The Paper Chase Information

The Paper Chase is a 1973 film starring Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wagner, and John Houseman and directed by James Bridges. Based on John Jay Osborn, Jr.'s 1970 novel, The Paper Chase, the film tells the story of Hart, a first-year law student at Harvard Law School, and his experiences with Professor Charles Kingsfield (played by John Houseman), the brilliant, demanding contracts instructor whom he both idolizes and finds incredibly intimidating. Houseman later reprised his role in a TV series of the same name that lasted four seasons.

Cast

• Timothy Bottoms as James T. Hart
• Lindsay Wagner as Susan Fields
• John Houseman as Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr.
• Graham Beckel as Franklin Ford III
• James Naughton as Kevin Brooks
• Edward Herrmann as Thomas Craig Anderson
• Craig Richard Nelson as Willis Bell
• Bob Lydiard as O'Connor
• Lenny Baker as William Moss, Tutor
• David Clennon as Toombs
• Regina Baff as Asheley Brooks

Plot

Expecting only the basic pressures of attending Harvard Law School, a serious, hard-working student named James Hart (Timothy Bottoms), a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota, finds himself the fearful adversary of the school's most imperious, sardonic contracts professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. (John Houseman). Their relationship grows even more complex when the young man discovers that the woman he is dating, Susan Fields (Lindsay Wagner), is his professor's daughter. Graham Beckel, Edward Herrmann, and James Naughton co-star as other law students.

The film is an extremely faithful adaptation of the novel, but it adds two revelations not in the book: Hart's first name and middle initial, and the final grade that Hart got in Contract Law (James T.; and 93 points, an A; both disclosed at 1:47:45 into the film). In both the novel and the film, Hart makes a paper airplane out of his final report card, and sends it sailing into the Atlantic Ocean without looking at it.

Kingsfield's words of advice to his class: "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer."

Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr.

Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. is one of the key characters in the novel, film and television series. Kingsfield is an imperious, highly respected (and feared) professor of contracts at Harvard Law School, known for his unrelenting use of the Socratic method on his students.

Kingsfield himself was a law student at Harvard, as shown by the presence of his own class notes in the institution's archives. Kingsfield has a daughter with a fiercely independent personality.

In modern parlance, law students are quick to compare their most challenging professors to Kingsfield.

There are several possible inspirations for the character. Retired Harvard Law professor Clark Byse is said to have been the inspiration for the character's position at Harvard Law School, though not the character's personality. According to John Houseman, the inspiration for Kingsfield was crusty professor Edward "Bull" Warren, also reflected in the Boston Globe in 2004. Houseman noted that Kingsfield's behavior is actually a toned-down version of Warren's famous classroom rudeness, as enshrined in classroom lore, and recounted several examples of the professor's putdowns.

James Bridges had originally earmarked James Mason for the Kingsfield role, but Mason was unavailable. After failed attempts to cast Melvyn Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, Sir John Gielgud, Paul Scofield and other famous actors in the role, Bridges offered it to Houseman, who agreed to fly to Toronto "? where the film's interior sequences were to be shot "? for a screen test. Bridges called it "fabulous," and Houseman accepted the part, thus launching his acting career. He had seldom acted before but had known Bridges from the time he had been a stage manager in Houseman's UCLA Professional Theater Group. Houseman had then recommended Bridges as a writer for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for which Bridges wrote eighteen teleplays before establishing himself as a motion picture writer-director.

Production

Only the exterior shots of Harvard Yard were filmed on the Harvard campus; all interiors were shot on stages in Toronto; in a 1999 interview, Gordon Willis said production designer George Jenkins "reproduced the Harvard Law School in The Paper Chase beautifully." The hotel scene was filmed at the Windsor Arms Hotel.

Willis shot The Paper Chase in anamorphic format due to the "schoolroom and the graphics in the film"; he also commented on the cinematography, noting that the composition of the scenes with John Houseman and Timothy Bottoms "related to who had command of the situation. We used huge close-ups of John, and demeaning shots of Timothy. Then as the movie goes along and Timothy begins to get on top of it, you'll notice the shot sizes begin to diminish on John and begin to get a little bit bigger on Timothy—until finally they are equal partners shooting back and forth.

Reception

Vincent Canby wrote the film "goes slowly soft like a waxwork on a hot day, losing the shape and substance that at the beginning have rightfully engaged our attention"; he concludes "it takes a long while for The Paper Chase to disintegrate, and there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés." Jay Cocks called it a movie of "some incidental pleasures and insights and a great deal of silliness":

"What [writer/director] Bridges catches best is the peculiar tension of the classroom, the cool terror that can be instilled by an academic skilled in psychological warfare. His Ivy League Olympian is Kingsfield, a professor of contract law who passes along scholarship with finely tempered disdain. In an original bit of casting, Kingsfield is played by veteran theater and film producer John Houseman. It is a forbidding, superb performance, catching not only the coldness of such a man but the patrician crustiness that conceals deep and raging contempt."

John Houseman was awarded Best Supporting Actor at the 46th Academy Awards and the same award from the National Board of Review. Bridges was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, losing to William Peter Blatty, who won for adapting his novel into the screenplay for The Exorcist. Donald O. Mitchell and Larry Jost received an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound. In spite of Houseman's awards, the University of Chicago Law School calls his rendition of the Socratic method "over-the-top", telling prospective students:

"John Houseman may have won an Oscar for his impressive performance, but if anyone ever did teach a law school class like his Professor Kingsfield, no one at Chicago does today. Instead, our students discover quickly that the Socratic Method is a tool and a good one at that used to engage a large group of students in a discussion, while using probing questions to get at the heart of the subject matter. The Socratic Method is not used at Chicago to intimidate, nor to "break down" new law students, but instead for the very reason Socrates developed it: to develop critical thinking skills in students and enable them to approach the law as intellectuals."

Over three decades later, the American Film Institute included the film in its AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers list.

Quotes

"Mister Hart, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer." - Kingsfield