitting form to hide his fatal error.
She had written down that the patient had had a full meal only one hour before being admitted. The doctor had failed to read the admitting notes. Thus, in ignorance, he gave her an anesthetic that should never be given to a patient with a full stomach. The screenplay by David Mamet is a wonder of good dialogue, strongly seen characters and a structure that pays off in the big courtroom scene - as the genre requires.
As a courtroom drama, "The Verdict" is superior work. But the director and the star of this film, Sidney Lumet and Paul Newman, seem to be going for something more; "The Verdict" is more a character study than a thriller, and the buried suspense in this movie is more about Galvin's own life than about his latest case.
Frank Galvin provides Newman with the occasion for one of his great performances. This is the first movie in which Newman has looked a little old, a little tired. There are moments when his face sags and his eyes seem terribly weary, and we can look ahead clearly to the old men he will be playing in 10 years' time.
Newman always has been an interesting actor, but sometimes his resiliency, his youthful vitality, have obscured his performances; he has a tendency to always look great, and that is not always what the role calls for. This time, he gives us old, bone-tired, hung-over, trembling and heroic Frank Galvin, and we buy it lock, stock and shot glass.
The movie is populated with finely tuned supporting performances many of them by British or Irish actors, playing Bostonians not at all badly. Jack Warden is the old law partner; Charlotte Rampling is the woman, also an alcoholic, with whom Galvin unwisely falls in love; James Mason is the ace lawyer for the archdiocese; Milo O'Shea is the politically connected judge; Wesley Addy provides just the right presence as one of the accused doctors.
Sidney Lumet. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Frank Galvin was once a promising Boston lawyer with a bright future ahead. An incident early in his career in which he was trying to do the right thing led to him being fired from the prestigious law firm with which he was working, almost being disbarred, and his wife leaving him.
Continually drowning his sorrows in booze, he is now an ambulance-chasing lawyer, preying on the weak and vulnerable, and bending the truth whenever necessary to make what few dollars he has, as he has only had a few cases in the last few years, losing the last four. His only friend in the profession is his now retired ex-partner, Mickey Morrissey, who gets Frank a case, his fee solely a percentage of what his clients are awarded. The case should net Frank tens of thousands of dollars by settling out of court, that money which would at least get him back on his feet.
Towler and Marks. Kaye was admitted to the hospital for what should have been a routine delivery, but something that happened while Kaye was on the operating room table led to her brain being deprived of oxygen, resulting in permanent brain damage, and Kaye now being in a totally vegetative state requiring hospitalization for the rest of her life. Frank eventually learns that the cause seems to be that Dr.
Towler, the anesthesiologist and an expert in the field, used the incorrect anesthetic for the situation. However, all but one person that was in the operating room that day has provided depositions that nothing improper occurred in the operating room. The one holdout is the operating room head nurse, Maureen Rooney, who is not talking, period, to Frank or the other side. Upon seeing the state Kaye is in, Frank unilaterally decides to do what he believes is the right thing by declining the lucrative out-of-court settlement offered by the Archdiocese and take the case to court.
In doing so, he hopes the truth that the hospital and the doctors truly were negligent comes to light. Feeling that this case may be a turning point in his life, Frank has a new spring in his step, enough that he attracts the attention of Laura Fischer, the two who begin a relationship.
Despite having whatever the truth is on his side, that truth which he does not know, and having an expert witness of his own, Frank has an uphill battle in that the Archdiocese has retained the services of Ed Concannon, a high-priced lawyer who has a large team of associates whose task is to help Concannon and the Archdiocese win at any cost. Concannon's task seems even easier as Judge Hoyle, the presiding judge, is already biased against Frank for taking the case to court.
Did you know Edit. Trivia Among the people in the courtroom during the dramatic closing speech is a young Bruce Willis. Goofs In the climactic courtroom scene, when Frank calls Kaitlin to the stand, Concannon is flustered and confers with one of his lawyers. We then see the lawyer leave the courtroom, presumably having been given some direction by Concannon.
Later, after Kaitlin has been questioned by Frank and cross-examined by Concannon, the lawyer returns with a book containing the case Concannon cites to get the judge to disallow the admittance of the photocopy of the hospital admission form as evidence. So there's no way the lawyer would have known to go out and find a case regarding the inadmissibility of a photocopy.
Quotes [Frank is giving his summation to the jury] Frank Galvin : You know, so much of the time we're just lost. Theoretically, I can do anything I want, limited only by my ability to express it in terms of the shot list. They each have their own strictures. The wisdom of how to understand those strictures fascinates me. What are the strictures of playwriting?
And at the end of recognizing the situation, he or she recognizes the situation, undergoes a transformation, the high becomes low, or in comedy, sometimes the low becomes high. How do you make a genre film your own? But what about this little part over here about the bunny rabbit? Why is the bunny rabbit hopping across the thing? That understanding that you cleanse just like the heroes cleanse not from your ability to manipulate the material but from your ability to understand the material.
Fuck that. How did you keep the exposition to a minimum? Smith, your son has myopia. What makes them interested is to make them catch up. Who is this guy? What crime was committed? Who was taken? Why is she important? Why are all these government people running around?
And how is he going to get her back? How do you not become lost in power? I think the answer is that you have to have the specter in front of you all the time.
There are a lot of really great models, and the military is one of them. I think this is a very pro-military movie in many ways. Have you ever deviated from your own script? In what circumstances? Oftentimes, you just get inspired. Has an actor ever invented a brilliant line that you took credit for? No, I would never take credit for something somebody else said. What have been the greatest frustrations of letting other people direct your scripts?
Well, the greatest frustrations have been having the scripts directed other than the ways in which I thought they would have gone. But when I did a script for someone else to direct, I got paid for it. When do you make yourself stop writing? At a certain point you want to do something else.
I put my name on it. Do you see a career plan? I just make them up as I go along.
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