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Great Court Room Speeches


Dean1700
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I was just thinking about the speech John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) gives in the movie Amistad and there are several key moments where I thought the script really excelled.

What other great court room speeches are there? Jim Garrison's summation in JFK?

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One of my favorite courtroom scenes (from a comedic perspective) is from What's Up Doc:

I couldn't find a video of my favorite part, but here's the dialogue:

Mr. Larrabee: They broke into my home.

Judge Maxwell: That's breaking and entering.

Mr. Larrabee: And they brought her with them forcibly.

Judge Maxwell: That's kidnapping.

Eunice: They tried to molest me.

Judge Maxwell: That's... unbelievable.

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Mr Smith Goes to Washington is the mother of all courtroom speeches (if this one takes place in the Capitol, it originated the whole "now-Mr-Authority-listen-to-my-layman's-rethinking-of-the-situation-let's-go-back-to-the-basics" angle that has fed the courtroom genre). It has very rarely been surpassed -- I can only think of the aforementioned Mockinbird and JFK -- but even when it is simply rehashed (Amistad) it's still strong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD-lFCsYOPs

The speech gimmick has produced some memorable of populist soul-searching and I am quite fond of them -- but it's been parodied so, so many times that barely any serious drama has been able to get away with them since the 1980s. (Amistad got away with it because it was the most interesting part of a very dull movie, which is an interesting technique to solve the problem.)

Now we get superb court dramas (I have always been extremely fond of The Rainmaker or, to a lesser extent, the courtroom sequences in Changeling) without speeches but with much less realistic suspense.

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