Macchio and Whitfield play William Gambini and Stanley Rothenstein, two young New Yorkers who are arrested in Alabama and put on trial for a murder they did not commit. Unable to afford a lawyer, they are defended by Gambini's cousin Vinny Gambini (Pesci), newly admitted to the bar, who arrives with his fiancée, Mona Lisa Vito (Tomei). The clash between the brash Italian-American New Yorkers and the more reserved Southern townspeople[3] provides much of the film's humor. The principal location of filming was Monticello, Georgia.[4]
My Cousin Vinny was a critical and financial success, with Pesci, Gwynne, Macchio and Tomei praised for their performances. Tomei won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Attorneys have also lauded the film for its accurate depiction of criminal procedure and trial strategy.
Plot
While driving through Alabama, New York college students Bill Gambini and Stan Rothenstein stop at a convenience store, during which Bill accidentally shoplifts a can of tuna. After they leave, the boys are pulled over and arrested as the shopkeeper has been found robbed and murdered. At the police station, Bill assumes he has been arrested for shoplifting and confesses to being responsible, resulting in him being charged with first-degree murder and Stan as an accessory. Unable to afford a private lawyer, Bill asks for help from his cousin Vinny Gambini, a personal injury lawyer from Brooklyn, who agrees to help the boys. However, they are unaware that Vinny has only just passed the bar to become a lawyer, after multiple failed attempts, and has no trial experience. Vinny promptly arrives in Alabama with his fiancée Mona Lisa Vito.
Vinny fools the trial judge, Chamberlain Haller, into believing he is an experienced New York lawyer who works under the alias Jerry Callo. Haller repeatedly holds Vinny in contempt for his unprofessional attire, attitude, and ignorance of courtroom decorum, resulting in brief stints in jail. The prosecuting district attorney, Jim Trotter III, presents a strong—although circumstantial—case against the boys, offering multiple witnesses to their involvement in the murder. Bill and Stan become concerned when Vinny declines to cross-examine the witnesses during the preliminary hearing, resulting in Stan firing Vinny and hiring the public defender, John Gibbons.
Vinny's inexperience with the legal system leads him to try to trick Trotter into sharing his evidence until Lisa tells Vinny that he legally can access the prosecution's evidence and prompts him to interview the witnesses, which he does. She grows frustrated with Vinny as he promised several years earlier that they would get married when he wins his first case and is worried he never will. Vinny is also eager to prove himself to his mentor Judge Malloy, who convinced him to go into law.
During the trial, Gibbons's nerves and severe stutter only further damage Stan's defense. Meanwhile, Vinny uses an aggressive but perceptive questioning style to discredit Trotter's witnesses, using his knowledge of the cooking time of grits to force one to admit that his perception of when the crime occurred is inaccurate, and the others by questioning their ability to positively identify the suspects due to obstructions in their sightline and impaired vision. Stan promptly rehires Vinny to defend him.
The next day, Trotter produces a surprise witness, FBI analyst George Wilbur, who testifies that tire markings at the crime scene match those on the boys' 1964 Buick Skylark, although Vinny makes him admit that the tires are the most used in America. Haller orders a lunch recess and denies Vinny's request for a full day's continuance to properly counter Wilbur's testimony. Stressed by lack of sleep, Haller's hostility, low funds, and the prospect of losing the case, Vinny lashes out at Lisa's efforts to help, but realizes that one of the photos she has taken during their stay, showing the tire marks at the scene, may help the case.
After asking the local sheriff for a favor, Vinny drags an angry Lisa into court to testify as an expert witness as she and her family have worked as mechanics and she has an encyclopedic knowledge of cars. Looking at the photo, Lisa realizes that only the 1963 Pontiac Tempest, which resembles a Buick Skylark, could have made the tire tracks, thanks to its independent rear suspension and Positraction. Vinny recalls Wilbur who confirms this information, discrediting his own testimony. The sheriff arrives and testifies that, following Vinny's request, he identified two men fitting Bill's and Stan's descriptions who have been arrested in Georgia for driving a stolen Pontiac Tempest and were in possession of a gun matching the murder weapon. His case dismantled, Trotter requests that Haller dismiss all charges. Bill, Stan, the Sheriff, Trotter, and Haller congratulate Vinny on his success. Driving away, Lisa admits that she had Judge Malloy help convince Haller of Jerry Callo's "successful" legal career, before she and Vinny bicker about their wedding plans.
Screenwriter Dale Launer came up with the idea for My Cousin Vinny as a college student, after hearing about a lawyer who had finally passed the bar after their 13th attempt. Launer thought it would be funny to have someone traveling through the Southern United States run into legal trouble and end up being represented by that type of lawyer.[5] Launer did not develop the concept until after he had written a few successful screenplays, including Ruthless People and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. He was inspired by the comedy of Sam Kinison, particularly his approach with hecklers, in developing Vinny, and he based the relationship between Vinny and his fiancée on two dating friends who would argue frequently.[5] Launer also took a road trip through the South in which he got stuck in the mud and had repairs to fix his car, which became part of the script. He met an assistant district attorney who became the basis of the character of Jim Trotter, including casting Lane Smith for the role.[5] He spent several sessions with an attorney to review the process of legal trials, and learned from him that much of criminal court proceedings are not taught in law school but come from practice, which served well for Vinny's character.[5]
For casting, the studio originally wanted Andrew Dice Clay for Vinny, but this did not work out. Other considerations included Danny DeVito, Peter Falk, Robert De Niro, and Jim Belushi, but save for De Niro and DeVito, none of these were the Italian American they were looking for. They eventually cast Joe Pesci, who had just finished Lethal Weapon 2, was finishing filming in Goodfellas, and was an ideal choice for the role.[5] For Mona Lisa, they had approached Lorraine Bracco and Carole Davis, but both had passed on the role. Director Jonathan Lynn auditioned several other actresses, but found Marisa Tomei when he was invited to the set of the movie Oscar by John Landis, where Tomei had a minor part. While Fox wanted an actress with more fame, they agreed to Tomei.[5]Ben Stiller and Will Smith were considered for the roles of Bill and Stan but, in both cases, there was concern related to the incarceration of a Jewish and Black person in the South, and Ralph Macchio and Mitchell Whitfield were hired instead.[5]
With a budget of $11 million, My Cousin Vinny was more successful than anticipated, grossing $52,929,168 domestically and $11,159,384 internationally, bringing its overall worldwide total to $64,088,552.[2]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 85%, based on 61 reviews. The site's consensus reads, "The deft comic interplay between Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei helps to elevate My Cousin Vinny's predictable script, and the result is a sharp, hilarious courtroom comedy."[7] On Metacritic the film has a score of 68 out of 100 based on reviews from 23 critics.[8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[9]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave My Cousin Vinny 2.5 stars out of a possible 4. He declared that despite Macchio's co-star billing, the actor was given little to do, and the film seemed adrift until "lightning strikes" with the final courtroom scenes, when Gwynne, Pesci, and Tomei all gave humorous performances.[10] Ebert's television partner, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, liked the film more, singling out Dale Launer's screenplay for praise.[11]
Despite the good-but-not-great initial reviews, My Cousin Vinny is generally considered to have held up as one of the most remembered and watched movies of the 1990s. The movie performed well in home video sales and rentals (originally VHS, and eventually DVD) and received frequent play on cable television. The film's catchier quotes became well known as well.[15]
One element that aged somewhat awkwardly was Austin Pendleton's role as a stuttering and ineffective public defender. Pendleton suffered from stuttering in his childhood before overcoming it; during filming he did not enjoy dredging up bad memories from his teenage years and, afterward, he was not pleased to be publicly associated with the character. In a 2022 interview, he said that he felt the role nearly ended his career, and, after receiving angry letters from stutterers, said he regretted agreeing to perform the role at all. Casting director David Rubin said that Pendleton's scenes, while funny, probably would have been changed significantly in a newer movie.[15]
Legal accuracy
The film's director, Jonathan Lynn, has an English law degree from the University of Cambridge,[16] and lawyers have praised the accuracy of My Cousin Vinny's depiction of courtroom procedure and trial strategy,[17] with one stating that "[t]he movie is close to reality even in its details. Part of why the film has such staying power among lawyers is because, unlike, say, A Few Good Men, everything that happens in the movie could happen—and often does happen—at trial".[18] One legal textbook discusses the film in detail as an "entertaining [and] extremely helpful introduction to the art of presenting expert witnesses at trial for both beginning experts and litigators";[19] furthermore, criminal defenders, law professors, and other lawyers use the film to demonstrate rules of evidence, voir dire, relevance, and cross examination.[20][17][21][22]
particularly rich in practice tips: how a criminal defense lawyer must stand his ground against a hostile judge, even at the cost of exasperating the judge, because the lawyer's primary audience is the jury, not the judge; how cross-examination on peripheral matters can sow serious doubts about a witness's credibility; how props can be used effectively in cross-examination (the tape measure that demolishes one of the prosecution's eyewitnesses); how to voir dire, examine, and cross-examine expert witnesses; the importance of the Brady doctrine ... how to dress for a trial; contrasting methods of conducting a jury trial; and more.
In "Ten Things Every Trial Lawyer Could Learn From Vincent La Guardia Gambini", federal judge Joseph F. Anderson praised Vinny's courtroom methods as "a textbook example" of Irving Younger's "Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination", and wrote that the film predicted the U.S. Supreme Court's 1999 decision Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael and its holding regarding the Daubert standard, which governs when expert witnesses can testify in U.S. federal trials. He concluded that Lynn and scriptwriter Dale Launer "have given our profession a wonderful teaching tool while producing a gem of a movie that gives the public at large renewed faith in the common law trial and the adversarial system as the best way to determine the truth and achieve justice".[24] In a 2019 decision, Merrick Garland, then the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, wrote "In 1992, Vincent Gambini taught a master class in cross-examination," and further extensively quoted from a cross-examination scene in the film.[25]
John Marshall Law School professor Alberto Bernabe wrote that "Vinny is terrible at the things we do teach in law school, but very good at the things we don't":[26]
[How to] interview clients, to gather facts, to prepare a theory of a case, to negotiate, to know when to ask a question and when to remain quiet, to cross examine a witness forcefully (but with charm) in order to expose the weaknesses in their testimony
United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited My Cousin Vinny as an example of the principle that a client can choose his own lawyer,[27] but United States SenatorJohn Kennedy told District Court nominee Matthew S. Petersen that having seen the film did not qualify one to be a federal judge during his failed 2017 confirmation hearing.[28] The authors of Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies (2006) gave the film its highest rating along with several films based on real trials, such as Judgment at Nuremberg and Breaker Morant.[29] In 2008 the ABA Journal ranked the film #3 on its list of the "25 Greatest Legal Movies",[13] and in 2010 ranked Pesci's character as #12 on its list of "The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers (Who Are Not Atticus Finch)".[30]
Lynn, an opponent of capital punishment, believes that the film expresses an anti-death penalty message without "preaching to people", and demonstrates the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Lawyers find the film appealing, according to the director, because "there aren't any bad guys", with the judge, prosecutor, and Vinny all seeking justice. Lynn stated that both he and Launer attempted to accurately depict the legal process in My Cousin Vinny, favorably comparing it to Trial and Error, for which he could not make what he believed were necessary changes.[16]
Sequels
Proposed film
In an interview on March 14, 2012, the film's screenwriter, Dale Launer, talked about a sequel he had written involving Vinny Gambini practicing law in England. Marisa Tomei dropped out. The studio hired another screenwriter to rework the script without Tomei's character. Eventually, the project was shelved.[31]
Novel series
In 2017, author Lawrence Kelter began a My Cousin Vinny novel series with Back to Brooklyn, which is intended to be in the spirit of The Thin Man series. With the setting updated to contemporary times, the series depicts the further cases of Vinny Gambini with Mona Lisa operating as his investigator.[32] After additionally writing a novelization of My Cousin Vinny alongside the first sequel, a third book, titled Wing and a Prayer, was published in August 2020.[33]
Album
Pesci reprised the Vinny Gambini character for his 1998 album Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You, which contains the song "Yo, Cousin Vinny". The album cover portrays Pesci in a red suit similar to the usher suit he wore in the film.[34]
Marisa Tomei is an American actress. She gained prominence for her comedic performance in My Cousin Vinny (1992), which earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She received further nominations in the category for In the Bedroom (2001) and The Wrestler (2008).
Joseph Frank Pesci is an American actor and musician. He is known for portraying tough, volatile characters in a variety of genres and for his collaborations with Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese in the films Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019). He has received several awards including an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award with nominations for three Golden Globe Awards.
Ralph George Macchio Jr. is an American actor. He is best known for playing Daniel LaRusso in three Karate Kid films, as well as in Cobra Kai (2018–present), a sequel television series on YouTube Premium and Netflix. Macchio also played Johnny Cade in The Outsiders (1983), Jeremy Andretti in the television series Eight Is Enough, William Gambini in My Cousin Vinny (1992), Eugene Martone in Crossroads (1986), and Archie Rodriguez in the television series Ugly Betty. He also had a recurring role as Officer Haddix in the television series The Deuce.
Walter Lane Smith III was an American actor. His well-known roles included newspaper editor Perry White in the ABC series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Walter Warner in Son in Law, collaborator entrepreneur Nathan Bates in the NBC television series V, Mayor Bates in the film Red Dawn, Coach Jack Reilly in The Mighty Ducks, district attorney Jim Trotter III in My Cousin Vinny, U.S. Congressman Dick Dodge in The Distinguished Gentleman, Grantland Rice in The Legend of Bagger Vance, and U.S. President Richard Nixon in The Final Days, for which he received a Golden Globe award nomination.
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Mitchell Whitfield is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Barry Farber in Friends (1994–2000), Dr. Bruce Hampton in Minor Adjustments (1995–1996), and Stan Rothenstein in My Cousin Vinny (1992). He is also known for voice roles including Donatello in the 2007 film TMNT, Prince Phobos in the animated adaptation of W.I.T.C.H., and Fixit in Transformers: Robots in Disguise.
Dale Launer is an American screenwriter, film director and producer, best known for his work in comedy films. His films include Ruthless People, Blind Date, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and My Cousin Vinny.
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Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You is the second studio album from actor and singer Joe Pesci.
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