The Lawyer's Secret

Fay Wray is engaged to Clive Brook. She asks him to speak with her brother, Charles 'Buddy Rogers.' He's been hanging out with the wrong people. When Brook braces him, Rogers resists, but Brook points out that as a lawyer, he's bound to absolute confidentiality as to a client's private communications; Rogers admits that he's done with the crowd he's been hanging around with. He's just taken part in a robbery with a gambling den owner who has been cheating him, and some one else killed the gambler. Brook urges him to confess, but Rogers refuses. He refuses when an innocent sailor, Richard Arlen, is convicted of the murder, he refuses when Arlen is sentenced to be hanged, he refuses to help when Arlen's fiancee, Jean Arthur comes to ask him to appeal the verdict, and even when Miss Wray asks him.

I'm uncertain of how far lawyerly confidentiality stretches nowadays, but it's a pretty good story, and Brook is fine in the role. In fact, everyone is pretty good, even Miss Arthur in a small, underplayed part. this causes me to wonder about the direction. Louis Gasnier co-directs with Max Marcin, who was better known as a writer. He entered films because he wrote plays, but is best remembered as -- eventually -- the creator of the Crime Doctor radio show. Did he, in effect, serve as a dialogue director here, while Gasnier handled the visuals?

In my unhealthy quest to view every available Fay Wray film, I picked this one up on the same DVD with "The Sea God" - a kind of Fay Wray/Richard Arlen double feature. "The Sea God" proved to be the better film as "The Lawyer's Secret" was weighed down by excessive staginess and lack of action.

The story is of a lawyer choosing between protecting his client (his fiancé's brother) or saving an innocent man from hanging. This could have been a compelling script with different actors and more innovative direction. Fay Wray is just fine as the fiancé of the lawyer but is given little to do other than look worried. She's still quite a dish, but she never leaves her house until the final scene of the film. It doesn't help that her fiancé is twice her age (Brook born in 1887, Fay in 1907) and looks it.

There were a couple of decent images in the film, with the jail house scene at the tops of the list. Arlen (the wrongly accused man) is informed that the Governor will not intervene and he is then moved to death row. This is a fairly powerful image, that would have been better played almost silent. Although pretty good in most of the film, Arlen nearly ruins this moment with some misplaced "acting".

Overall, I'm glad I saw the film, but probably won't be popping it into the DVD player again anytime soon. "The Sea God", however, on the same disk, will see some more use.

... and I'll lay that at the feet of the directors (count 'em - there are two). This is an early talkie and suffers from the slow pacing of many of those films, plus there is no score whatsoever. The dialog is minimalist in a story that really demands many more words than we get, and much more in the establishment of relationships.

A sailor winds up blowing all his pay at a gambling joint while on leave, he "borrows" a car to get back to his ship on time, gets caught doing that, and then is apprehended in the murder of the guy running the gambling joint. It doesn't help that his gun shot the man. But the truth is the sailor sold his gun to a fellow gambler so he could stay in the game awhile longer. He doesn't have any witness to him selling the gun, and he has no idea who it was he sold the gun to. Will he hang or not? Watch and find out.

This film is full of Paramount talent from the silent era trying to make it in talkies - Clive Brook, Richard Arlen, Charles Buddy Rogers. Plus there is the new talent brought in for talking film - Fay Wray and Jean Arthur. Don't expect screwball Jean Arthur. Here she is so plain vanilla you can hardly taste her.

As for relationships, forget about it. How do I know that Fay Wray and Clive Brooks are engaged? Because they tell me they are! There is zero chemistry between them. There is more chemistry between Charles Buddy Rogers and Fay Wray as brother and sister!

This could have risen to an 8/10 with better direction and dialogue, given the delightful irony of the situation. But I'll give it a respectable 6 as is. If only Hitchcock could have gotten hold of it. It's just the kind of "wrongly accused" story he so loved to direct.