Opening with a death-row electrocution and ending at the moment in which a man is presumably sentenced to the same fate, Reasonable Doubt is defined by its audacious, sensationalistic arrangement of events. The story's anti-capital punishment premise—a struggling writer frames himself for murder to prove the fallibility of the death penalty—obviously lends itself to pulpy embellishment, but the film's most spectacular feat is its jaw-dropping last-reel twist, which puts its own purported moral stance through the ringer by positing emotion as the true determiner of principles. Lang baldly manipulates the audience with this reversal, but his purpose, deeper than momentary awe, is to illustrate the eternal conflict in society between humankind's self-preserving unpredictability and its own noble, if constantly undermined, search for unified moral judgments. What ultimately transcends the stodginess of the theoretical conversations between the main players and their necessarily shallow characterizations (the film hinges on befuddlement for a reason) is Lang's empathy for a condemned man, a sensibility fully embodied in two shots: a close-up on a revoked certificate of pardon and the reverse shot of its regarder as he sadly considers freedom for the last time. In retrospect, the story's outcome is established in one of its very first shots, as the guilty party looks unblinkingly upon an execution while the other spectators turn away in disgust. Lang's thesis is easily described after all: the only man who can emotionlessly observe the practice of capital punishment is himself a murderer.
Review of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
