First Monday in October (1981)

I had wanted to see this movie for years, it had been sold to me as a romantic comedy set in the supreme court, and it kind of is only the leads don't end up together romantically (sorry spoiler, but that's not really the point of this movie). Walter Matthau plays Associate Justice Daniel Snow, an avowed liberal, something of a grump, been on the Supreme Court for decades. Snow is at first very leery of Justice Ruth Loomis (Jill Clayburgh) a conservative jurist from Orange County, California just named as the first woman appointed to the supreme court (I think an opportunity was missed by not including Jack Lemmon in a cameo as the president who nominates Loomis). The two butt heads, but learn to respect and even become fond of one another, and in the end they uncover some corporate fraud pertaining to a case the court is considering hearing.

The movie came out in 1981 the same year that Sandra Day O'Conner became the real first woman appointed to the nations highest court, that probably helped at the box office some (a more then respectable $12+ million in early 80's money). The film is based on a play of the same name from about three years earlier by the writing team of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, best known for Inherit the Wind. First Monday in October is a solid, smart, somewhat tonally unusual film, well acted and well written, though the ending seemed a little off to me for the most part I liked it. Matthau and Clayburgh have good chemistry, and its a treat seeing them go at each other in verbal joust, the whole thing is reminiscent of a Hepburn/Tracy picture, had this been written some decades earlier those two could have stared in it together. More then a little hard to find, but it was worth waiting for. ***