"Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" was the last Hollywood film of German-born director Fritz Lang. It is a crime drama with a strange premise- a man plants evidence to incriminate himself in a crime. The man in question is Tom Garrett, a successful novelist who is engaged to Susan, the daughter of a newspaper proprietor named Austin Spencer. Spencer is leading a crusade against capital punishment, and discusses with his prospective son-in-law a scheme he has concocted to discredit the death penalty. He will wait until a murder is committed for which the police have no obvious suspects. He and an accomplice will then plant evidence at the scene of the crime implicating the accomplice in the murder. The accomplice will be arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. At this point Spencer will come forward with the evidence which will prove the man's innocence, leading to his release and (or so Spencer hopes) to the abolition of capital punishment in the State.
Shortly afterwards a stripper named Patti Gray is found strangled, and Garrett volunteers to act as guinea-pig in Spencer's scheme. He and Spencer plant evidence suggesting Garrett's guilt, and he is duly arrested and placed on trial for Patti's murder. A series of plot twists then follow. Spencer, the one man who can prove Garrett's innocence, is killed in a car crash, and the documentary evidence of Garrett's innocence is presumed to have been destroyed along with his car. Garrett attempts to tell the court about his part in Spencer's scheme, but he is not believed and is convicted. At the last minute the vital documents are discovered in Spencer's safe, and when they are proved to be genuine the prosecution recommend to the State Governor that Garrett be pardoned.
There is, however, one final twist to follow. In a conversation with Susan, Garrett inadvertently reveals that he has been guilty all along; Patti, whose real name was Emma Blucher, was Garrett's former wife and had been pursuing him for money ever since he achieved success as a novelist. He went along with Spencer's scheme because he saw it as a chance to kill her and then be formally proclaimed innocent of her death.
As a thriller, the film has its points of interest, but it fails as a human drama because all the characters are either unsympathetic or uninteresting. Even before the truth about Garrett is revealed, he seems too keen to go along with Spencer's hare-brained scheme, which must make us wonder what his true motives are, and his behaviour involves a good deal of emotional cruelty to Susan, the woman he supposedly loves. Spencer, as another reviewer has pointed out, is the sort of left-liberal ideologue who sees everything in abstract terms without weighing the human cost of his ideas. Roy Thompson, the crusading District Attorney who prosecutes Garrett, is the sort of right-wing ideologue who is motivated less by a genuine concern for law and order than by political ambition. Susan is bland and colourless. Garrett's defence lawyer Jonathan Wilson is a minor figure. The police are hopelessly incompetent, failing to uncover the most elementary facts about the murder victim, including her marriage to Garrett and her true name. The only character who has any spark about her is Dolly, the brassy peroxide-blonde showgirl whom Garrett briefly befriends as part of his scheme.
Despite its theme, the film does not make any serious contribution to the debate on capital punishment. As Spencer points out, fictional stories are of little use in this debate, which is why makers of films attacking the death penalty ("I Want to Live", "10 Rillington Place", "Let Him Have It") have tended to concentrate on real-life miscarriages of justice rather than invented ones. The film glosses over the drawbacks in Spencer's scheme. Apart from the obvious danger of an man being put to death for a crime he did not commit should the scheme go wrong, these drawbacks are legal, moral and practical. What Spencer and Garrett are doing is illegal and they could be prosecuted for wasting police time or conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Morally, Spencer's idea of securing the conviction of an innocent man means that the real murderer will go undetected and free to kill again. Practically, even if Spencer's idea had succeeded perfectly, its success would not have persuaded many supporters of capital punishment to change their minds. It is hard to regard a case in which the defendant engineers his own conviction as a genuine miscarriage of justice.
"Halliwell's Film Guide" describes this film as an ingenious but mechanical thriller, and it is hard to dissent from that judgement. The plot is a far-fetched one, but it is competently handled, even if the final twist did seem rather too obvious. It never succeeds, however, on any level other than that of the mechanical thriller; in the last resort it is clever but cold and pretentious. It is not on the same level as Lang's great noir thriller from three years earlier, "The Big Heat". 6/10
Shortly afterwards a stripper named Patti Gray is found strangled, and Garrett volunteers to act as guinea-pig in Spencer's scheme. He and Spencer plant evidence suggesting Garrett's guilt, and he is duly arrested and placed on trial for Patti's murder. A series of plot twists then follow. Spencer, the one man who can prove Garrett's innocence, is killed in a car crash, and the documentary evidence of Garrett's innocence is presumed to have been destroyed along with his car. Garrett attempts to tell the court about his part in Spencer's scheme, but he is not believed and is convicted. At the last minute the vital documents are discovered in Spencer's safe, and when they are proved to be genuine the prosecution recommend to the State Governor that Garrett be pardoned.
There is, however, one final twist to follow. In a conversation with Susan, Garrett inadvertently reveals that he has been guilty all along; Patti, whose real name was Emma Blucher, was Garrett's former wife and had been pursuing him for money ever since he achieved success as a novelist. He went along with Spencer's scheme because he saw it as a chance to kill her and then be formally proclaimed innocent of her death.
As a thriller, the film has its points of interest, but it fails as a human drama because all the characters are either unsympathetic or uninteresting. Even before the truth about Garrett is revealed, he seems too keen to go along with Spencer's hare-brained scheme, which must make us wonder what his true motives are, and his behaviour involves a good deal of emotional cruelty to Susan, the woman he supposedly loves. Spencer, as another reviewer has pointed out, is the sort of left-liberal ideologue who sees everything in abstract terms without weighing the human cost of his ideas. Roy Thompson, the crusading District Attorney who prosecutes Garrett, is the sort of right-wing ideologue who is motivated less by a genuine concern for law and order than by political ambition. Susan is bland and colourless. Garrett's defence lawyer Jonathan Wilson is a minor figure. The police are hopelessly incompetent, failing to uncover the most elementary facts about the murder victim, including her marriage to Garrett and her true name. The only character who has any spark about her is Dolly, the brassy peroxide-blonde showgirl whom Garrett briefly befriends as part of his scheme.
Despite its theme, the film does not make any serious contribution to the debate on capital punishment. As Spencer points out, fictional stories are of little use in this debate, which is why makers of films attacking the death penalty ("I Want to Live", "10 Rillington Place", "Let Him Have It") have tended to concentrate on real-life miscarriages of justice rather than invented ones. The film glosses over the drawbacks in Spencer's scheme. Apart from the obvious danger of an man being put to death for a crime he did not commit should the scheme go wrong, these drawbacks are legal, moral and practical. What Spencer and Garrett are doing is illegal and they could be prosecuted for wasting police time or conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Morally, Spencer's idea of securing the conviction of an innocent man means that the real murderer will go undetected and free to kill again. Practically, even if Spencer's idea had succeeded perfectly, its success would not have persuaded many supporters of capital punishment to change their minds. It is hard to regard a case in which the defendant engineers his own conviction as a genuine miscarriage of justice.
"Halliwell's Film Guide" describes this film as an ingenious but mechanical thriller, and it is hard to dissent from that judgement. The plot is a far-fetched one, but it is competently handled, even if the final twist did seem rather too obvious. It never succeeds, however, on any level other than that of the mechanical thriller; in the last resort it is clever but cold and pretentious. It is not on the same level as Lang's great noir thriller from three years earlier, "The Big Heat". 6/10