L'invraisemblable vérité

... and I highly recommend it. The implausible plot has a few large potholes and implausible events but it has a heck of an ending. It is clever enough to be entertaining while being complete and utter glossy trash. They couldn't possibly believe this film made any points against capital punishment.

Barbara Nichols is priceless as always.

While Sidney Blackmer and Dana Andrews cook up and carry out their scheme to prove that an innocent person can be convicted of a murder, everyone ignores the fact that, by getting this innocent person convicted, they're helping the real murderer escape justice. Just sayin'.

Sometimes, in the world of 1940s-1950s film noir, we are given a film so transparently impossible and contrived that we can see ourselves giving up on watching it half way through. But is extremely rare that we are faced with a film where the very response the viewer is having holds the key to the success, rather than the failure, of the film.

Such is the case with BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, which has - to its credit - been completely misunderstood by many. When we reach the film's conclusion, we realize that even the title of the film itself is a joke, perhaps the ultimate prank on the viewer. Yet to offer analysis of the film would be to destroy its main and most sinister motive; you can't "explain away" the glaring plot holes and contrivances without revealing the twist the film takes in its climax, and to do would rob the viewer of a genuine experience. So... I won't.

Suffice it to say, BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT is far more than it seems and is nothing without the sum of its parts, in total. Lang tackles the story of a person who creates a fictitious role for himself in order to, essentially, pull a fast one on the legal profession for personal gain (or, as it appears on the surface, someone else's). In the world of film noir, of course, we know that such a character won't get away with it, but when Lang depicts the tragedy the viewer knows will come, he majestically turns the entire premise on its head. As a result, it's a cold slap in the face - a devastating critique of the complicity of the audience in following along, hungrily, with such contrivances in cinema.

Every part of the film fits perfectly by not fitting at all. Even the visual style of the film is a cold, rarely pleasing one, almost daring you to suspend your disbelief just a little bit longer without even granting the pleasure of emotionally charged close-ups at key moments. The editing is brutal and jarring, cutting away practically mid-sentence and moving to a similar conversation elsewhere.

As a swan song to his Hollywood career, BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT does to the audience what Billy Wilder does to the industry in SUNSET BLVD. - biting the hand that feeds. The result is a total masterpiece.

In his last film in the USA before returning to Germany where he had left to escape the Nazis in the Thirties, Fritz Lang takes up the case of capital punishment and its application, especially when the case is a circumstantial one.

Unlike the remake of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt with Jesse Metcalfe as the reporter and Michael Douglas as a corrupt District Attorney, both Sidney Blackmer as a newspaper publisher and Sheppard Strudwick as the politically ambitious DA hold each other in respect. Blackmer is not happy with Strudwick running up a string of murder convictions as a platform to be governor.

He and prospective son-in-law Dana Andrews agree to frame Andrews with a string of manufactured evidence all carefully documented with photographs to have the police arrest him for murder of a burlesque queen that the police are stumped about. It certainly works all right, but as the case is coming to verdict, Blackmer is killed in an automobile accident and the evidence burn with him. Andrews is left in quite the jackpot.

How it all works out is for you to see. Andrews is not abandoned by fiancé Joan Fontaine who is Blackmer's daughter. She does what she can and toward the end of the film her performance dominates.

Fritz Lang certainly builds the tension worthy of Alfred Hitchcock himself. One scene did have me baffled. After the police have gotten those arranged clues, Andrews makes some moves on burlesque dancer Barbara Nichols who resists his advances. I could not quite believe that one at all.

This original version is a notch or two above the Metcalfe/Douglas remake. Though it got an interesting alternative remake, this is still the one to see.

Fritz Lang's twenty years as a Hollywood refugee, which had started so spiritedly with "Fury", gradually wound down to the grey, listless offering that is "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt". True, Lang's first and last titles have family resemblances. "Fury" concerns a man who may or may not have committed a capital crime but who deserves due process rather than lynching; "Doubt" is about a guy who frames himself to prove that the irrevocable sentence of capital punishment, legal or not, is never justifiable if the law is fallible.

But whereas the argument of "Fury" was driven full steam ahead by a master of montage ("Metropolis") and suspenseful pacing ("M"), "Doubt" consists largely of two- or three-shots of men in suits with "display kerchiefs", arguing in paneled offices with unraised voices. The story has its due ration of twists as Dana Andrews's writer is persuaded by his prospective father-in-law, a crusading press magnate, to set himself up as a burlesque dancer's killer; the two of them will keep records of the plot that are sure to exonerate Andrews before he faces the chair. (Wouldn't he get a stiff sentence for wasting the cops' time, though?)

But the focus shifts awkwardly from Andrews to his girl and lawyer as it unwinds, and the scenario is oddly bare of dramatic crises. For example, the press boss's death occurs off screen and his exoneration is brought in by his lawyer, not tracked down by his daughter, Andrews's fiancée. Only a few backstage scenes with the dancing girls, all peroxide and nasal cynicism, enliven proceedings. Andrews had begun to freeze into the stone faced stolidity which hampered his later career, while 39 year old Fontaine (the classic aging actress's age) is matronly in costume, maquillage and demeanor: encased in stately prissiness like other English ladies of Hollywood such as Garson and Kerr.

Apart from Fontaine the production looks as well as feels impoverished, aesthetically like Ida Lupino's and Collier Young's problem pics but without their punch. The final twist is not signaled strongly enough to give smarter audience members a decent chance of foreseeing it. At one ludicrous moment, the publisher suggests his guests catch up on the day's highlights in Andrews's murder trial: he turns on a TV which immediately and obligingly recounts them, like George Burns's magic set on "The Burns and Allen Show". Incidentally, was covering trials and commenting on them normal for American television c. 1955?

"Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" was a swansong not only for Lang but for RKO. It had abandoned production three years earlier after being wrecked by Howard Hughes, had sold its studio to Desi and Lucy and was now reduced to releasing outside product: in this instance from one Bert Friedlob. It really was time for Herr Lang to catch the plane back to de-Nazified Germany.