A blonde in a white bathrobe getting ready for a shower in front of a mirror turns and screams when a dark sleeved forearm holding a .45 automatic handgun comes around the doorjamb and blasts six shots.
Police pick up the usual suspect—the victim’s hapless boyfriend—right away.
At trial, defendant Edward Clary (DeForest Kelley, better known later as Star Trek’s Dr. Leonard McCoy) claims his innocence with a gentle, stricken face, but District Attorney Victor Scott (Edward G. Robinson) is a cocksure, hard-charging prosecutor who has Clary right where he wants him—dead to rights in front of a jury. Scott hates to lose, and he rarely does.
This case is no different. Moreover, Scott’s successful prosecution of Clary is the final feather he needs to toss his cap in the ring for governor. But all Scott’s success as though falls apart when it turns out moments before Clary goes to the electric chair that he was innocent and Scott cannot save him.
Scott resigns, takes time to regain his bearings, and before long finds himself on the other side of the aisle in the criminal courts, as determined as ever to win. ‘I’d rather see a hundred guilty men go free than convict another innocent man,’ Scott says.
Despite the disparagements of his former associates, adversaries, a cynical press and the general public, especially when he takes on mob big shot Frank Garland (the veteran heavy Albert Dekker) as a client, what rings true about this story is that Scott remains the same tough, ethical, client-serving lawyer at the bar.
And true to the genre, it is Scott’s involvement with the mob that hatches the movie’s main plot and gets this classic film noir airborne.
Angel O’Hara (Jayne Mansfield in her film debut) appears to be connected with Garland in more ways than sitting around his office playing the piano and answering the telephone. Her looks distract the boys; she pays a lot of attention to her surroundings. She is not a femme fatale, but those who treat her like a bimbo may end up paying for it.
Robinson’s larger-than-life Victor Scott is fun to watch in the courtroom. In one scene, he does what many trial lawyers must fantasize doing when he challenges the veracity of a smug witness he suspects to be stretching the truth by setting that witness up to take a clean one on the chin.
Prosecutors charged Scott’s client Joseph Carter (Jay Adler) with manslaughter for killing a man he evidently hit in the head with a lead pipe. Scott does not believe that the state’s only witness, a man named Taylor (Henry Kulky), is telling the truth,
On cross-examination, Scott suggested to Taylor that in the bar fight which preceded the fatal incident, Carter had knocked Taylor unconscious, so that he could not possibly have witnessed the alleged offense.
The beefy Taylor countered that Carter could not possibly have knocked him out. When Scott suggested that he and Carter are about the same size, Taylor scoffed:
‘An old man like you couldn’t knock me out. I got an iron jaw.’
‘Not even if you weren’t expecting the blow?’
‘Not even if I held up my chin like this and let him hit it.’
‘Well, that’s all, Mr. Taylor. Thank you very much.’
Then Scott, busily sorting papers at counsel table, connected with a swift money shot to Taylor’s purportedly ‘iron’ jaw as he passed Scott leaving the witness stand, coldcocking him before the bench. The prosecutor was too gape-mouthed to say a word and the court promptly granted Scott’s motion for dismissal in the interest of justice.
And all for a $2 fee…
(This movie double bills on the same CD with the Mitchum-Greer noir romantic comedy The Big Steal)
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