Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Best John Grisham Adaptations, Ranked About this episode There’s a new TV version of The Rainmaker out, so today, we’re ranking the five best John Grisham adaptations – including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and A Time To Kill. But which one is the very best?
Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/letterboxd.com/nprpopculture http://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture
To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. http://plus.npr.org/happy
See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.
0:19 Stephen Thompson? Courts, briefcases, incriminating documents, a sole crusader against the system. These are just some of the signs that you might just be watching a movie based on a John Grisham novel.
0:31 Linda Holmes? A lot of Grisham movies have been really successful, and they've come from some big time directors. But which ones are the very best? I'm Linda Holmes.
0:40 Stephen Thompson? And I'm Stephen Thompson. Today, we are ranking the best John Grisham adaptations on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. It's just the two of us today. Lynda, you wrote a piece for NPR that ranks all of the John Grisham novel adaptations for film and TV. Grisham, of course, is a writer mostly of legal thrillers, including a bunch of bestsellers. There are a ton of adaptations on film and TV, and we're going to talk about your top five.
1:08 Linda Holmes? Sure. Well, I want to say first that the reason why I did this ranking in the first place is that there is a TV adaptation of The Rainmaker, which is really one of his best novels, I think, which is on USA and Peacock. I think it's like middle bottom of this list. It doesn't make this top five. If you came to this wanting to hear about that, you can read a little more about it in the piece that I wrote. But I have to clarify a few caveats to this list in honor of lawyers. There are some technicalities that I observed. I really only ranked legal thrillers here.
1:42 Stephen Thompson? Okay.
1:43 Linda Holmes? So there is some nonfiction. There is Christmas with the Cranks.
1:47 Stephen Thompson? First thing I looked for with your list.
1:48 Linda Holmes? You can't compare that to the other ones. So I did not do that. Also, was not able to include a couple of things that I could not watch, right?
1:56 Stephen Thompson? Not because they were bad, but because they're not available.
1:58 Linda Holmes? Yes, exactly. Did not have access to a pilot for The Street Lawyer that starred Eddie Sibrian. There also was a TV adaptation of The Client.
2:10 Linda Holmes? That is nowhere. Also, there was a movie called The Gingerbread Man, which was directed by Robert Altman and starred Kenneth Branagh. But that I discovered is not an actual Grisham novel. It's a manuscript he never published. So we're sticking with the novel adaptations from the published legal thriller novels. And like I said, in honor of lawyers, there's just a lot of caveats that you have to be aware of.
2:38 Stephen Thompson? So Holmesy, kick us off with the fifth best Grisham adaptation.
2:42 Linda Holmes? Okay, the fifth best is The Client, which is a 1994 drama starring Susan Sarandon as Reggie Love, a lawyer who becomes the representative for a kid named Mark Sway, played by Brad Renfro, who witnesses an event, a death, and then has information about it, but it's related to organized crime. So he's very scared. He's in a lot of peril. And the prosecutor, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is pushing and pushing and pushing him to participate in this prosecution and be a witness. And he's terrified, so he goes and gets a lawyer.
3:25 Linda Holmes? So the thing of this one is she's representing a kid up against the system because his mother is distracted because his brother is sick and there's some other stuff. But she becomes kind of his representative. And I like this one because, mostly because of the performances. This is a nice Susan Sarandon performance as a Grisham hero. And Tommy Lee Jones, this was right after The Fugitive, and he's kind of doing a slimier, like this prosecutor is kind of a bad person, not necessarily a fully bad person, but very like politically motivated. But he still has that like very gruff ordering everybody around, and it's just entertaining.
4:05 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, I remember this as kind of the height of Tommy Lee Jones and his Tommy Lee Jones-ness.
4:11 Linda Holmes? It's certainly in the thick of it. It's also a really, really nice performance from Brad Renfro. You know, child actors obviously often are not that natural. He's very natural in this movie. He's very, I think believable and appealing and really seems like a kid. Unfortunately, he died quite young in his twenties. He's great in this movie, I think. And as with a bunch of these, there are a lot of really fun actors to spot in here. You can spot Bradley Whitford, but just barely. He looks really different. You know, Anthony Edwards is in it. Mary Louise Parker is in it, playing Mark's mom. And this is directed, and this is one of the themes of this. This is directed by Joel Schumacher.
4:50 Stephen Thompson? Yeah.
4:51 Linda Holmes? And we'll talk about this more, but like, these movies really, for a while, were pulling down major, major directors. I already mentioned Robert Altman, and here's Joel Schumacher, who, whatever you think of Joel Schumacher as a director, that was a big deal director at this moment in the nineties to kind of pull down for your film. So that's number five is The Client with Susan Sarandon.
5:14 Stephen Thompson? All right. Excellent choice. I don't think I've seen it since it was in theaters, but I remember gobbling it up.
5:20 Linda Holmes? It's a fun one. It's a fun one.
5:21 Stephen Thompson? All right. Give me number four.
5:23 Linda Holmes? Number four, I chose A Time To Kill, which
5:27 Stephen Thompson? Also Joel Schumacher.
5:28 Linda Holmes? Also Joel Schumacher. Now, the thing about A Time To Kill is that A Time To Kill was Grisham's first novel. It just wasn't his first smash novel. His first smash novel was The Firm, but his first novel was A Time To Kill. Time To Kill is about a guy named Carl Lee Haley, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who shoots the two men who assaulted his little daughter. They're sort of white supremacist adjacent guys or racists, and he kills them. And so then Matthew McConaughey, and this was kind of the Matthew McConaughey arrival performance for a lot of people, plays the lawyer Jake Brigance, who defends Carl Lee and tries to kind of make the point that wouldn't anybody have done the same thing.
6:14 Linda Holmes? Some people love this movie. Some people don't like this movie. It definitely has some very clunky racial politics in it. There's some kind of, I think, dated treatment of how you write a movie like this centered on a white lawyer. But there's some really nice work in this. Samuel L. Jackson is really good in it and has a scene where he kind of explains to Jake, we are not on the same side. The whole reason I picked you is that you can talk to the racists, I'm afraid, are going to convict me.
6:44 Speaker 03 You see me as different. You see me like that jury sees me. You are them. Now throw out your points of law, Jake. If you was on that jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free?
7:03 Linda Holmes? It plays with kind of Jake's alignment in an interesting way, even though Jake thinks of himself as a good guy. This is also, not for nothing, one of the sweatiest movies you will ever see in your entire life, which again, very Joel Schumacher. Matthew McConaughey and Ashley Judd, who plays his wife, sweat so much in this movie, you could just at any time fill a drinking glass by just mopping them down.
7:31 Stephen Thompson? Not that we recommend it.
7:32 Linda Holmes? No, we should not do that. Also, you know, again, a lot of really nice other performances. Sandra Bullock's very appealing in this as kind of a, an assistant who sort of shows up to help Jake. And Oliver Platt is, is great in this as Jake's kind of very cynical friend. Very good in this. Very good.
7:49 Stephen Thompson? Oliver Platt, really born to do Grisham. This is, you know, summer of 1996, definitely right in the pocket of the Chris Cooper, you know, of a run of amazing movies that Chris Cooper was in. He was also in Lone Star around this time. He pops up in this film.
8:03 Linda Holmes? He does. He plays a deputy who is also shot in this shooting. So Carl, you know, gets the two guys he meant to get, but he also collaterally, really badly injures this deputy. And there's a very interesting willingness of the film, I think, to contend with the fact that Even if you think this is an understandable, no response from him, kind of a vengeance thing, there are always consequences to those kinds of things that are not always direct. And there's some good treatment in this film of the fact that Jake also kind of brings consequences on other people for undertaking this defense. And that's kind
8:44 Linda Holmes? of part of what he has to take responsibility for and process. And it's an interesting movie. I have misgivings about it, but it's a really interesting movie. And again, a lot of really strong performances. I dig it.
8:56 Stephen Thompson? Nice. That's a time to kill. Linda, give us number three.
9:00 Linda Holmes? Okay. This is one of the big ones that some of you are going to be waiting for. Number three, I chose The Firm. This was Grisham's big hit novel that kind of became the book that you could be on an airplane and somebody on the airplane would be reading The Firm.
9:17 Stephen Thompson? Yeah.
9:17 Linda Holmes? This movie came out in 1993. It stars Tom Cruise in maybe the Grisham-iest Grisham story that there is. He plays an attorney named Mitch McDeer, who takes a job with a fancy pants law firm. And he is, and his wife go to Memphis, where he's going to work for this firm. And he realizes gradually that the firm is evil and is implicated in all kinds of wrongdoing. Gene Hackman is in multiple Grisham movies. He's also in one called The Chamber. And he's very tragic in this as a sort of tragically compromised attorney. Holly Hunter has a terrific small part in this as the kind of sidekick secretary
10:02 Linda Holmes? to a private investigator played by Gary Busey. And Holly Hunter is tremendous in this. And I have to mention Wilford Brimley as the very dangerous enforcer of the law firm, which is why when I talk to people about this movie, I always say, Tom Cruise beats Wilford Brimley unconscious with a briefcase. It is amazing. It is, we also, you get to see Tom Cruise, or I assume Tom Cruise's body double at this time, based on how Shot, although I do not know for sure. Doing like gymnastics down the street, which is odd, in my opinion.
10:39 Stephen Thompson? You write about this, like it has some strange, some characteristically strange Tom Cruise running.
10:44 Linda Holmes? It does. So if you're one of those people who always watches Mission Impossible movies and thinks that like Tom Cruise runs funny in Mission Impossible movies, wait until you see him run in The Firm. And they are hysterical. They have that amazing, slightly out of control Tom Cruise running that we've all grown to love. This is a just a really good thriller. This is one that I've come back to many times. I have watched it, you know, probably at least six or seven times just because it's very satisfying. This is always part of my rotation of what I call trench coat thrillers, people with documents and people who are very dangerous and scary.
11:26 Linda Holmes? This is the Grisham-iest Grisham story, in my opinion, even though it's not courtroom, which there's sort of a divide between there are some courtroom ones and some not courtroom ones.
11:36 Stephen Thompson? Yeah. And even in the absence of a courtroom, you give out a Grisham score at the end of each title in this ranking. You give this movie a 12 out of 10.
11:45 Linda Holmes? I did. I gave this movie a 12 out of 10 for Grishaminess. You can check out the rest of the Grisham scores that I gave in the piece at NPR. But yes, this got a 12 out of 10 because that's how much I feel like this represents Grisham to people. This is sort of what cemented for a lot of people, uh, who he is and was. And this one is directed by Sidney Pollack. So again, a tremendously great director, a really like prominent director, making this thriller. Love it. I love it.
12:15 Stephen Thompson? Yeah. Well, speaking of prominent directors, give us your pick for number two.
12:19 Linda Holmes? Number two, I chose The Rainmaker, which is directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The Rainmaker is a story about a young attorney played by Matt Damon, who gets out of law school, has very few choices about where to work and goes to work for a kind of bottom feeding ambulance chaser played by Mickey Rourke. And when the ambulance- Ambulance chaser skips town. It's just Rudy, the lawyer, and Deck, who is the paralegal played by Danny DeVito, who is great in this. I love him in this. And the two of them set out to represent a family where the son was denied insurance
12:59 Linda Holmes? coverage for a bone marrow transplant and is thus very close to the end of his life. And so they're suing the insurance company. And there's sort of a side story about him meeting a woman who is in an abusive marriage. She's played by Claire Danes and her husband is played by Andrew Shue. I don't care for that story as much. I don't think they have time to make much of it. But Damon is really good as a Grisham lawyer and his chemistry with Danny DeVito is great. And then you have this lineup of lawyers on the other side of the case. John Voight is the king of the lawyers on the other side. And as I said in the piece, not even one who was being eaten by a snake in Anaconda
13:43 Linda Holmes? was John Voight this slimy, you know?
13:46 Stephen Thompson? Not while being devoured by a reptile.
13:49 Linda Holmes? He is so sleazy and so hateful that I really love it. There's a great little bit that involves him and Randy Travis. And that's all I'm gonna say. This was during this little point where Randy Travis was gonna be an actor. It's just kind of scrappy and fun and they're going back and forth and nobody can really be trusted. And this, in its own way, is also a super Grisham-y piece.
14:14 Stephen Thompson? You're getting a lot of like A-plus character actors. You're getting people who have done a ton of amazing character work in their career. And you haven't even mentioned people like Dean Stockwell, who was always welcome in anything he turned up in.
14:28 Linda Holmes? Playing the judge.
14:29 Stephen Thompson? As a judge. Roy Scheider is in this film. I mean, they're.
14:32 Linda Holmes? Roy Scheider is the head of the insurance company and he is just, ooh. And I, and I think what's great about this is that the evil of this is so boring. The evil that Rudy is up against is so dull. It's just a company that won't do what it should do. And as a result, somebody is dying.
14:51 Stephen Thompson? The banality of evil.
14:52 Linda Holmes? I love the fact that he gets into this kind of grubby. It's not a fancy kind of evil. It's just a kind of evil that grinds people down. And I very much appreciate his attention to that kind of evil.
15:06 Stephen Thompson? That is the rainmaker. And now after the break, we've got one more film we're going to get to. We're going to reveal Linda's number one pick, so stick around.
15:16 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon with their five day fasting mimicking diet. A clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR. This message comes from AT&T. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trade in. It has the ultimate pro camera system and a big leap in battery life. So you can turn this deal into a long lasting connection. Connecting changes everything. Requires trade in of $230 or more and eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit an AT&T store for details.
15:59 Speaker 00 This message comes from Integrative Therapeutics, makers of Cortisol Manager. Daily stressors come and go, and heightened stress can affect sleep and focus. Cortisol Manager helps support a healthy response to everyday stress. Available at amazon.com. Use code STRESS2026 for 20% off. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
16:27 Stephen Thompson? Welcome back, Linda Holmes. You have watched a lot of John Grisham movies. You have watched a lot of John Grisham movies a lot of times.
16:35 Linda Holmes? I have.
16:35 Stephen Thompson? I'm going to ask you for your very favorite of them all.
16:40 Linda Holmes? So number one, and you know, Grisham heads, the Grisham heads out there know this already, I suspect. But number one is The Pelican Brief, which is a fabulous 1993 thriller starring Julia Roberts as Darby Shaw, a law student who discovers, she just kind of figures out. Who assassinated two Supreme Court justices and why? And she's just kind of thinking about theories of this. And she comes up with a theory and she writes it all down. And it kind of passes through different hands first from people who don't take it too seriously. And then it kind of goes to somebody who realizes that she's correct.
17:24 Linda Holmes? And so now she's in big trouble because now they're trying to track her down. These various evil forces because she's on to them. She connects with a journalist named Greg Rantham, played by Denzel Washington in a kind of like, what I think of as like, one of the really like, cool Denzel Washington performances that I love. And they are essentially then allies. And he is trying to get the story for the newspaper. He's also trying to keep her and him from getting murdered. Stanley Tucci as a dangerous assassin in some not very good disguises. John Lithgow as the newspaper editor, who is basically Ben Bradley, right? Even though not officially.
18:09 Linda Holmes? There are a bunch of kind of suspense sequences in this movie that I really love. There's a chase through a garage. There is a very tense moment where she's trying to get information and she goes to visit a guy who is ill and in a hospital. And I think this is just an extremely satisfying film. And this is directed by Alan J. Pacula. Right. He directed All the President's Men. He's one of the kind of great sort of paranoid thriller directors of the seventies. And so it makes so much sense to kind of combine that sensibility with the Grisham sensibility. This one is a 10 on the Grisham scale. This is another one that I cannot tell you how many times I've watched this movie.
18:52 Linda Holmes? Probably at least 10. Love this one. I think everybody in it is really, really good. The Pelican Brief, 1993. If I could tell people to just watch one Grisham legal thriller if they never have, I would say watch The Pelican Brief.
19:07 Stephen Thompson? All right. Well, we want to know your favorite John Grisham adaptation. Find us at facebook.com/pchh and on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture. We'll have a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show. Linda Holmes, thanks so much for being here, buddy.
19:25 Linda Holmes? Thank you.
19:26 Stephen Thompson? And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/happyhour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Janaye Morris, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.
20:02 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
Previous Our 15th Anniversary Time Capsule Next Lurker And What's Making Us Happy Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated