On Trial

A financier is dead, and John Litel seems to have killed him. Will vanished wife Margareret Lindsay reappear in time to save her husband, ON TRIAL for murder? Sometimes the Warner Brothers penchant for remaking its old movies as Bs can result in something interesting, but in this case, the plot itself is way too Victorian to be convincing in 1939 dress. As a result, some of the plot twists just seem weird. The violations of judicial procedure will not only appall any lawyer, but have any amateur enthusiast of Law and Order or even Perry Mason chuckling about the absurdities.

John Litel and Margaret Lindsay turn in average performances. One would like to sic W.C. Fields on the child actor, who, alas, gets a lot of scream, er, screen, time. The direction is efficient, but no more than that.

In other words, not a bad movie, but also not a movie anyone would need to see. The original 1928 movie, however, appears to be lost.

Yes, as some have said, this barely hour long "B" picture remake (the third filming of one of the 20th Century's more important popular playwrights, Elmer Rice's, first produced play - and a massive hit for the time the original was, at almost a full year on Broadway when the average HIT expected a mere two to three month run!) is probably not on too many people's "must see" list - but it ought to be.

This 1939 streamlining of Rice's original loses a half hour of what was retained for the (hopefully for now only) lost 1928 filming and the 1917 silent version of Rice's 1914 play (written and produced before he changed his name from Reizenstein) but retains all the salient plot points which made the original so historically important. According to theatre historian/chronicler Gerald Bordman, Rice's ON TRIAL was the first courtroom drama to actually follow a trial from start to finish and the first to employ the now seemingly ubiquitous "flashback" on Broadway. The structure still works.

As before, a man is on trial for murdering a colleague who had lent him money and MAY have been involved with the accused man's now missing wife. The accused does not want to defend himself. If there is a real weakness in this abbreviated version it is losing some of the explanation of how the trial can go on when the accused won't stop confessing - but it is fairly clear that his confessions are an attempt to cover for someone else as well as to shield his all too Shirley Temple-like daughter from the revelations of a trial. Yes, the child is, by modern lights, just short of insufferable, but such was the taste of the day and she does what she is called upon to do very well.

The play and film have been copied so often (at a time when happy endings were the order of the day, it is not giving anything away to say that all is revealed before the final curtain) the original has slipped into obscurity and even this second remake is hard to find, but it is easy to sit through for any fan of period mysteries and close to essential viewing for any real student of the evolution of the modern mystery. The cast (even the irritating Shirley Temple wanna-be moppet) is certainly acceptable if not stellar for Warner Brothers - it was, after all tossed off as a "programmer" rather than one of their lead features - with John Litel (in the role of the accused which Burt Lytell played in 1928) continued as a studio staple until switching to TV in the early 1950's and working right up until 1967. As his mysterious wife, top billed Margaret Lindsey has the perfect guilty intensity and worked just as often and long (through 1974), perhaps best remembered as Nikki Porter in the Ellery Queen mystery movies in the 1940's.

If you can find a copy, don't turn your nose up at this quality "B movie"! It's a piece of mystery history you should treat yourself to.