A study of an amoral and sleazy defense lawyer who suddenly tries to "go straight" when he finds out that his tart wife is cheating on him; as well as the similarities he has in life with one of his clients.
14 Feb The Judge (1949)
See Evil, Do Ambitious Evil
I usually seek out detective movies from the early 30s because this is before the film narrative found short cuts and experimentation was the norm. After ‘Kane,‘ the narrative stance changed, and while novel forms got more radical, they are harder to find.
This is a gem of that kind, nominally a detective movie of the earlier kind. It is set in the early 30s. Superficially, it is a simple story of how a smart man frames his wife‘s lover for his own murder, but the form is quite complex.
There is an outer wrapper: the narrator is a judge, and the focus a lawyer who appears before him, successfully defending guilty murderers. Before the core story happens, we are also put into the role of a judge as we witness an introductory story that establishes not only the characters and their situations, but where we fit is as well.
The judge respects the lawyer but is repelled by his success at using ‘tricks.‘ Involved in the pre-story is an ‘alienist‘ who judges the sanity of defendants. Using our anachronistic perspective, we watch as we learn that the lawyer‘s wife judges her husband as inadequate, and this is why he has sold his brilliance to the guilty.
Everybody in this story is a judge, and there is a deliberate merging of passive watching with actively manipulating the story, noir-wise.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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