Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) is a straightforward crime and detection story which unfolds through subtexts of its characters’ intuitions and conflicting motivations.  
 
In Fritz Lang’s last US film, a crusading newspaper publisher at loggerheads with a law-and-order prosecutor somewhere in Middle America (the city is never identified) contrives an airtight scheme to prove that circumstantial evidence can send an innocent man to his execution.

Longtime death penalty opponent Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer), owner and publisher of The Daily Press Herald, editorially derides the politically ambitious District Attorney Roy Thompson (Philip Bourneuf) for ‘trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed men’. Thompson insists that he simply follows the facts and the law in a state that prescribes capital punishment.

Dana Andrews, Sidney Blackmer and Philip Bourneuf in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

But what makes this story compelling is the paradox it poses: under the law, a logical pattern of circumstantial facts can convict an innocent person; but alogical intuition can construe patterns from similar facts that point to the guilty. In other words, where lawyers tend to fence themselves in with formulas like ‘following the facts and the law’ to a verdict of guilt ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, there also is the cosmic justice of the biblical ‘vengeance is mine; I will repay’.

Headline news provides a test case in Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

A stripper without ‘much more than a suitcase full of nothing between her and the gutter’, left murdered ‘in a ravine just outside of town’, leaves police ‘no clues, no suspects, nothing to go on’. But it gives Spencer his test case for ‘someone whose innocence I knew and could prove, [to be] arrested, tried and convicted for a murder he didn’t commit.’

Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

In Spencer’s eyes, there is no better man for this role than Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews), his former star reporter and prospective son-in-law. Garrett left the newspaper with Spencer’s blessing to become a career novelist after the success of his first novel. He plans to marry Spencer’s daughter Susan (Joan Fontaine) and needs a solid second book to follow his first. A book about being convicted and sent to death row as an innocent man was sure to be a bestseller. Spencer’s idea is that he and Garrett create a false circumstantial case, keeping a meticulous written and photographic record of each detail and telling no one else, not even Susan.  

Garrett calls this ‘a weird, crazy idea’ but goes along with Spencer’s scheme.

Dana Andrews 'the perfect man for the job' in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

‘Of course you could be acquitted, but if you are lucky, you could get the chair,’ Spencer says with relish, making it clear that this is when he would step in. Once Garrett was ‘convicted and sentenced, [Spencer] would reveal the details of our plan’ to the court and Garrett would be pardoned, Spencer says.

The two set the plan in motion by slumming at the strip club where the murder victim worked. Barbara Nichols, Robin Raymond and Joyce Taylor have fun camping up their burly-que roles as ‘exotic dancers’ Dolly Moore, Terry LaRue and Joan Williams. They are Fritz Lang’s platinum blonde answer to Shakespeare’s clowns, lightening the atmosphere as they roll the plot forward. 

Barbara Nichols camps it up in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

As for the subtext of characters’ intuitions and conflicting motivations noted at outset, there is Spencer’s desire to shake Thompson’s belief that only the guilty are convicted. When Spencer’s future son-in-law becomes the suspect, Thompson knows he has to tread carefully but that he must win the case. Spencer assumes that his scheme has Thompson right where he wants him. But Thompson’s investigator once dated Susan and never got over her. Susan, kept out of the loop, and the strippers, are confused because what they each sense in their own way is different from what they hear or see or think they know. And Garrett acts oddly for a man purportedly fighting for his freedom and his life.

Yet amid this farrago of colliding circumstances, the central unanswered question is: Why did a canny old newspaperman, a widower who lives with his adult daughter, pick this moment and this crime to hang on this man in the first place? 

It bears mentioning that, although this is a movie, standards for the rules of criminal procedure were considerably different at this time from what we have today. A series of decisions issued in the following decade by the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren for the first time enumerated and expanded the constitutional rights of people accused in criminal matters. 

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 1956 U.S. (80 minutes) RKO Radio. Directed by Fritz Lang; story and screenplay by Douglas Morrow; cinematography by William Snyder; music composed and conducted by Herschel Burke Gilbert; edited by Gene Fowler Jr.