Watched "Conviction" last night, and OMIGOSH! It was like a great Brecht play. Did anyone else see it?

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I never have caught it before, owing to poor reviews, but I was organizing some DVDs and tapes and it came on and I got interested. A two-hour season finale, the rather standard Part I was a police/prosecutor procedural on indicting this rapist, Part II was the trial. All very standard, but as Part I was so well done... well...
So they got the guy, a cocky black gansta type, up on the stand and then an "accomplice" of his -- falsely accused, as it happens, a total innocent distraught over losing his lady and his son to the malign forces of the prosecutor's office, but present as a witness -- totally unexpectedly rips a gun off a guard, disarms the others, and the pair take over the courtroom.
With all of that accomplished very efficiently, here's where it gets scary. The next scene opens and the accused rapist is in the judge's robes and in total command of the some 20 people left in the courtroom, and he stages a trial of the prosecutors who put him in chains and who falsely accused his friend. He struts, and he threatens, and he mocks, and he makes the D.A.'s staff grill the others -- and when the phone rings, a call from the tactical squad that's gathered outside, he says, "Don't you know we got a trial going on in here? F*uck off!"
And so it goes, to a bloody but highly satisfactory denoument.
Talk about gripping television.
But where were the critics telling us to watch this masterpiece?
The specific Brecht play this must have / could have been drawn from is The Caucasian Chalk Circle, where the "narrator", previously off to the side, becomes so disgusted at the goings-on on stage that at the beginning of Act III he barges into the action, rips a cloth off one of the characters, wraps it around his shoulders and becomes... the judge!
It's a displacement of normal P.O.V. that Brecht specialized in, but which one rarely encounters on television or in the movies.
And I can't get it out of my head.
clark
PS Any sentiment here for a TV Forum? A Theatre Forum?

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Topic - Watched "Conviction" last night, and OMIGOSH! It was like a great Brecht play. Did anyone else see it? - clarkjohnsen 08:21:19 05/20/06 (0)

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