A look at Hollywood and the movies : THE LEGAL FILE : Whiplash Willie Gets a Makeover : By JANE GALBRAITH

Hollywood movies do not view the legal profession very kindly. With “The Firm,” perhaps a turnaround is in the works.

At least one lawyer in Paramount Pictures’ upcoming adaptation of John Grisham’s best-sellingnovel “The Firm” is a good guy: the movie’s protagonist, Mitch McDeere, played by Tom Cruise. The rest, working at a fictional Memphis law firm, are controlled by the Mafia.

This step-in-the-right-direction has prompted the National Law Journal to assess that “The Firm” at least won’t further hurt the image of attorneys in the minds of moviegoers “because the public hates (attorneys) anyway.”

The journal is mindful that its lawyer-readers are also some of the very same people who have made Grisham, himself a lawyer, a best-selling author, even though most of the fictional attorneys he writes about act like money-grubbing scum, drunks, womanizers and worse.

Paramount Pictures has taken out a full-page ad for its big summer picture in the trade publication and, not surprisingly, it is the National Law Journal that Cruise reads as an aspiring partner-to-be on his new job as law associate.

“While I’m no fan of Grisham, one of the things that I like about him is his cynical attitude toward lawyers,” U.S. Attorney-turned-New Yorker writer Jeffrey Ross Tobin is quoted as saying in the current issue of the Journal.

Other left-handed compliments for “The Firm” take into account that young upstart McDeere works impossibly longer hours than most new grads out of law school and that the picture may also help demystify corporate law culture.

But the fact there’s even one good guy-lawyer is something of an improvement from the spate of recent Hollywood movies that feature attorney characters who would face disbarment under real-life circumstances.

In the current release “Guilty as Sin,” attorney Rebecca De Mornay is terrorized by client Don Johnson and, instead of trying to get him off, plants bogus evidence intended to frame him instead. And the over-eager lawyer representing the interests of the “Jurassic Park” developers at the expense of safety concerns for future park visitors meets an early demise--he’s swallowed whole by a hungry T. rex .

Attorneys’ love-hate relationship with Grisham-style lawyers presumably will continue in two future Hollywood adaptations of his books, “The Pelican Brief” and “The Client.”

At least in “The Client” there are two role models to choose from: a do-good juvenile attorney and her mentor-friend, the local juvenile court judge.

In “The Pelican Brief,” however, the one, smart, female Tulane University law student who survives while a couple of her non-corrupt lawyer-friends do not, is forced to share the limelight with someone representing that other, lofty profession everyone loves to dump on: journalism. To be exact--a reporter for the Washington Post.