Handle with Care

I saw this old film while I was lying in bed recovering from a leg injury, and it was a surprising treat. Dean Jones, in one of his earliest movie roles before he became a Disney stock player, is an earnest young student pursuing the popular mayor of a small town for his apparent embezzlement of tax funds. He earns the open hostility of the townspeople, his fellow students, and his girlfriend as he continues his quest for truth and justice. So the ending I was expecting was that he'd uncover the popular old mayor's crime, and the entire town would be apologetic and grateful, and his girlfriend would return to him, right? Well, NO! Not at all! Nice plot twist at the end, and the short dialogue between the mayor and Dean Jones when they inadvertently meet at very end of the movie, involving the morality of the mayor's actions, provides a very nice little additional mini-twist at the end. If this movie is shown on your local station, and you've got some time, check this one out.

It plays like a Playhouse 90 tv drama: relatively short on 82 minutes, black and white, with economy script and production values.

Nothing to attract much attention here, except when one notices the name of Thomas Mitchell in the cast. Seldom did this legendary character actor appear in something that wasn't worth watching.

In this case, he's Williston, Mayor of a small town, being "investigated" by a collegiate mock court, undergoing their final exams. He willingly cooperates, until the court's "D.A." begins to uncover something unbalanced in tax books back in '32 and '33.

How far to go in pursuing this investigation of a now-beloved, long-term Mayor? It's Dean Jones, cast in the "D.A." role of Zach Davis, who must decide.

The whole town to a fault loves the Mayor and turns against Zach, when word about the investigation leaks out. It's Zach who must choose to go "all the way" or not.

A constantly interesting story, with some nice character and plot turns transpire. Also the philosophical question of whether unyielding factual truth must be pursued and exposed, no matter what the circumstances. Is there only one right and one wrong, or are there some shades of gray?

Jones is fine as the idealistic student lawyer, Walter Abel is strong as Jones' law teacher, Prof. Bowdin, and Mitchell is wonderful, as always, as Mayor Williston.

How nice to have this little mid-50s drama (made by MGM, probably on its B-budget backlot) preserved and shown on the AMC channel. I'd say it accurately represents the quality of many such small-budget productions of that period, which is to say, it's nicely scripted, well acted, and thought provoking.

"Handle with Care" from 1958 is a low-budget second feature that starts Dean Jones and Thomas Mitchell.

Jones plays a Zachary Mitchell, a law student who is to be the DA in a mock trial. He argues for trying a real case and finding one in the town.

After going through town records and rejecting several ideas, he finds one that is very interesting: it seems the mayor, who in those days the tax collector, embezzled tax money in the early '30s. What he took in and what he deposited are two different things, as he deposited less than he wrote out receipts for.

The other students, who are from the area unlike Zachary and admire the mayor, are against this being tried as a case, and the townspeople basically turn against him. He loses his drugstore job.

Nevertheless, stubborn, intelligent, and somewhat angry, he perseveres. The "trial" doesn't go as planned.

Thomas Mitchell does a beautiful job as the mayor, and there are other excellent character actors in the film: Anne Seymour, Walter Abel, and Burt Douglas. John Smith, who starred in TV western Laramie, plays Zachary's good friend.

This is a good movie, with an earnest performance by Jones, who went on to do films for Disney, starred in the TV series Hennessy, later starred as the original Bobby in the musical Company on Broadway, and then became born-again and dedicated his life to mostly performances in Christian-based productions, including a one-man show, St. John in Exile.

Well worth seeing, and the footage of '30s farms and people affected by drought is sobering, to say the least.

Excellent 82 minute story which plots justice, morality and law against a small community's mayor whose "accounting methods" (during a very distressed economically period) become questioned by a mock Grand Jury proceeding held by studying local Law Students.

Particular note was a very enjoyable ending which ultimately leaves the viewers to decide where their boundaries of law, justice and morality would reside if tasked with leading a community through a period of economically induced suffrage.

For this viewer "Handle with Care" was an elegant (Thomas Mitchell) depiction of a conundrum.

This is a very interesting idea for a movie, but here's it's been done in a pretty hokey way, with amateurish writing and some weak acting. A decent scriptwriter, backed up by serious talent in the acting and directing departments, could make an excellent movie of it. There's the sense of unravelling a mystery, the young generation against the older, the whiff of corruption in a picture-perfect town, and a climactic scene that the audience has been waiting for all along. I wasn't particularly surprised at the ending here, since it could have gone in only one of two ways, but a more creative approach could cap everything off in a more interesting way.