A look inside Hollywood and the movies : ANIMATED ATTORNEY : If You’re Not Tired of Lawyer Bashing Just Yet, Keep Reading

He looks like a classic melodrama villain: tall, rail-thin and sporting a waxed mustache. He speaks in mellifluous tones, drives a classic red convertible and has a capacity for dirty deeds unequaled by any recent movie scoundrel.

Meet Lickboot, the screen’s latest lawyer.

Lawyer? ‘Fraid so. The most politically incorrect legal eagle to come down the pike in decades is one of the stars of “Tom and Jerry: The Movie.”

Harvey Saferstein, the president of the State Bar of California, was just about over the furor he created when he suggested early last month that jokes about lawyers may have some link to violence directed at the profession, when he was told about Lickboot.

Wincing and laughing, he said at his Century City office: “I guess this isn’t going to help the cause . . . but it does give me one more chance to set the record straight.

“I have tried to make it clear that nobody’s out to censor anybody. There is nothing wrong with making the villain a lawyer. My big objection was commercials selling products by making lawyers the bad guys.”

The Miller Brewing Co. shelved a TV commercial showing an overweight tax attorney being roped at a rodeo after his objections. It is now back on the air, however.

Tom and Jerry producer Phil Roman is unrepentant about Lickboot. “I wouldn’t change a frame of him even if I could,” he said.

Saferstein said that at one time lawyers were heroes in movies and occasionally still are.

“Just as there are good cats and bad cats there is nothing wrong with making a lawyer the villain. However Tom Cruise played a good guy in ‘A Few Good Men’ and not a totally bad guy in ‘The Firm’ so maybe things are looking up.”