Rufmord

Always enjoy viewing this film mainly because Joey Heatherton's father was a mail man and delivered the mail to my home at the time in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. Richard Chamberland,(David Mitchell),"The Pavilion",'99, was a lawyer in this picture and wound up having to defend Joey Heatherton's (Laura Mae Brown), husband from a crime he was accused of performing on a police officer. The police officer was found not breathing in the bed in which Laura Mae shared herself. Laura is a very sexy hot to trot gal and performs all sorts of wild movements with her body in a bar next to a classic jukebox in the 1960's. Claude Rains,(Art Harper),"The Invisible Man",'33 makes a brief appearance and adds a good supporting role. This is a very entertaining film in Black and White and held my interest from beginning to the very end.

Richard Chamberlain was as big a star as MGM ever had when Chamberlain was TV's Dr. Kildare. Chamberlain had an iron clad 7 year contract, and MGM kept him busy both on TV and in movies, and his first movie was the western A Thunder of Drums billed far below George Hamilton and Luana Patten. After his rocket to fame, MGM starred Richard Chamberlain in this first rate court room drama Twilight Of Honor to cash in on Chamberlain's tremendous popularity. In his Dr. Kildare days Chamberlain is reported to have gotten 15,000 fan letters per week more than Clark Gable ever got in his heyday as King of the MGM Lot. MGM in those days was the premier movie studio and this film reflects the quality production values the MGM studio gave its films. The production team of Perlberg/Seaton were assigned this film and cast along with Chamberlain a true star and class act Claude Rains. Nick Adams also stars. Quality film.

In an unnamed city in a fictional county in New Mexico, a vicious killer (Nick Adams) is being tried for murder. The courtroom drama focuses on an ambitious prosecutor (James Gregory) and a young and inexperience defender (Richard Chamberlain).

Gregory is trying to ride the publicity surrounding the trial to a high political office, and there seem to be a lot of people willing to railroad the kid into the gas chamber. The case has several curious aspects. Adams has signed two different confessions but both of them have omitted large parts of his story. Adams also has a tramp for a wife (Joey Heatherton) who turned him in for the reward!

Into this media circus of lies and hype comes young Chamberlain who must battle the system ((including a judge who clearly favors the prosecutor). He relies on advice from a wily old lawyer (Claude Rains) who's been sidelined by ill health. Rains also has a comely daughter (Joan Blackman) who has eyes for Chamberlain.

Can the young lawyer navigate the complicated legal waters and fight the corruption to save his client?

All the actors are fine. Chamberlain (currently starring on TV as Dr. Kildare) gets the star build-up here from MGM. Rains steals all his scenes and Gregory and Adams are solid performers (Adams won an Oscar nomination). Heatherton makes her film debut here.

Cast includes Jeanette Nolan as the widow, Linda Evans as her daughter, Edgar Stehli as the judge, Arch Johnson as the bartender, Robin Raymond as Heatherton's ma, and Pat Buttram as the victim.

Much of the film is told in flashback, but the overall storyline suffers by being a tad too close to the classic Anatomie eines Mordes (1959). Still worth a look.

I was introduced to Nick Adams on the set of Twilight of Honor by my then girl friend Joey Heatherton. He was one of the nicest guys i had ever met and we became fast friends in the few days i spent with him and Joey while they were filming this movie. When I was about to go back to NY, I asked Nick for an autograph and he gave me a very large photo of himself and Kirk Douglas. i just took out that picture after many years and read the inscription that Nick wrote on the photo. It reads, "For Paul- This is the only big picture I have left so I hope you don't mind Kirk staring at you too. Only I just want to say I think you are a great guy and am very happy to be able to call you a friend. Looking forward to seeing more of you. Your Friend, Nick."

Soon after he wrote this to me I was told that he died...and later was told he took his own life. I was shocked and to this day do not know the story behind his suicide. I will treasure this photo forever.

OK courtroom drama from Perlberg-Seaton, with MGM capitalizing on Richard Chamberlain's TV success by casting him as a rather Kildare-like defense attorney. He's recently widowed, and he's given the unenviable job of defending sleazy-but-polite Nick Adams, who's already confessed, twice, to murdering Pat Buttram, a well-liked local politico who was trying to make time with Adams' sluttish wife, Joey Heatherton. Chamberlain's OK, and so are the courtroom exploits, with a screenplay that seems to delight in pushing the envelope a bit in terms of sexual conversation circa 1963. There's discussion of impotence, sleeping nude, and prostitution, and several sequences of Joey Heatherton twitching luridly next to a jukebox. But the best reason to watch is Claude Rains, as Chamberlain's former professor and current legal adviser. He looks genuinely unsteady and hasn't many good lines, but it's a beautiful, modest, underplayed performance. Joan Blackman is on hand as his daughter, to provide the rather tepid romantic interest, and Jeanette Nolan is good (when wasn't she) as Buttram's protective widow. The flashback format is unwieldy, and Boris Sagal directs it like it's a big TV show, but it keeps your interest pretty steadily, especially as a barometer of what was and wasn't permissible on screen in1963.