ABSTRACT
While fiction-based films that use law and lawyers are themselves a well used construct, a further heavily utilised vehicle is the film based upon a true story. Indeed, in a wider sense, historic events, which may be adapted or interpreted from pre-existing text(s), are a useful source for the cinema generally.1 For the purposes of this chapter we look at where these two issues intersect: the portrayal of true life ‘legal stories’ through the medium of legal film. This type of true life representation may take a number of forms. For example, Crowther (1989, p 3) analyses prison movies, a subject that ‘captured the imagination of movie makers and audiences from the earliest days of popular cinema’. Indeed, Crowther devotes one chapter of his text to ‘Factual fiction: true prison movies’, citing numerous films under this umbrella ranging from The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) through Unchained (1955), to more contemporary films such as Papillon (1973), McVicar (1980) and Midnight Express (1978). We have generally not considered prison movies within this work, although many of the films we have considered throughout the text, such as In the Name of the Father (1993), The Hurricane (1999) and The Green Mile (1999), have important prison scenes. In a sense prison is a very important part of the cinematic criminal legal system, particularly where there is a link to miscarriages of justice. However, in the same way that ‘cop’ films may have a relationship to law films, prison films do not necessarily contain those other ‘legal’ elements that specifically interest us. This of course brings us back round to the issues of genre and the problems of typology outlined in Chapter 1.
