Review of First Monday in October (1981) by Luciano D — 11 Sep 2010

I respectfully submit that this film should be vacated and remanded.

The basic idea may seem promising, but the filmmakers did not play with it enough. There is a scene where Justice Snow refuses to pick up a phone call and when Chief Justice asks "How can you let it ring?" Snow answers, "The phone has no Constitutional right to be picked up." I was sure that the reply would be: "But the callers have right for Due Process, don't they? The Due Process with a ringing phone would be to pick it up!" I was wrong. Chief Justice could not produce any counter-argument. Justice Snow's arguments are impenetrable to anybody save for Justice Loomis.

Justice Loomis' prudish but incredibly flowery opinions simply cannot be shaken in this film, no matter how defectively they are formulated. She keeps going on and on about "Moral Standards" and "Decency! and yet she is unable to give any logical arguments to support her extremist positions (e.g. she is quite open to censorship).

If only this film was written as an intellectual battle between two great minds! It surely would have been an extraordinary achievement. However, what we are presented with here is a series of fatuous personal quarrels.