Law and Disorder

Sure, there are a lot of crazy people in Hollywood. But can movies seriously address the issues surrounding mental health -- particularly when it comes to the law? The Museum of Fine Arts film series "Mental Health and the Law" will take a stab at it, anyway.

Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Peter Lorre pleads insanity in M.

Details

Screens at 6 p.m. on Saturday, February 7;discussion follows. Series runs through February 28; For information and a schedule, call 713-639-7515 or visit w ww.mfah.org/films. $6.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet

Related Content

• Comment of the Day: A Race-Baiting Genius Gets His Comeuppance
  August 11, 2011
• Express Yourself: The 10 Best Deep Tracks of Madonna's Career
  February 9, 2012
• Come on Down, Casey
  July 28, 2011
• “Circa 1900: Decorative Arts at the Turn of the Century”
  March 17, 2011
• Casey Anthony: Five Reasons She Should Move To Houston
  July 18, 2011

More About

• Daniel Creson
• Peter Lorre
• Hollywood
• Mental Health
• Visual Arts

The series, whose four films look into some thorny legal and moral questions, is the brainchild of Daniel Creson of the University of Texas Health Science Center of Houston. Each screening will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by local medical, law and psychiatric experts.

Talk will center around civil liberties and bigotry after a screening of the post-World War II interracial romance Snow Falling on Cedars, and around the insanity defense after the 1931 German classic M, starring Peter Lorre as a compulsive child molester. Compulsion, based on the Leopold and Loeb teen murder case, deals with juveniles being tried as adults. And the Sean Penn-Susan Sarandon death-row drama Dead Man Walkingtackles the death penalty.

The basic question posed by this series: When the law's black-and-white reductivism butts up against the grayish realm of mental health, is there any way to balance the legitimate concerns and needs of each side? "This has been a problem since the very beginning of case law and mental health paradigms," says Creson.

Take Lorre's portrayal of the cinema's first serial killer in M. Director Fritz Lang's film brings the audience into uncomfortable intimacy with the killer's mad thoughts. His crimes are violent and unforgivable, but he claims not to remember committing them. Can he be held accountable? Should he? He falls back on that same legal defense used by everyone from Andrea Yates to Robert Durst.

"The insanity defense is rarely used in Texas, because it almost always fails," says Creson. "That fact speaks for itself." No wonder the Joker is always tried in Gotham City rather than Houston.