Review: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Dana Andrews plays a novelist engaged to Joan Fontaine. One day he witnesses a public execution with Fontaine’s left-wing, anti-capital punishment newspaper man father (Sidney Blackmer) about the wrongs of capital punishment. Blackmer comes up with a cockamamie idea for Andrews (looking for inspiration for a book) to incriminate himself to such a degree that he gets arrested for a recent murder, and set to be executed. The idea will be that Blackmer will arrive just in time with all of the plans that prove that he is innocent and that it was just a stunt to prove that an innocent man can be executed (That they could get arrested for dicking around with the law never seems to enter into their, or the filmmaker’s heads). In order for this to work, Fontaine must be kept in the dark, because she’s a silly bobble-headed girl who can’t be trusted to keep a story straight, right? So, Andrews agrees for some godforsaken reason to be the ‘guilty’ party and away we go. Complications come via a freak accident that will make it very difficult for Andrews to prove his innocence. Whoops. Philip Bourneuf plays the aggressive DA, Edward Binns plays a cop, and Barbara Nichols plays a floozy ‘dancer’ who knew the deceased, a co-worker.

 

The last American film from director Fritz Lang (“Metropolis”, “Ministry of Fear”, “Clash By Night”, “The Big Heat”) is sadly not a good one. This 1956 twisty courtroom thriller/social message film plays like something Alfred Hitchcock would’ve thought up…and given up on because he couldn’t think of a way to make it work. Lang and screenwriter Douglas Morrow (“The Stratton Story”, “Jim Thorpe- All American”) have pushed on either undeterred or unaware of the problems. If you’ve seen “The Life of David Gale”, it’s quite a similar film, but not as good (and that film was no masterpiece).

 

This is the kind of film where a newspaper man played by Sidney Blackmer will claim in earnest that a newspaper can’t take sides. Really? ‘Coz I can think of at least one paper in Australia that calls bullshit on that, buddy. Unlike “David Gale”, I never felt Dana Andrews was committed enough to the cause to go along with this, and it’s only partly due to Andrews’ unpersuasive performance. In fact, almost no one in this film acts with any sense of urgency or interest. Hell, everything is subpar here- acting, script, direction. It’s all underwhelming. And incredibly preachy. Boringly preachy, actually, with Andrews looking deathly bored, and the talented Sidney Blackmer choking on his pretentious dialogue. After quite a ballsy opening scene of an execution, we get an awfully dry and inorganic post-electrocution discussion between Blackmer, Andrews, and the pro-death penalty DA (Philip Bourneuf) that stops the film dead.

 

Also hampering the film is the rather unconvincing performance by a thanklessly cast Joan Fontaine. An 11^th hour twist is a pleasant surprise and helps nix a few concerns I had with the logic of the whole thing (I’d rather not delve into spoilers, to be honest, but you’ll have the same concerns believe me), but not nearly all of my concerns. Still, along with a fun performance by Barbara Nichols, the twist is the best thing.

 

The whole thing is just dated and unconvincing, it feels not like a B-picture, but a C-picture, and I’ve always held Lang a lot higher in esteem than that. It doesn’t even look memorable, which is quite disappointing for a Lang picture. What the hell went wrong here? It just doesn’t come off, and the fact that it was written by a law school graduate (!) almost makes your brain explode.

 

Rating: C