Like Lang's other 1956 movie, While the City Sleeps,""Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" has noirish elements, but much more of it takes places in daylight, in brightly-lit offices than in night-time bars and streets. Another similarity (an unfortunate one) is that both movies have Dana Andrews as a newsman who has written a celebrated book (in this instance a best-seller, in the previous one, a Pulitzer Prize-winning one). I find it very difficult to accept Dana Andrews (who also played the leads in Ottto Preminger's noires, Laura, and Fallen Angel) as a writer.

That, however, is not the most difficult improbability to swallow. Indeed, it is a gnat in comparison to the basic premise of the plot, which is that this writer just off the success of his first book and needing to postpone his marriage to finish a second one agrees to the idea of Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) the newspaper's publisher/editor and his father-in-law-to-be that they demonstrate the capriciousness of death sentences by framing Tom Garrett with circumstantial evidence and then revealing the ease with which an innocent man was sentenced to be executed. Such a prank is guaranteed to distress the fiancee already very frustrated by the delay, Susan Spencer (Joan Fontaine), as both her father and her affianced know. The dangers of the plan are many, including what might happen to Tom in jail. Moreover, if the jury does not convict, the whole elaborate exercise will have been wasted. It seems to me that the two men are colluding in criminal obstruction of justice, too, though they do not give that a thought.

I settled back to a didactic piece on the death penalty (the movie begins with an electrocution with Tom as one of the official witnesses), but reminded myself that however odd, this was a Fritz Lang movie, so that something would have to go wrong with such elaborate plans. My guess of what would go wrong was darker than what did go wrong, but less dark than the ultimate result, but I will not spoil the plot by discussing that. "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" is like "While the City Sleeps" in taking a long time to set up the suspense, although it is more conventionally a crime movie than "While the City Sleeps" (which for the first third seemed to be a romantic comedy about working "girls" in their 30s and 40s).

Wooden as Dana Andrews is -- and that's very! -- the politically ambitious DA prosecuting him (Arthur Franz) and his boss/future father-in-law who are, respectively, advocates and critics of the death penalty -- are also inhuman (robots left over from "Metropolis"?). Joan Fontaine is at best ("Letter from an Unknown Woman" directed by yet another refugee, Max Ophuls) not very warm (though determinedly faithful to unfaithful or otherwise unworthy men). "In "Doubt," she is actually more animated than in some later movies I've seen in which she failed to register the emotions in her parts (Islands in the Sun, Tender is the Night). The parts of all the leading characters I've mentioned, and that of her ex-beau police detective (Ed Binns) are seriously underwritten.

The lively (welcome comic relief) characters are a pair of burlesque strippers (Robin Raymond, Barbara Nichols) who worked with the murdered woman. The "liberal" crusading newspaper publisher and the "conservative" opportunist DA and the undercover reporter are opportunistic and manipulative in less brassy, more dangerous ways. As in "Sleeps," the role of the press is turning brutal murders to a profit is underlined: the complicity of police, prosecutors, and news media remains the same (tv news marketing murder is already well-developed in both 1956 Lang films). The cynicism of newsmen is a Lang leitmotif along, architectural arrangement of human beings recurrent in his visual compositions.

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This a contribution to Lean 'n Mean III.

Recommended:
No