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Each Year in Review podcast we give ourselves a homework assignment to watch a movie we are all interested in but missed. For the 1982 Year in Review, we decided to watch Sydney Lumet’s The Verdict with a stellar performance by Paul Newman.
Steve Scalici
You folks missed a key point: Newman gets the idea to check Nurse Rooney’s mailbox because HE got his telephone bill that same day and figured this nurse would get hers the same day. That’s no 1-in-a-million chance…it’s brilliant logic on a lawyer’s part.
And Laura wasn’t punched, she was slapped.
Steve Scalici
And the bar on Madison Avenue at 38th Street in NYC where Laura is slapped had a restaurant in the rear…I ate there in 1980 (2 years before the movie) and had veal piccata…it was great. That hotel was razed and rebuilt as a residential tower.
[Newman lost the Oscar to Ben Kingsley as Ghandi. That oversight bugs me to this day bc this was Newman’s best performance of his career.]
Marcus K.
I totally agree, Paul Newman was so great in the movie. We just were discussing him in The Color of Money during our 1986 Top 4 podcast. He was at his best!
Thanks for listening! 👍
Dave Harris
Thanks Steve! I thought the phone bill was mightily convenient at the time – at the time it seemed like a leap.
Thanks for listening!
Steve Scalici
My favorite line was when Jack Warden is questioning Joe Seneca in a practice session…”St. Mary’s Women’s College for Medicine…what is that, a joke or something?”
For me, the partial crescent window in his office is either emblematic of his life setting sun in the movie’s beginning or at the end, a rising sun with his court victory.