One delight of having a large-screen TV and a cupboard full of DVDs is the ability to watch what you want WHEN you want. On a recent evening, there was great tension in my household, with a lot riding on a key phone call the following morning. (Thankfully, it all worked out.) It had been a miserably rainy day and evening, and we were definitely in need of some cheer. That’s when I pulled out a disk containing one of my all-time favorite funny movies: 1992’s My Cousin Vinny.
My Cousin Vinny is beloved by the legal profession because its essential scenes take place in a court of law where a novice attorney pleads a case before an old-school judge who’s a stickler for correct behavior. (I’m told the film is an accurate depiction of courtroom procedure and trial strategy.) Much of the humor comes from a clash of opposites, and from the very different (and often incorrect) assumptions we all make about the brash New Yawker and the Southern bumpkin. Two nice young men from the Big Apple, Bill Gambini and Stan Rothenstein, are driving Bill’s mint-green 1964 Buick Skylark convertible through the Deep South en route to grad school at UCLA. In a rural town, they stop at the Sack of Suds to purchase some snack food. But shortly thereafter they find themselves stopped by the local cops and arrested. Though at first Bill believes the cops have gotten wind of the can of tuna fish he accidentally forgot to pay for, something far more serious is afoot. It seems the Sack of Suds clerk has just been murdered during a hold-up by someone driving a mint-green Sixties-era convertible, and the two are the prime suspects. They’re innocent, of course, but what they desperately need is a attorney who can plead their case in a town full of strangers.
Enter Vinny Gambini (the irreplaceable Joe Pesci), Bill’s uncle and a former garage mechanic who’s just passed the New York bar on his sixth try. Riding shotgun in his souped-up Cadillac is his plain-spoken fiancée, Mona Lisa Vito. Newcomer Marissa Tomei won an Oscar for this hilarious role: she wants to be helpful, because she’s been promised they’ll finally marry after he wins his first-ever case. But Vinny, who knows nothing about courtroom protocol, immediately alienates the very staid Judge Chamberlain Haller, a Yale Law School graduate who demands that the dignity of the legal system be treated with respect. Judge Haller is played by the towering Fred Gwynne, a frequent TV presence in sitcoms like Car 54, Where Are You? Sadly, he died shortly after the film’s release, but this role—requiring him to be cunning yet fair-minded, indignant but oozing Southern charm—was surely the highlight of his career.
Vinny’s struggles—to come up with a court-worthy suit of clothing, to get a good night’s sleep in a town that rises before dawn, to placate his fiancée’s growing petulance—are highly comic. At first, as more and more details are brought forward, the task seems hopeless. But as the trial proceeds his native smarts are suddenly on display, particularly as he figures out how to cross-examine well-meaning eyewitnesses who are too quick to see the out-of-towners as murderers. Eventually, Vinny emerges victorious, but not without the help of someone who turns out to be far more knowledgeable than we would have guessed.
It's nice indeed to see a film about a culture clash in which no one on screen is a bad guy. And it’s even nicer when we find ourselves laughing all the way.
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