When older film fans lament the loss of the mid-budget movie made for grown-ups, Presumed Innocent is an obvious example of what they have in mind. The 1990 adaptation of Scott Turow’s best-selling legal thriller — starring Harrison Ford as a prosecutor charged with killing his mistress — wasn’t meant to be high art, but it was nonetheless made by and for grownups. Writer/director Alan J.
Pakula was responsible for All the President’s Men , Sophie’s Choice , Klute , and The Parallax View , among other classics. Ford was (and still is) one of our great movie stars, and the supporting cast was littered with great character actors like Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia, John Spencer, and Bonnie Bedelia. Next year, Ford will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the fourth Captain America film, but in the Nineties, there was an unofficial Legal Cinematic Universe, where A-listers like him, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and Denzel Washington would rush to headline films based on novels by the likes of Turow and John Grisham.
(Pakula directed one of each, also teaming with Roberts and Washington for a take on Grisham’s The Pelican Brief .) Between radical economic shifts in the movie industry and the rise of cable and streaming dramas, those kinds of stories — not blockbuster franchises, but also not blatant Oscar plays — now almost exclusively go straight to the small screen. And since the concept of the made-for-TV movie is all but extinct, it means that we see lots of p.