Presumed Innocent – 3.75 stars

Crisp and taut work by the reliable Alan Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men), expert enough that you don’t think about the silliness of it all until the end.

And boy is it silly.

Harrison Ford, with a bad haircut, plays a deputy prosecutor (Rusty Sabich) who has an affair with a subordinate colleague, Greta Shacchi. She is young, exciting, a risk taker, and sexually promiscuous/irresistible.

Rusty, however, is a family man with a loving Plain Jane wife (Bonnie Bedelia), a nice suburban brick house, and a lot to lose. When Scacchi is brutally murdered, Rusty is given the task of prosecuting the killer. But the evidence implicates Ford and soon, he is fighting for his life, enlisting top flight defense lawyer Sandy Stern (Raoul Julia) to defend him. Turns out Scacchi slept with pretty much everybody in the entire judiciary system. Rusty just wasn’t all that special and she was no wide-eyed ingenue, despite his own obsession with his young charge.

Then the twist. [SPOILERS ON A 34 YEAR OLD MOVIE FOLLOW]

Bedelia, sensing the younger woman’s threat to her own family, is the killer! But it’s not enough for her to eliminate the competition, she must teach Rusty a lesson, tame him. So she not only killed his lover, but, per Wikipedia, “left enough evidence for Rusty to know that she committed the crime but did not anticipate him being charged.”

How?

She secreted Rusty’s semen and put it in the dead woman!

Jiminey Christmas! That’ll teach him.

[Side note – how depressing – Rusty and wife are clearly past child-bearing age and what, they’re still using condoms? I mean, I supposed she could have saved it another way, but that seems even more diabolically comical].

Thankfully, for Rusty, Stern is a capable defense attorney, the coroner misplaced the semen sample, a mug with Rusty’s prints found at the scene was disappeared by his investigator pal and even better, Scacchi also slept with the judge (Paul Winfield), for whom she was soliciting bribes.

Case Dismissed.

Maybe one of the dumbest whodunnits ever, the flick came on the heels of Fatal Attraction, the lesson of both being, “Don’t cheat on your wife. Seriously. Don’t.”

Still, it was plenty entertaining as long as you didn’t think too much about it.

Or perhaps think about it at all.

They just released a remake of this on Apple with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the role of Ford. We tuned in for the first episode, which was not good. Gyllenhaal is too young, too emotional, and borderline oafish, and the set-up is wearyingly predictable. Plus, the key to Scott Turow’s novel and the first picture is that Rusty is kind of ordinary schlub entranced by a sexpot. Jake Gyllenhaal is no ordinary schlub and can’t play one. Worse, Gyllenhaal’s Rusty is so into the Scacchi character, even post-mortem, he’s in therapy. Which we get to see. Which sucks.

If it is any consolation, apparently, they have taken care of any import of slut-shaming the Scaachi character. Which is kind of dumb, because Scaachi wasn’t slut-shamed in the original. Rather, she was just breezily promiscuous, manipulative, ambitious, and corrupt. Per Vanity Fair, now, she “cares” for Rusty – blech – a fact I don’t have the time or inclination to confirm.