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"Don't cry yet. You haven't even been to court." Memphis skyline, building and police car, repeated at the close after a courthouse sign ("No exit. Use other door"). Runaways, shoplifters, prostitutes, addicts, sundry "mixed-up kids" with their maiden taste of the justice system, social workers, lawyers and parents, thus Frederick Wiseman's companion piece to High School. A couple debates the difference between punishment and maltreatment when it comes to a battered toddler, elsewhere the truant sixth-grader weeps at the trick question: "Would you rather be in a home or in an institution?" A 15-year-old lad stands accused of molesting the little girl he was babysitting, a bandaged boy is asked what he did to trigger the wrath of the uncle who scalded him, a suicidal teenager is calmly assured that the stepfather who abused her did not in reality abuse her. The Christian-fellowship rehabilitation program recommends praying to the pimply drug-dealer, pious pleas don't much help him during the hearing, after all "God is a witness that cannot be sworn" (Beckett). The enigma of Rorschach tests, the threat of training school. Overseeing all of this is the soberly compassionate judge tasked with ordering complicated situations into orderly verdicts—in his way, as much a locked figure in this grid as any of the adolescent subjects. Prematurely aged visages and strangled voices, corridors and halls full of them in a search for "the ability to relate in society." A theme dear to Preminger, the matter of law pragmatically worked out in closed chambers as the least bad deal, Wiseman depicts a judicial decision from origin to delivery while the waiting juvenile trembles outside. Tears, handshakes, "we did a miracle!" Browning's outlook in "Apparent Failure" is closely related. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |