Museum Exhibits Ads for Films About Lawyers : Movie Posters Get a Change of Venue

Judging by his collection of movie posters, law and history Prof. Renard Strickland says the jury is still out on how society views the legal profession. Some lawyers are good; some are bad and some are a little goofy.

Strickland’s evidence was recently on exhibit at the Philbrook Museum of Art in a colorful display of posters advertising movies about lawyers.

Some of the movies are about lawyers as wholeheartedly decent as Gregory Peck was in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Some of the lawyers represented are as lowdown as Louis Calhern was in “The Asphalt Jungle.”

Some are brave, as Jimmy Stewart was when he went up against Lee Marvin in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Marx Movie

Some are as loony as Groucho Marx, who made a circus of the legal profession as a lawyer in “A Day at the Circus.”

Each of those movies bears some evidence of what people think about lawyers, Strickland says.

“I think, on the whole, lawyers tend to be perceived on film the same as they are perceived in society,” he says.

Strickland, a 1958 graduate of Muskogee’s Central High School, is dean of the Law School at Southern Illinois University. Before that, he taught law and history at the University of Tulsa from 1976 to 1985.

He began collecting movie posters about five years ago, he says.

“I got the first of these posters at the Tulsa Flea Market on a Saturday morning,” Strickland says.

Now, his collection numbers in the hundreds--too many to hang all at once in the museum.

Slide Show

Ed Wade, the Philbrook’s curator, reached a compromise. Wade hung 32 of the posters. Also, he set up a slide show of 120 others.

The Philbrook showed the posters in conjunction with the Armand Hammer Daumier Collection, an exhibit of drawings by the 19th-Century French caricaturist Honore Daumier.

Daumier, who is credited as the originator of the “editorial cartoon,” often criticized the French legal system in his work, lampooning lawyers in a famous set of lithographs that are part of the Hammer collection.

Wade says the posters were used to draw people who might not normally visit an art exhibit.

“We all watch movies, and it’s something that breaks down the scariness of going to a fine arts exhibit,” he says.

But the posters were there to make a serious case too, as testimony of “how our attitudes have changed over the past 50 years,” Wade says.

Saving Heroines

The 1920s lawyer was “suave and dashing,” generally called upon to save the rich heroine from an embarrassing scandal, he says.

A decade later, in “I Am the Law,” it took a tough guy like Edward G. Robinson to stay honest in the midst of a corrupt system.

The 1940s and ‘50s leaned heavily toward six-gun justice the way it was dealt by Hopalong Cassady, but that gave way to the courtroom drama of “Compulsion.”

“Compulsion” was about the trial of a pair of young “thrill killers,” with Orson Welles as an attorney. It set the tone for the movies about the legal system in the 1960s and ‘70s, Wade says--lawyers being forced to deal with some threat of chaos in society.

No wonder the lawyer Paul Newman played in “The Verdict” (1982) was feeling down and out, contrasted with the silk-smooth lawyer he played in “The Young Philadelphians” (1959).

TV Series

Strickland is putting together a public television series, “Magic Mirror: Law and the American Spirit,” and is writing a book on the history of cinema.

“I discovered there is a tremendous body of film footage on lawyers,” he says. “I think lawyers establish clearly that film is a mirror to society.”

Which movies reflect best on the legal profession?

Strickland testified to his favorites: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “Adam’s Rib.”

“Adam’s Rib” starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as husband-wife lawyers on opposite sides of the same case. Strickland cited “Kramer vs. Kramer,” 1979’s Oscar winner as best picture.

“It was the only Oscar-winning film that had a lawsuit for its title,” he says.