David in TN and Nicholas Stix: More on The Defender

[Re: “Somebody Once Knew How to Write Speeches: Officers of the Court”;

“See One of the Greatest Courtroom Dramas Ever Performed on Live TV: An Expert Restoration of Part One of Reginald Rose’s Two-Hour Pilot The Defender, Starring a Sensational Ralph Bellamy, with a Young William Shatner, Martin Balsam, and “Steven McQueen”; and

LIVE TV RESTORATION: Studio One: The Defender, Part Two.”]


By David in TN
Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 6:12:00 P.M. EDT

I watched The Defenders when it was on. I preferred it to Perry Mason as “more realistic.”

The speech Ralph Bellamy gives is what our friend Walt Lewis told us in his book The Criminal Justice Club—a client’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant to a defense attorney.

You referred to defense attorneys defending guilty black suspects. The aggressive defense provided to every Knoxville Horror defendant is a prime example.

An unknown Steve McQueen (credited as Steven McQueen) method acted his way through it. Who would have thought 10-12 years later he would be the biggest star in the world?

N.S.: I’m sure The Defenders was more realistic than Perry Mason, but Mason fans (like my Nana) probably weren’t craving realism, and it had something The Defenders lacked—Raymond Burr, who was a force of nature.

Via Red Eddie Muller, I’ve seen Burr in a great many 1950s B pictures, and he was always great. And after Mason, he took off a year before returning to the small screen as the wheel-chair bound former police commissioner (due to an assassin’s bullet) in Ironside, at which point he could be as fat as he liked, and in which he was almost as popular. He then made Perry Mason TV movies for the rest of his life.

(I religiously watched Ironside on TV with Nana.)

One of the best things about the small screen was the way it made a home for great character actors of the “I know the face but not the name club,” who became stars on it: Burr, Walter Brennan, Buddy Ebsen, William Conrad, Karl Malden, Carroll O’Connor, Bea Arthur, Sherman Helmsley, et al. (Figures like Redd Foxx and Tim Allen don’t fit in that group, because they were stand-up comics, not character actors.)

I can recall hearing since I was a teenager that our legal system is “an adversarial system,” but there was something the patrician Walter Preston (Ralph Bellamy) said in The Defender to his son, Kenneth (William Shatner) that I’d never heard articulated, and yet I immediately appreciated it (paraphrased): Defense counsel is an officer of the court, and as such has an interest that goes beyond just winning for his client.

So, I guess David and I disagree on the relevance of a client’s guilt or innocence.

Neither Kenneth Preston nor Assistant District Attorney Francis Toohey (Martin Balsam) appreciates that distinction. Each wants to win at all costs, and their success at dragging Walter Preston down to their level is the tragedy of the pilot.

(Clearly, the prosecutor was named for an Irishman. Since Martin Balsam was the quintessential Jewish New York actor, writer Reginald Rose was remiss in not changing the character’s name.)

I want to return to this point later, but I have to remark that Rose was fond of murderers, and sought to reshape the legal system, in order to help them get off. One reviewer at IMDB.com wrote, “The Defenders: The reason I became a lawyer.”

Unfortunately, Reginald Rose succeeded.