Marshall, the movie

We assembled a group of folks who mirrored the characters in the movie Marshall: two Jews, a black woman, and a white non-Jewish male (i.e., one of the villains). The movie gets 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and, as far as I know, no starlets had to watch Harvey Weinstein shower in order to get parts in the film.

It is a good biopic in that it starts in medias res and doesn’t try to cover the entire arc of the great man’s life. The movie covers, essentially, just one case and not one that is significant enough to merit mention on the Wikipedia entry for Thurgood Marshall.

The late 1930s cars that they polished up for the movie are alone worth the price of admission.

How accurate is the rest of the movie? TIME talks about this and there is a better 2005 article from legalaffairs.org. It seems that the case was real, but Hollywood added some drama.

Spoiler alert…

In both the movie and in real life, the Greenwich, Connecticut woman who complains of being raped was married to a rich older husband. Eleanor Strubing was born in 1908, so she was 32 years old at the time of the purported rape.

In the movie, the rich white guy, as in the typical U.S. family court today, turns out conveniently to be a wife-beater. Thus, the female victim is left with no choice but to have sex with other people when her (abusive) advertising executive husband is out of town earning the money that supports her lavish household. In the historical record there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the surrounded-by-servants woman was beaten up by anyone. And, in fact, the wife remained married to the purported abuser until his death in 1961.

In the movie, the black chauffeur left a wife and two children 1000+ miles away. In real life, the accused rapist was living with a common-law wife in the attic above the rape victim’s bedroom.

Compared to the historical record, the movie amps up the dramatic tension of the lawsuit. The accused rapist denies everything. In real life, the accused chauffeur had the same story throughout the litigation: he had sex with the married woman, but it was consensual.

In the movie, the accused rapist is terrified of being lynched if he became known that he had sex with a white woman. There is no suggestion in the historical record that he was concerned about people finding out about interracial intimacy. (i.e., the movie stages a virtue contest for us between Americans of the World War I generation and Americans today; yay for us because we turn out to be more virtuous!)

In the movie, the lawyers defending the accused rapist are physically attacked by local thugs. This doesn’t seem to correspond to anything in the historical record. Between the rich white guy beating up his wife and the thugs beating up the defense lawyers, Hollywood seems to have added a lot of violence. What does it say about us that a movie can’t be financially successful unless there is violence?

Conclusion: Worth seeing for the acting, period costumes and sets, etc. The dialog is anachronistic (e.g., people talk about “making a difference”) and the plot is only loosely based on a true story. We all thought it was worth going out, though, and we made the trip to the theater in a Tesla X, so we saved the planet!