Richie-67-485852 We have an interesting premise here served with a nice twist while keeping your attention. I gave it a seven because today it would be considered a worthy entry into the suspense genre. I am surprised it didn't do well when released. It is always pleasure to watch Dana Andrews work as he is able to communicate and reach his audience with little or no effort while causing us to believe the character he is portraying. The story is interesting and when this movie is over, it has potential for good discussion as well criticism. It is not a rich production but a rushed one sort of like someone wanted to get this out in record time and for next to nothing giving it a lack of depth. The story picks up midway and then has us running along side of it eager to see it unfold and justice done. For people who like courtroom drama, there is a satisfaction here as well as a history lesson too. There were no Miranda rights back then, you could be charged with little or no evidence and executions were carried out right away. Today it takes at least 13 years to execute someone for fear they might innocent thus giving them the benefit of the time doubt. I always enjoy watching these older movies to study the streets, cars, talk, signs and people at random. Have a snack and enjoy

Robert J. Maxwell I enjoyed this tale of a writer, Dana Andrews, who arranges an indictment of "circumstantial evidence" by picking an unimportant murder case out of the newspaper and, with the aid of the newspaper's editor, plants clues that point to him as the murderer. The editor, however, is busily taking photos with a "self-developing camera" of Andrews cheerfully planting the fake evidence.But -- the best laid plans. Andrews is convicted of the murder, but the editor dies in a car accident and burns up, along with all the evidence of fakery. That leaves Andrews pacing nervously back and forth on Death Row facing two eggs of hydrogen cyanide.His girl friend, Joan Fontaine, does everything she can to help him. When he explains the scheme, she enlists the aid of a detective Arthur Franz, to find any exculpatory evidence. Everyone is nervous.I can't say it's Fritz Lang's best American movie. I saw it in the El Camino Theater in San Bruno, California, and enjoyed it. It's still enjoyable but for a more experience and critical viewer, certain holes in the plot may be apparent.Also, Joan Fontaine, enchanting in her youth, here seems stiff and perfunctory, and wrapped up in the ugliest women's clothes imaginable. My God, the styles were terrible. And make up didn't help. They've tied her blond hair back into a severe bun or whatever it's called.Dana Andrews is his grim and solemn self, but he's older too, and he was in the grip of alcohol and looks puffy.For whatever its weaknesses may be, it's worth catching. It would have made a perfect episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

tomgillespie2002 Fritz Lang's last American film before he returned to Germany, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt suffers from the director's clear lack of interest. Lang was reportedly dismayed by the lack of visual creativity allowed by American producers (which was also clear in his penultimate American noir, While the City Sleeps (1956)), and so shortly after returned to his homeland to make the visually lavish double-bill Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959), dubbed the 'Indian Epic'. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an intriguing little noir starring Dana Andrews, is by no means a bad film, but is clearly the work of a man handicapped by the system and a film that is pessimistic in its execution.Tom (Andrews), a novelist in search of inspiration for his second book, is approached by his newspaper publisher father-in-law Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) to help aide his opposition of state capital punishment. The plan is to plant circumstantial evidence of Tom's fake involvement in the recent unsolved murder of nightclub stripper Patty Gray. Naturally, during the trial, an incident prevents Austin from delivering the evidence and testimony that will prove Tom's innocence, so Tom's disgruntled fiancée Susan (Joan Fontaine) races against time to prevent Tom getting executed on Death Row.Lang had already exposed the fragility of the justice system in his German masterpiece M (1931), and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt begins in suitably grim fashion with the silent execution of an inmate. The plot is a great idea (to think what Hitchcock would have made of it) but the execution is plain and predictable. Although Andrews' performance is solid and the movie sometimes threatens to push the boundaries set by the censors at the time, it simply goes through the motions until a twist reveal in the last 15 minutes livens things up a bit. You most likely won't see it coming, but it ends the film with plenty of plot- holes to pick at and left me scratching my head at exactly what point the movie was trying to make. A rather flat end to a solid period of film noir for the German master.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

bkoganbing In his last film in the USA before returning to Germany where he had left to escape the Nazis in the Thirties, Fritz Lang takes up the case of capital punishment and its application, especially when the case is a circumstantial one. Unlike the remake of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt with Jesse Metcalfe as the reporter and Michael Douglas as a corrupt District Attorney, both Sidney Blackmer as a newspaper publisher and Sheppard Strudwick as the politically ambitious DA hold each other in respect. Blackmer is not happy with Strudwick running up a string of murder convictions as a platform to be governor.He and prospective son-in-law Dana Andrews agree to frame Andrews with a string of manufactured evidence all carefully documented with photographs to have the police arrest him for murder of a burlesque queen that the police are stumped about. It certainly works all right, but as the case is coming to verdict, Blackmer is killed in an automobile accident and the evidence burn with him. Andrews is left in quite the jackpot.How it all works out is for you to see. Andrews is not abandoned by fiancé Joan Fontaine who is Blackmer's daughter. She does what she can and toward the end of the film her performance dominates.Fritz Lang certainly builds the tension worthy of Alfred Hitchcock himself. One scene did have me baffled. After the police have gotten those arranged clues, Andrews makes some moves on burlesque dancer Barbara Nichols who resists his advances. I could not quite believe that one at all.This original version is a notch or two above the Metcalfe/Douglas remake. Though it got an interesting alternative remake, this is still the one to see.