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Title: Presumed Innocent (1990)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Harrison Ford | ... | Rusty Sabich | |
| Brian Dennehy | ... | Raymond Horgan | |
| Raul Julia | ... | Sandy Stern | |
| Bonnie Bedelia | ... | Barbara Sabich | |
| Paul Winfield | ... | Judge Larren Lyttle | |
| Greta Scacchi | ... | Carolyn Polhemus | |
| John Spencer | ... | Detective Dan Lipranzer | |
| Joe Grifasi | ... | Tommy Molto | |
| Tom Mardirosian | ... | Nico Della Guardia | |
| Anna Maria Horsford | ... | Eugenia | |
| Sab Shimono | ... | 'Painless' Kumagai | |
| Bradley Whitford | ... | Jamie Kemp | |
| Christine Estabrook | ... | Lydia 'Mac' MacDougall | |
| Michael Tolan | ... | Mr. Polhemus | |
 |
Madison Arnold | ... | Sergeant Lionel Kenneally |
Rozat Sabich - Rusty to most that know him, even in formal circumstances - is the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for Kindle County, Illinois. His wife, Barbara Sabich, has been struggling with focus on completing her Ph.D. dissertation in Mathemetics - a thus far ten year process - she who nonetheless is applying for a college teaching position. They are generally in a loving, supportive marriage, Barbara who seems to have gotten over Rusty's infidelity with his colleague Carolyn Polhemus, an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney. Carolyn is ambitious, she who, in part, used Rusty to try and climb up the ladder. Barbara will still throw the issue of Carolyn in his face whenever there are problems between the two. Rusty and Carolyn's affair is unknown to others in their personal and professional circles. Rusty is handed the most personal case of his career when his boss and mentor, Chief Prosecuting Attorney Raymond Horgan, assigns him the case to discover who killed Carolyn, her dead body... Written by Huggo
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It used to be doctors that boasted about the literary artists that rose from their ranks -- William Carlos Williams, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Michael Crighton, Frank Slaughter. (Frank Slaughter?) Now it's coming to be lawyers. Back in 1959, "Anatomy of a Murder" was a lonely best seller. Lately there has been a cascade of more or less autobiographical books about lawyers from the likes of Turow and Gresham. And the movies inevitably follow the bucks, I mean the books.
I wish Turow had used a little more imagination in cooking up the names for his characters, especially since they seem designed to represent a little microcosm of ethnic identities. I guess Sabich is properly Polish, and Horgan irretrievably Irish, and lawyer Stern can be a Jewish lawyer who looks and speaks like a Puerto Rican. Polhemus may be a little unusual but not everyone can claim a hyphenized national allegiance.
The attempt is weak with the Italian characters, though. Molto? Too much for me to believe. And Della Guardia is plumb wrong. La Guardia is an occupational name, meaning "guard," pretty much like "Steward" in English. But "de la" indicates a place name, like "von" in German or "van" in Dutch. "Della" and "Guardia" are a mismatched couple. "From the guard"? It would be like an Italian novelist making up a character name like "Cookson" or "Bakerson." The animal doesn't exist.
Oh -- the movie? It's okay. It rolls along in its sexy, suspenseful, stereotypical way, an efficient example of how to reconstruct in an unidentifiable manner a story already familiar from "The Big Clock" and "No Way Out" and "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and a couple of others.
Harrison Ford mopes efficiently through his part. I like Brian Dennehy a lot better as a nice guy than a heavy. Raul Julia is reassuring, almost comforting, in the role of Ford's defense counsel. If I were to be tried for murder I would want him and his underplayed confidence and his big dark gentle eyes to represent me rather than the skulky guilty-looking Ford. Bonny Bedelia is okay. Greta Scacchi is a knockout, so to speak, so it's a double tragedy when she gets her head bashed in. John Spencer is always reliable -- or was. He died a month ago. Too bad, a reliable New Jerseyish everyman.
It's worth catching but not worth commenting further on.