Ban the ’Bird?

This item from The Toronto Star is just sad:

The classic literary novel To Kill a Mockingbird is being pulled from the Grade 10 English course at a Brampton [Ontario] high school after a parent complained about the use of a racial epithet in the book.

Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which challenges racial injustice in America’s Deep South, will be removed from curriculum at St. Edmund Campion Secondary School following a lone complaint from a parent whose child will be in Grade 10 this September.

Although I’d seen a couple of stage versions over the years and, of course, the 1962 movie, I didn’t get around to reading Harper Lee’s acclaimed novel until this year. It was worth the wait: To Kill a Mockingbird is a subtly stunning work of fiction. If you haven’t already read the book, add it to your must-read list. And if there’s a teenager in your life, perhaps you should buy another copy for him or her, if only to protest that idiotic St. Edmund Campion Secondary School parent who would ban a contemporary masterwork through their own lack of intellect and understanding.

READ MORE: “Mockingbird Debate Continues,” by Linda L. Richards (January Magazine).

The Jury Has Reached a Verdict

“Who’s the best TV/movie criminal attorney in history?” That was the question posed in The Rap Sheet’s third and latest survey, and over the last two weeks readers responded in fairly great numbers. In fact, more people participated in this poll than made their opinions known in our previous blog surveys about favorite TV cops and private eyes and long-missing crime novelists. With 329 votes cast, the top five picks are:

1. Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird (Gregory Peck)--63 votes
2. Perry Mason, Perry Mason (Raymond Burr)--54 votes
3. Horace Rumpole, Rumpole of the Bailey (Leo McKern)--39 votes
4. Alexandra Cabot, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (Stephanie March)--19 votes
5. Jack McCoy, Law & Order (Sam Waterston)--18 votes

To be frank, I had expected Erle Stanley Gardner’s renowned trial advocate, Mason, to lead this pack. However, Finch’s win might have been predicted. After all, as Wikipedia reminds us, in 2003 the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch as “the #1 Greatest Hero of American film”; and in 2002, “a panel of 55 authors, literary agents, editors, and actors” assembled by the now-defunct Book Magazine, rated Finch #7 on its rundown of the “100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900” (right behind Sherlock Holmes). Obviously, Rap Sheet readers have good taste. That’s proven true, as well, by the fact that the late McKern’s Rumpole, an eccentric British barrister who would probably not appeal to today’s younger audience of action-movie junkies, scored so high.

That New York Assistant District Attorney Cabot (who actually bowed out of Law & Order: SVU back in 2003, only to reappear in the short-lived Conviction three years later) and newly promoted District Attorney McCoy occupy the fourth and fifth positions in this poll probably owes both to the brilliance of the actors portraying them and to the general, continuing popularity of creator-executive producer Dick Wolf’s ratings-grabbling series franchise.

More surprising are the characters--all of them TV figures--who fill the next four spots on this survey. Coming in at #6 is Tony Petrocelli, the Harvard-educated lawyer (portrayed by Barry Newman) who, in Petrocelli, left the higher-paying playing field of Manhattan to take up a very different sort of practice in the fictional cow town of San Remo, Arizona. Petrocelli held a place on NBC’s TV schedule for only two years (1974-1976), but, as evidenced by our poll, its protagonist is still fondly remembered. (Petrocelli received 17 votes.) The same goes for #7 on our list: Los Angeles District Attorney Hamilton Burger (William Tallman), who was Perry Mason’s customary adversary on the 1957-1966 CBS TV series. He walked away with 16 votes in our poll. Which, it should be noted, is just one more than was received by Billy Jim Hawkins, the deceptively bright West Virginia criminal attorney portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in the CBS-TV series Hawkins (1973-1974). At #8, Hawkins barely squeaked ahead of Owen Marshall (Arthur Hill), the avuncular counselor from Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law (1971-1974); he scored 14 votes.

Capturing the last spot on our top 10: Paul Biegler, the better-than-able defense attorney (also played by Stewart) in the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder. He won 12 votes.

A full table of the results from this poll can be found here.

As our readers pointed out, we forgot at least two criminal attorneys who might have made good showings in this survey: Alan Shore (James Spader), the offbeat, womanizing, but still somehow endearing go-to lawyer lead from ABC-TV’s very popular series Boston Legal; and the fondly remembered--if not quite so broadly recalled--Lawrence Preston (E.G. Marshall) from The Defenders (1961-1965), a CBS series about a father-son team of attorneys who took on definably hopeless cases. (Robert Reed, later of The Brady Bunch, played the junior Preston.) There’s one other character, as well, who I can hardly believe I forgot to include in this poll’s choices: Theodore “Ted” Hoffman (Daniel Benzali) from the 1995-1996 first season of Steven Bochco’s unconventional Murder One. Quietly powerful and resolutely ethical, if not brimming with human warmth, Hoffman was exactly the sort of advocate one wanted on his or her side, when there seemed no hope in sight of a favorable verdict. So terrific was Benzali in that first season, that I was astounded to see him replaced by Anthony LaPaglia in season two.

There’s no way of knowing whether any of these additional candidates might have swayed the voting in The Rap Sheet’s recent poll. But I suspect they, too, would have found many admirers among our readers. Maybe next time.

Courting Public Opinion

Yesterday’s birthday tribute to Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of celebrated fictional lawyer-detective Perry Mason, got us to thinking: In the past, The Rap Sheet has asked readers about their favorite TV police detectives and private eyes, but we’ve never inquired as to your favorite attorneys from screens large and small.

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).