... as in I have no idea why Joe E. Brown plays his part with a (German?) accent here. It just makes him harder to understand and adds nothing to his character.
At first it looks like you are going to get two maudlin melodramas for the price of one. The first maudlin melodrama starts as an entertainment team enter a vaudeville house where they are going to be working and discover that a man who hit on the female half of the team is playing there too. Her partner - they are planning to get married - threatens to kill the guy if he touches her again.
So predictably, one night, the lethario performer is found dead in his dressing room with the man who threatened to kill him standing over him holding the gun that shot him. Now here the poverty row roots yield a little humor. The dead man's dressing room looks more like a utility closet. Oh, and you never see the actual dead man's face when he was alive. The accused claims he picked up the gun and found the man dead, and that he is innocent.
Fast forward to the trial, actually the end of it. Since when is the girlfriend of the accused allowed to sit at the defense table? And why is the judge doing the prosecutor's job for him, with jury instructions that sound like he is telling the jury to convict the guy?
So the bulk of the film is in the jury room - and kudos to the makers of the film for including women on the jury. Almost 30 years later it is still "12 Angry Men" after all. Eleven of the jurors vote guilty on the first ballot. The holdout is of course Joe E. Brown's character. He has no real reason for his objection other than he believes the circumstantial evidence claim by the defense and is adamant in his objection. This goes on for five days. When the foreman says he has had enough and is going to tell the judge that they are hopelessly deadlocked, Brown makes a deal with the jury. He says he wants to tell them a story about circumstantial evidence that will change their minds. If it does not, he says, he will vote guilty with the rest of them.
This must be some story, but all I can say is watch and find out. I will tell you that before this last part of the film I was going to give it a 4/10. This last part raises it to a 6/10. It is very interesting seeing Joe E. Brown so early in his film career. This is right before he begins his six year career with Warner Brothers and makes some of his best films. I think he had the kind of comic career there that Buster Keaton could have had in talking films if only Buster had been lucky enough to join up with an outfit that understood his talents as well as Warner Brothers seemed to get Brown.
I'd recommend this one for those interested in both the comic and dramatic talents of Joe E. Brown.
