Grand Jury

When even a script by Joseph Fields and Philip G. Epstein and the presence of Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Billy Gilbert can't save a movie, a viewer knows they're in trouble.

Fred Stone may have been a delightful and welcome personality to audiences in the first third of the century, but he's nothing but annoyingly obnoxious in this one. The movie paints him as a charming eccentric who seems to be doing wrong but comes out right but, in actuality, he's a stupid busybody who gets a couple of innocent people killed through his dimwitted schemes. Every time the movie threatens to become interesting or funny, Stone's character mucks it up by doing something that no one with three functioning brain cells would do.

The Monopoly scene is a decent one, but that's mainly due to Williams's talents and Stone's not being an active presence in the scene.

I'm a sucker for unknown and little-seen B pictures, but this is like one of those acts that closed vaudeville shows: intended to clear out the theatre to make room for the next audience.

Grand Jury (1936)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

When a gangster (Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams) gets away with murder, a reporter (Owen Davis, Jr.) and a commodore (Fred Stone) decide to track down evidence, which will prove he killed a man in cold blood. GRAND JURY is a pretty bad movie that doesn't have much working for it. It's also a rather bizarre movie because it tries to mix comedy and crime drama but the end results just don't work. What really hurts this movie is the screenplay, which seems to run out of gas around the twenty-minute mark and everything else that follows just seems lazy and underwritten. The final forty-or-so minutes of the film just have the two leads walking around, talking and asking questions but nothing they say is very interesting. Even dumber are some strange comedy sequences that are added for no apparent reason. It almost seems as if someone was directing a drama, got fired and the replacement director didn't realize they were doing drama so just started adding in comedy. Both Stone and Davis are less than entertaining to say the least. Both of them are playing pretty annoying characters and the screenplay just never gives them anything interesting to do. The best scene in the film comes from actor Harry Beresford who addresses the grand jury after they've let the gangster off for killing his son. The actor does a very good job in the sequence and it's highly memorable for its emotional punch.

At the opening, they are pulling names out of a pool for jury duty, and one of the jurors selected is Taylor, played by Frank Thomas. it's a murder case, and Britt (Guinn Williams) will be tried for it. but then, shots are fired! and the cases are all turned around. Steve, the ace reporter, keeps running in with more news, but every time he has a scoop, it goofs things up more and more. that's the running gag. Grandpa Taylor (the Commodore, played by Fred Stone) gets involved, and gets things more screwed up. lots of yammering and talking in circles, as the gangsters try to silence any witnesses. the story kind of meanders all over... there's the subplot where we follow the Commodore around town for a while, as he tries to lose his bodyguard. so much time spent on this. the script must have come up short. let's see what was the plot again? oh yes, the Commodore promises to provide a break in "the case"... what case, at this point?? this is the one from RKO, 1936. there were also "Grand Jury" in 1959 (tv series) and a film in 1976. Directed by Al Rogell... was in silent films for YEARS before moving into talkers. Steve (Owen Davis) only had 16 roles, and died of drowning at age 41. this one is pretty weak all over. it limps along to the end, but no big deal. Now, these guys would have been arrested for obstructing justice, or witness tampering. or something.

John Taylor is called for jury duty. He's not happy. He wants to get out but his father George argues for civic duty. It's a murder trial against gangster Joseph Britt. Tom Evans, the father of the murder victim, shoots Britt in the courtroom as the trial goes downhill. Tom is arrested for wounding the defendant. George Taylor turns out to be Tom's friend and he suggests to a cub reporter that Tom is going to name names.

If George is connected to the victim and John is desperate to get out of the trial, it seems to be a straight road with an obvious offramp. A conflict of interest should be an easy way to get out. The premise has a few holes. The movie is also trying very hard to be a screwball comedy. Non of it generates a laugh but the effort is surely there. They get to break a few fake glass windows. The funniest bit may be Monopoly and that's only because it's so stupid. All in all, it's not great at either drama nor comedy but it's almost good enough to pass. Fred Stone has a loveable senior personality and that goes some of the way. In the end, it doesn't go the rest of the way.

This film is about a bunch of gangsters (headed by the incredibly dumb Guinn Williams) and some folks who want to clean up the town. There are two serious problems with getting rid of the gang--they have an upstanding citizen within their ranks and the Commodore is determined to stop them and the Commodore is REALLY dumb. In fact, so many of the characters are idiots that you wonder is there's something in the drinking water or soil in this town! "Grand Jury" is, at best, an adequate time-passer. It's a shame, as it had some story elements that might have worked--it's just that combining comedy with a crime drama simply didn't work very well. In addition, several of the characters were just downright annoying and stupid--especially the Commodore, who seems dumber than a taco! Because of this, it's not a film I especially enjoyed or would recommend.

If you do watch it, a couple things to look for is, perhaps, the earliest reference to Monopoly in a film as well as a quick look at Stymie Beard in a non-Our Gang role. Sadly, like many black characters of the era, he's given a subhuman name--as if to further marginalize him (he's called 'Marshmallow'!!).