The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 20-26
The Verdict (1982)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Neither subtle nor simplistic, Lumet and screenwriter David Mamet invariably recognize the human side of corruption and criminality as well as redemption. In The Verdict, they combine the Higgins-esque backslapping duplicity and the blue-collar rectitude (think Spotlight) of the Boston Irish warp to tell a satisfyingly believable—and sordid—courtroom underdog story. Paul Newman is in his gloriously toxic mode as drunken ambulance-chaser Frank Galvin, who takes on the Catholic Church, two eminent doctors on staff at an archdiocese-run hospital, and their imperiously amoral lawyer (James Mason at his most lacertilian) on behalf of a young woman whose botched delivery lost her baby and made her a vegetable. Charlotte Rampling, playing a waifish, enigmatic femme fatale, does as much with those hooded green eyes and that incongruously deep voice in this film as she does in her brilliantly calibrated performance in the current 45 Years to convey both potency and vulnerability, along with the pain of expediency. In support, Jack Warden and Lindsay Crouse are pitch-perfect as Galvin’s world-weary guru and a tortured nurse, respectively. A vintage Lumet morality tale. Jonathan Stevenson (January 22-24, 11am at IFC Center’s Rampling tribute)