Why wait any longer? You will find near the top of the right-hand column on this page a silver-shaded box in which we ask, Who’s the best TV/movie criminal attorney in history? The 20 nominees are drawn from both media, and from works current as well as historical. Some of the choices will be more easily recognized than others. We anticipate that there’s no great necessity to remind people of who Atticus Finch is, for instance (he’s the middle-aged lawyer-father in Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird). And fans of Scott Turow’s legal thrillers are likely to recognize Rusty Sabich, the chief deputy prosecuting attorney in Turow’s 1987 first novel, Presumed Innocent, played by Harrison Ford in the movie. Followers of the Law & Order TV series franchise should have no troubled identifying New York Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy (recently promoted to fill D.A. Arthur Branch’s shoes) on the original Law & Order series, or ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March) from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. And we’re pretty confident that savvy frequenters of The Rap Sheet will remember Horace Rumpole, the British barrister created by novelist John Mortimer and played with such aplomb by Leo McKern on the UK TV show Rumpole of the Bailey, as well as Ben Matlock, the cantankerous Georgia attorney portrayed by Andy Griffith on eight seasons of Matlock.Other figures, though, are rather more obscure. One example being small-town lawyer Paul Biegler, who was played by Jimmy Stewart in the 1959 movie adaptation of Robert Traver’s 1958 novel, Anatomy of a Murder. Another Stewart character appears on this list, too: West Virginia criminal attorney Billy Jim Hawkins, who gave his moniker to the regrettably short-lived (1973-1974) CBS-TV series Hawkins. And it might take some head scratching, especially by Americans, to recall criminal law barrister James Kavanagh of British television’s Kavanagh QC (starring John Thaw, better recognized for his role as Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse). Three other TV lawyers included in our poll and destined to try the memories of crime-fiction fans: Anthony J. Petrocelli (Barry Newman), the Harvard-educated attorney who relocated from Manhattan to Arizona with his wife in Petrocelli (1974-1976); Clinton Judd (Carl Betz), the flamboyant Texas advocate who headlined Judd, for the Defense (1967-1969); and Deputy District Attorney Paul Ryan (Robert Conrad), the no-quarter-given prosecutor in the Los Angeles-based series The D.A. (1971-1972). If you can’t place the name Harmon Cobb either, don’t feel stupid. He’s the elderly, World War II-era lawyer Walter Matthau portrayed in a trio of 1990s made-for-TV courtroom dramas (The Incident, Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore, and Incident in a Small Town). Don’t confuse him with another contestant in our survey: Harmon “Harm” Rabb (David James Elliott), the U.S. Navy captain and lawyer who led the cast in JAG (1995-2005).
Our final few criminal attorneys are drawn from both television and movies. That latter category is represented here by Jake Brigance, the star of John Grisham’s 1989 novel, A Time to Kill, portrayed so well in the 1996 feature film by Matthew McConaughey. While from the small screen we get Indiana Deputy Prosecutor Annabeth Chase (Jennifer Finnigan, shown at right)
of the 2005-2007 crime drama Close to Home; defense attorney Owen Marshall (Arthur Hill), the avuncular counselor from Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law (1971-1974); and Sebastian “Shark” Stark (James Woods), the “notorious” L.A. deputy district attorney from CBS-TV’s Shark.Of course, we wouldn’t think to conduct this poll without including Perry Mason, played so memorably in the 1957-1966 TV series by Raymond Burr. And just for the sake of fairness, we’ve decided to include in this survey Mason’s most familiar adversary, L.A. District Attorney Hamilton Burger (William Tallman). Depending on the vote count, this could be one of those rare occasions when Burger actually gets the upper hand on Perry.
Feel free to vote for one or more of your favorite characters on this list. We’ll tally the poll results and announce the winners in a future Rap Sheet posting.
And if there are other criminal lawyers from television or the movies that you would like to recommend, please tell us about them in the Comments section of this post.
READ MORE: “The Jury Has Reached a Verdict,” by J. Kingston
Pierce (The Rap Sheet).
6 comments:
Nobody from Crane, Pool, and Schmidt? Alan Shore gets my vote, played wonderfully by James Spader. Smart, funny, and while a deceptively simple show, it is a very smart dramedy. Yes, Alan Shore gets my vote.
And for literary lawyers, William Lashner's Victor Carl is wonderful.
I enjoy Alan Shore very much. But the problem is that he doesn't generally practice criminal law. His cases seem mostly to be of the civil variety. That qualification is the same reason why Grace Van Owen (L.A. Law) doesn't appear on this list.
Shore argues murder trials all the time on Boston Legal!
Actually you're right, now that I think about it. I could well have included him in this survey. Because we don't usually witness the crimes that Crane, Poole, and Schmidt wind up litigating, I always think of them as operating outside of criminal law. My error. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
You left out the best defense attorneys on tv ever--E.G. Marshall in The Defenders. My whole family watched this wonderful show together every week while it ran. We all learned a lot from it. It was full of social issues and great stories.
Interestingly, Boston Legal used footage of Shatner from the Defenders in one of their episodes where someone takes the firm hostage to settle a score with Denny Crane.
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