Sabich is like the traditional Hitchcock hero: not guilty of the crime he is accused of but guilty of other moral malfeasance. Carolyn's murderer has an excellent motive both for killing her and for making sure Sabich, Carolyn's sometime lover, is accused of the crime. The filmmakers also fail to cure the central defect of the novel's plotting. The scruffy atmosphere of the book, the sense of lively, crooked, occasionally desperate human scurryings along marbled halls that have not been cleaned in years, and are probably lined by spittoons, is lost in the film's elegant shadows. The burnished glow of the cinematography imparts a portentous, not to say pretentious, air to the halls of justice where much of the film's most significant action occurs. Whatever its other virtues, Presumed Innocent was basically a page turner the movie is a slow burner.

In converting the story of Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford), a public prosecutor forced by circumstantial evidence and local political imperatives to stand trial for the murder of Carolyn Polhemus (Greta Scacchi), an upper-slutty colleague, Pakula seems overawed by the book's critical and popular success. Yet conscientiously as this movie has been made, it does not work as well as the novel did or as some of Pakula's other films have.Ĭonscientiousness may, indeed, be part of the problem. Klute, The Parallax View and All the President's Men are all marvelously intricate visions in which otherwise quite knowing individuals are slowly forced to the awareness that they are being victimized - no, terrorized - by other people's unscrupulous rage to maintain respectable order at any cost. The book is also the kind of material Alan J. The itchy authenticity with which he showed how even an expert in the legal system can be caught up in one of its patented narratives of false accusation made his novel Presumed Innocent a best seller. Law according to Scott Turow is pretty much as we imagine it in our worst-case scenarios, which are, of course, essentially indistinguishable from our paranoid nightmares.

Presumed innocent book review