Film Studies

1. Robert Mulligan, 1962 Joel Schumacher, 1996

2. Start comparing
• Please answer the following questions in your notebooks – feel free to
also type notes up if you wish, I will not be marking these notes but they
will be needed to participate in lessons and they will be vital for your
exam.
• You have a copy of slide 4 in the folders I gave you – you will need it to
help you answer 8
• Remember internet research will help you with question 4 – BUT most
things you find will be English revision notes talking about the books – do
keep that in mind.

3. Start comparing
1. Who are the main protagonists in each film? Compare and contrast them
2. What other characters are important in the film?
3. What key themes do you think both films share? E.g. Justice & The Law
4. TKAM was set in the 1930s what was happening in America at this time?
5. Films often reflect the time they were made – TKAM was made in 1962
what was happening in America at this time?
6. Two big criminal cases in the 1990s involved O.J. Simpson and Rodney King
– find out about these cases and propose how links can be made to ATTK
7. Where are the films set? Why is this important to what occurs in the
narrative of each film?
8. In what ways to the films fulfil the genre conventions of Lawyer films? (Look
at the next slide explain how each film conforms/or not to each bullet
point)
9. How are the themes you have listed communicated to you?
10. How do the themes help to communicate massages values?

4. ‘Lawyer Film’
Conventions
• the film’s protagonist, central character, or narrator is a
lawyer;
• the film presents the lawyer engaged in professional
work;
• the lawyer’s work, his life, and his world, have been
significantly disrupted either by a client’s case or
cause, or by some feature of the lawyer’s work, or
his/her life in the law firm, or by some event in the
lawyer’s personal life;
• the ordinary world of the lawyer is subject to a
significant threat;
• the threat of confusion, dissolution, loss, uncontrolled
outrage, craziness must be addressed, and it gets
addressed by the lawyer's resort to professional and
personal resources related to the character's work as a
lawyer; and in addressing the threat, the lawyer’s work
and the meaning of that work is at stake;
• the lawyer may, during the course of the drama that
ensues from the upending of his ordinary world, be
involved in litigation that culminates in dramatic
courtroom scenes;
• the lawyer’s courtroom battles, engagements with
clients, and efforts to marshal his or her own
psychological resources encounter substantial
obstacles, and in the deployment of his/her resources,
and the inevitable failures to immediately prevail, we
find the lawyer engaged in something akin to a heroic
journey.
Atticus Finch
Jake Brigance
Bob Ewell
Freddie Lee Cobb
Professor James R. Elkins
College of Law
West Virginia University