Legal Eagles(1986)

One night, Chelsea (Daryl Hannah) shows up at Tom’s (Robert Redford) apartment after she has paid a visit to Taft (Terence Stamp), and she tells him that she confronted Taft with a gun and tried to force him to tell her where her father Sebastian’s (James Hurdle) paintings were, but he just knocked her around and took the gun away from her. She soon managed to break free of him and fled, but as she left, he warned her that he was going to call the police on her. Tom asks if she called Laura (Debra Winger) about this, but she replies that, when she did, she only got her answering machine. Tom decides to let Chelsea stay for the night, but the two of them wind up having sex.

In the morning, they are startled awake when two police officers suddenly barge into the bedroom and inform Chelsea that Taft has been murdered and that she is under arrest for it. Tom’s and Chelsea’s intimate encounter quickly turns into a scandal once the press finds out about it, and later that morning, Tom meets with his boss, District Attorney Bower (Steven Hill), and finds out from him that the cops came to his place because an anonymous caller reported that Chelsea was there. Tom tells Bower that he believes that he is being set up, because of this scandal as well as how he got shot at one night by someone who was spying on Chelsea while he was visiting her to get information regarding her father’s journal and artwork, plus Taft blew up his gallery’s warehouse rather than let its contents be checked out by the authorities and then got killed himself. Bower ultimately decides to fire him over the scandal, and while Tom is clearing out his office, Laura shows up. She first admonishes Tom for sleeping with her client, then tells him that she knows that he is being set up and that they both know that Chelsea is being framed and that this trumped-up murder charge is just more of the same. She tells him that she can prove this, but he will need to work with her to make it happen because he knows just as much about this case as she does. She also tells him that, if Chelsea is acquitted, he will more than likely get his job back as Assistant D.A., and they can just go their separate ways once it is over. Tom agrees to team up with her, and he takes a desk in her law office. Over time, a mutual attraction that they have been nurturing since before they became co-workers deepens, and they end up sharing a kiss one night.

On the first day of Chelsea’s trial, the prosecution reveals to all that Chelsea and Taft were secret lovers and lived in Taft’s apartment for two years, plus he was her only means of financial support during that time. When the court takes a recess, Tom and Laura privately speak to Chelsea about this news, and she admits that she was romantically involved with Taft, but they never went out in public, and she never said anything about this to either of them because she was afraid that, if she told them, it would only make her look more guilty. When they return to the courtroom, Tom makes his opening statement, where he tells the jury and the people present that Taft was not murdered by Chelsea, but by someone who was trying to protect themselves. He goes on to add that this someone was involved in the acts of arson, theft, and murder 18 years ago that resulted in Sebastian’s death and the supposed loss of his paintings, and is the same someone who is now trying to frame Chelsea for murder. After court is adjourned for the day, Robert Forrester (John McMartin) (whom Chelsea earlier tried to steal one of her father’s few remaining paintings from, thinking that it was the one that he gave her for her 8th birthday) approaches Tom and Laura and criticizes them for what they are doing, but as he does so, Chelsea has a flashback to the night of her father’s death and remembers that Forrester left her father to die in the inferno rather than save him. She accuses Forrester of being her father’s murderer, but he firmly denies it.

The next day, Tom and Laura pore over some shipping files that they managed to acquire through trickery and discover that Taft had sent one crate full of paintings to an apartment he owns in Sutton Square Park in Manhattan. Thinking that this crate might contain Sebastian’s paintings since it was the only one they found that wasn’t going to Taft’s art gallery, Tom and Laura get ready to head over to the apartment and check it out. However, neither are aware that the same mysterious man who tried to shoot Tom – and who has been spying on him, Laura, and Chelsea all through the rest of the film – is listening in on their conversation through a wiretap that he secretly placed in their office. He then calls someone and tells the person that Tom and Laura found what the person has been looking for, but he assures that person that he will get to Taft’s apartment first because he is going to take out Tom and Laura now. After Tom and Laura exit the office, the man tries to run them over in his car, but fails, and he soon loses control and crashes into a truck before fleeing the scene on foot. Tom chases after him through a few streets, with Laura following in his car (despite not knowing how to drive), but the chase ends abruptly when the man is suddenly struck and killed by a taxi. Tom takes the man’s wallet and then flees with Laura when she shows up, and Laura checks the wallet and finds Forrester’s business card among the items in it.

They go to Taft’s apartment and find the door ajar, and then they go inside and take a look at all of the millions of dollars’ worth of paintings that were shipped there and realize that someone has just been through all of them. However, none of Sebastian’s works are among them. Soon after, they find Forrester’s body in the bed with a gunshot wound in his head, and then Tom finds Chelsea hiding in the bathroom. She claims that they left her a message on her answering machine telling her to meet them here, and she was able to get in because she still had a key to the place, and she becomes distressed upon seeing Forrester’s corpse moments later. After they all go into the living room to collect their thoughts, Laura tells Tom that Chelsea couldn’t have killed Forrester because she doesn’t have the strength needed to lift a 200-pound man onto the bed. Tom then looks out the window and takes notice of a Bertolini sculpture outside at the end of the street, and after he directs Laura’s attention to it, they remember that Taft possessed the model for that very sculpture in his office at his art gallery, which he claimed was of sentimental value to him because it was personally given to him by Bertolini. Chelsea reveals to them that Taft actually hated that sculpture and thought that Bertolini was a joke, which leads them to think that Taft may have stashed Sebastian’s paintings inside the sculpture’s model. Tom gets a cab for Laura and Chelsea and tells them to go on ahead of him to Taft’s gallery while he finds Detective Cavanaugh (Brian Dennehy) and gets a search warrant first (Cavanaugh had investigated the gallery fire [and personally came to believe that Sebastian’s death was no accident], and he provided Tom and Laura with information about how Taft, Forrester, and a third man named Joseph Brock were committing tax fraud through the company they ran together around the time of Sebastian’s death, and when Taft and Forrester found out that they were being investigated by the I.R.S., they set up Brock to take the fall for everything, which led to him getting sent to prison for three years and then reportedly dying from cancer a year after he was released). As the cab goes, another car follows after them.

Tom goes to the Manhattan South precinct where Cavanaugh is based and asks for him, but when he gets directed to him, he discovers that Cavanaugh is an African-American man. Realizing that the man he thought was Cavanaugh is an imposter, he speeds off in his car towards the gallery. Laura and Chelsea arrive at the gallery while a memorial service for Taft is going on, and they make their way to his office and check out the model. When Chelsea knocks on it, they discover that it sounds hollow, so they start looking for an opening to it. As they do so, “Cavanaugh” comes into the office with his gun pointed right at them, and he reveals that he is actually Joseph Brock before telling them that whatever is in that model belongs to him. He then forces Laura and Chelsea to start hitting the model with smaller sculptures in the room in an attempt to break it open, in the process explaining that the mystery man who had been bothering them and Tom was just a hired hand paid to do a job, and (in addition to starting the fire that took out Sebastian) he had killed both Taft and Forrester as revenge for putting him in prison; he had just been waiting for the right opportunity to do it ever since he was released. Laura then tries to attack him, but he knocks her out with a punch to the face, and when Chelsea tries to flee the office, he grabs her and throws her down to the floor. He then takes a few whacks at the statue with the sculpture that Laura had been using until it swings open to reveal a large storage tube standing inside of it. Chelsea gets up and tries to take it, but Brock slaps her hard in the face and then handcuffs her to the underside of Taft’s desk before taking the tube out and leaving the office. Upon seeing all of the mourners below, he decides to create a diversion so he can escape with the storage tube unseen, so he sets one of the storerooms on fire in order to create a panic and guarantee an emergency evacuation of the gallery, which will give him a chance to slip away.

As the fire quickly spreads throughout the entire top floor, Tom makes his arrival and pushes his way past the panicking mourners towards the staircase leading to Taft’s office. Brock spots him while he is making his way down the staircase and takes a shot at him, but he misses, which forces him to retreat back upstairs. Tom gets up there and soon crosses paths with Brock, and they have a short fight that sees Brock losing his gun. In an effort to keep him from reclaiming it, Tom pushes him into one of the blazing rooms, and moments later, an explosion comes out of the room that sends Brock flying out of it and then over the balcony railing straight down into the decorative water display on the first floor, where he dies on impact. Tom grabs the storage tube and then meets with Laura and Chelsea after they have made their escape from Taft’s office, and unable to use the stairwell on their floor due to the fire having spread to there, they manage to get down to the next floor by finding a tall sculpture that starts on that floor and then climbing down it. They then take the stairs the rest of the way down to the first floor and get safely outside, where they are met by firefighters and EMTs. After getting a safe distance away from the building, they open up the tube and find all of Sebastian’s missing paintings inside of it, including Chelsea’s birthday painting.

On their next day in court, Tom and Laura present everyone with their new evidence that proves Chelsea’s innocence, and the judge dismisses the case. Bower congratulates Tom after his victory and both offers him his old job back and encourages him to campaign for District Attorney again, but Tom turns it all down, citing that he is happier working with Laura. As they watch Chelsea conduct an interview with the press outside the courthouse, Tom and Laura share a passionate kiss.

During the credits, we see Tom and Laura enjoying life as both full-time romantic partners and full-time legal partners, and they continue to operate out of Laura’s firm, which now bears both of their names.