...And Justice for All (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 04, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Norman JewisonRelease Date(s)
1979 (August 18, 2025)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Powerhouse Films/Indicator)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: B+
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region B-locked British Blu-ray import.]
Not one of the great legal dramas but very entertaining and made by talented people behind the camera along with a fine cast spanning several generations, ...And Justice for All. (as its title card appears onscreen) is basically Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital (1971) retooled for the legal system. It has an identical absurdist black comedy approach with many of the same character types and while I’m not accusing writers Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin of appropriating its template, any writer going at it from that angle would likely have yielded similar results.
Al Pacino stars as Arthur Kirkland, a disheveled but principled Baltimore defense attorney, in jail as the story opens, on a contempt-of-court charge after punching fascist Judge Henry T. Fleming (John Forsythe). From his cell he watches as a transgendered prisoner, Ralph Agee (Robert Christian), in full drag, panic-stricken at being locked up with abusive male prisoners as guards delight in her terror.
The shaggy dog-type plotting partly revolves around Kirkland’s attempts to free hapless Jeff McCullaugh (Thomas Waites of The Thing), stopped for a broken taillight but then lost in the prison system after he is confused with another Jeff McCullaugh wanted on an arrest warrant in another state. Due to a technically, an unsympathetic Fleming orders him back in the slammer. Meanwhile, Kirkland deals with his progressively senile father Sam (Lee Strasberg); begins a romance with legal ethics committee member Gail Packer (Christine Lahti); tries to help legal partner Jay Porter (Jeffrey Tambor), who suffers from severe depression after a man he got off on a murder charger kills two children immediately after his release; and has an awkward friendship with genial but insane Judge Francis Rayford (Jack Warden).
When, to the delight of many, Judge Fleming is arrested for raping and beating a young woman, Kirkland is shocked to learn the judge wants the same man who punched him to defend him in court, albeit for political reasons. Essentially blackmailed into representing Fleming, Kirkland hopes as part of the arrangement to negotiate a new trial for McCullaugh, by this point raped and beaten in prison, and now suicidal.
Overall, ...And Justice for All. pretty accurately if melodramatically identifies all the problems in the overworked urban judicial system, how it fails badly in protecting the rights of accused poor and minorities, how people fall through its cracks, the hypocrisy of corrupt and far-right or simply mentally unstable judges, etc. Though set in Baltimore, it could be Anywhere, U.S.A.
Some of the vignettes, however, fall completely flat, notably a long set piece where nervous Nellie Kirkland agrees to a helicopter ride piloted by carefree Judge Rayford, who ends up crashing his ‘copter in knee-high water, short of the landing strip. The extravagantly indulgent monologue by Pacino during the courtroom climax—“You’re outta order! You’re outta order! This whole trial’s outta order! They’re outta order!”—is highly quotable but contextually ridiculous and anticlimactic. (No comparison with Paul Newman’s closing argument monologue in The Verdict a few years later.) Dave Grusin’s jazzy score seems very dated today and wasn’t good when it was new.
But the film’s atmosphere is authentic-feeling throughout; it’s like a proto-Law & Order, with Lahti playing a virtual warmup to her continuing character on the Special Victims Unit series. Norman Jewison’s direction is excellent, and the wide range of performers is almost astounding. Besides Lahti and Tambor, other emerging talent includes Craig T. Nelson as a prosecuting attorney, while at the other end of the spectrum are Strasberg (in his last feature), Sam Levene (ditto), and, amusingly, living in the same old folks home as Strasberg and Levene, Connie Sawyer—who’d live and act in films for another 40 years. Viewers will also be amused to find Dominic Chianese, 45 years younger, as one of Kirkland’s regular clients.
I’d seen the film a couple of times in the VHS and early cable-TV era but not since. Watching it now, I was struck by how this modest production ($4 million) and considerable hit ($33 million) was, in 1979, a typical Hollywood studio release. In those pre-CGI, Marvel Universe days, the notion of Al Pacino appearing in a legal drama was enough motivation to get the hoi polloi into movie theater seats. It’s difficult to imagine one of the major Hollywood studios fully financing anything like this today.
A Region “B” title from Indicator, ...And Justice for All. is presented in its original 1.85:1 format. Much of the film is incredibly grainy, but it accurately reflects the look of many features at the time because of the types of film stock used, the gritty style preferred by some cinematographers, the manner in which theatrical prints were run off, etc. The LPCM mono audio is fine, given its limitations, and comes with optional English subtitles.
Though it includes a new audio commentary track by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson, most of the extras are culled from earlier home video releases. They include another commentary track, this one from 2001 featuring director Jewison; Norman Jewison: The Testimony of the Director and Barry Levinson: Cross Examining the Screenwriter, video interviews from 2008; there’s an archival audio-only recording of Levinson at the BFI from 2000; a trailer; and image gallery.
The Digital Bits, alas, was sent only a check disc with no final packaging, and no booklet reportedly included featuring a new essay and archival interviews.
For such a hit-and-miss film, ...And Justice for All. is eminently watchable, especially for its wide-ranging cast. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV