Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) - film review

For years, newspaper editor Austin Spencer has sought to expose failings in the American legal system which may lead an innocent man to the electric chair.  He persuades his future son-in-law Tom Garrett, an aspiring novelist, to assist him in an elaborate charade that will discredit not only a system that he believes is flawed but also the district attorney, who appears to relish sending convicted men to their deaths.  Together, Spencer and Garrett plant evidence that will lead to the latter’s arrest and trial for murder.  The plan is that, once Garrett has been found guilty and sentenced to death, Spencer will produce photographic evidence that will prove beyond any doubt his innocence.  Needless to say, the plan goes horribly wrong...

Fritz Lang’s Hollywood swansong is arguably the best of his films noirs, an understated yet thoroughly compelling crime melodrama that powerfully evokes Lang’s deeply felt cynicism about human nature and his ambivalence for American society.  Whilst the film lacks the stylistic embellishments of Lang’s earlier film noir offerings Ministry of Fear (1944) and The Woman in the Window (1944), and is not as graphically shocking as his hard-edged masterpiece The Big Heat (1953), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is one of the director’s most disturbing films, a sophisticated study in manipulation that has a very nasty after taste.  Peter Hyams’ 2009 remake doesn’t come anywhere near to matching this film’s artistic and narrative brilliance.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is ahead of its time, both in its narrative complexity (Douglas Morrow’s screenplay is among the most ingenious and convincing of any 1950s film noir) and its handling of an issue which, at the time, Hollywood was somewhat loth to tackle - the rights and wrongs of capital punishment.  The ease with which the film plays on our feelings, deludes us and leads us to the wrong conclusions (more than once) underscores how easy it is for a persuasive lawyer to convince a jury of a man’s culpability for a crime he has not committed, and in doing so provides the most powerful case against state-sanctioned execution.  Even when the film has unveiled its final plot twist (after a head-spinning torrent of twists), we are doubtful that the villain of the piece deserves the punishment that fate (or rather, a flawed system of justice devised by man) has dished up for him.

Dana Andrews gives one of his more memorable performances as the unlikely writer who seems strangely too enthusiastic to dig his own grave, perhaps a subtle allusion to Andrews’ own self-destructive tendencies, which had relegated him to B-movies such as this after a promising start to his career.  By the time he made this film, the actor was stricken with chronic alcoholism, which created major problems for director Fritz Lang, who found him virtually impossible to work with.  Further run-ins with producer Bert L. Friedlob strained Lang’s patience too far and once the film was in the can the director made up his mind to quit Hollywood and return to Europe, where he continued making films for a few more years before retiring.  For Lang, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt was a painful end to the most productive and demanding phase of his career; for his devotees, it is one his finest works, a devious psychological roller-coaster that should rank among some of the greatest of all classic films noirs.

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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