Mr. District Attorney

I did not know this little movie produced by Republic Studios. I don't know the director either. Not a crime movie but an entertaining mystery yarn indeed. Typically from the early 40's, well paced and little comedy too. Look for Peter Lorre in the Mr Hyde character.

Dennis O'Keefe is also the good surprise of this little movie.

It's always a good surprise to find this kind of forgotten film. The score is the same as the Republic serials, especially in the action sequences. In the car chase for instance. I did not expect so much from this feature.

It's available in the Forgotten Noir disc set.

Go for it.

1941's Republic version of the radio series "Mr. District Attorney" is far more lighthearted than its source, starring Dennis O'Keefe as Prince Cadwallader Jones, rookie assistant to DA Winton (Stanley Ridges), assigned to an old case involving the missing Paul Hyde (Peter Lorre), whose hidden cache of embezzled loot mysteriously turns up at the race track. There are red herrings and murder victims, but it's a waste of Lorre, in a criminally small role. Florence Rice supplies much comedy as nosy reporter Terry Parker, who also shows a tendency to get into hot water. The 1947 version from Columbia was probably more faithful than this one, certainly more serious; highly enjoyable in a breezy style, upper class for Poverty Row's Republic Pictures, who followed it with a pair of little seen sequels, "Mr. District Attorney in the Carter Case" and "Secrets of the Underground" (both featuring different actors in the lead).

Dennis O'Keefe has the dubious distinction of starring in two films with the same exact title. But whereas the second Mr. District Attorey is quite serious, this one at times crosses over into screwball comedy.

As in the second film O'Keefe is a bright young newly minted Assistant who is top in his class which was Harvard and he's got nice blue blood connections. District Attorney Stanley Ridges almost is hammerlocked into hiring him and in his first court appearance, so fastidious is O'Keefe about ethics that he wins an acquittal for gangster Ben Welden. That actually pays off for him later in the film in a very curious way.

O'Keefe is then assigned the toughest case in the office, one of a man who embezzled money which sad to say was marked and then he disappeared. Later on however a couple of those bills show up as being bet by Joan Blair who on a big longshot who comes in. Later on she's killed and so is Charles Arnt who gave her the money.

The real thief is Peter Lorre who is at his creepy best. He has disappeared and can't get at the money anyway which is recorded and hot. But Lorre has something on a lot of the bigshots in town who coincidentally enough are political opponents of Ridges.

Along for the ride is reporter Florence Rice who first hangs around O'Keefe because news seems to break wherever he is, but then they kind of like each other though her help is as dubious as Myrna Loy's for William Powell in The Thin Man.

The first Mr. District Attorney is nicely paced with a lot of laughs from O'Keefe and Rice who almost fall into the solution of all the crime. Mr. District Attorney on radio was a pretty serious program so no wonder they might have felt the need to make a more serious film with this title later.

Mr. District Attorney (1941) is a particularly well-produced Republic Picture, coming as it does from a studio better known for its quickie Westerns and B-picture programmers. It is extremely well-staged and paced by British-born director William Morgan, who had begun his film career as a film editor. His previous experience shows. The script was co-written by Karl Brown, one of the few cinematographers ever to leave the camera behind to become a successful screenwriter; Karl had begun as a teen-age camera operator working for D. W. Griffith in the silent days. This film is a typical screwball comedy with an improbable crime plot, a genre popular back then, and features Dennis O'Keefe as the uptight Harvard lawyer, and Florence Rice as the wise-cracking girl reporter. They are not quite up to the dazzle of a Cary Grant and a Roz Russell, but they are both attractive and perfectly acceptable. Republic must have spent a good deal of money surrounding them with some of the ablest character actors in town, faces all of us recognize even if we can't name them-- among them, Minor Watson, Stanley Ridges, Charles Halton, Vince Barnett, and, for a flash, Dave Wilcox. Peter Lorre, who must have cost Republic a pretty penny to borrow from Warner Bros, is his usual evil self. Of all the fine cast, the ever-dependable Charles Arnt is the most memorable as the little sucker who falls for the no-good dame. As was so often the case, director Morgan went on from picture to picture, and as an editor, from TV series to series, rarely ever getting a chance to show his comic talents as a director again. Too bad.

Someone decided that the radio series, Mr. District Attorney, was too serious and the film version should be crammed with comic relief. Thus you have Dennis O'Keefe as a Harvard law school graduate (summa cum laude no less) who's a nutcase in the courtroom and equally muddle-headed when he's assigned to find a master criminal named Hyde. From time to time, he literally bumps into Florence Rice as a newspaperwoman who's out to outwit the competition by solving the Hyde mystery. When O'Keefe isn't accidentally plunking her on her prat, she goes all out to get a scoop, hiding in the trunk of a car she suspects is en route to pick up Hyde. Fortunately, no key is required to open the trunk from the outside or the inside. Meanwhile, Peter Lorre -- as Hyde -- obviously thinks he's in a totally different movie, playing it psychotically straight, projecting the kind of sibilant menace of which he's the acknowledged master. As usual, he's terrific. Too bad the movie isn't, as well.