Twilight of Honor

In an unnamed city in a fictional county in New Mexico, a vicious killer (Nick Adams) is being tried for murder. The courtroom drama focuses on an ambitious prosecutor (James Gregory) and a young and inexperience defender (Richard Chamberlain).

Gregory is trying to ride the publicity surrounding the trial to a high political office, and there seem to be a lot of people willing to railroad the kid into the gas chamber. The case has several curious aspects. Adams has signed two different confessions but both of them have omitted large parts of his story. Adams also has a tramp for a wife (Joey Heatherton) who turned him in for the reward!

Into this media circus of lies and hype comes young Chamberlain who must battle the system ((including a judge who clearly favors the prosecutor). He relies on advice from a wily old lawyer (Claude Rains) who's been sidelined by ill health. Rains also has a comely daughter (Joan Blackman) who has eyes for Chamberlain.

Can the young lawyer navigate the complicated legal waters and fight the corruption to save his client?

All the actors are fine. Chamberlain (currently starring on TV as Dr. Kildare) gets the star build-up here from MGM. Rains steals all his scenes and Gregory and Adams are solid performers (Adams won an Oscar nomination). Heatherton makes her film debut here.

Cast includes Jeanette Nolan as the widow, Linda Evans as her daughter, Edgar Stehli as the judge, Arch Johnson as the bartender, Robin Raymond as Heatherton's ma, and Pat Buttram as the victim.

Much of the film is told in flashback, but the overall storyline suffers by being a tad too close to the classic Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Still worth a look.

This is, though entertaining, far from a good movie. It comes across as a long television show. And no wonder! The director did mostly TV. At the time, star Richard Chamberlain was known primarily for his Dr. Kildare series.

The supporting cast is lots of fun. It runs the gamut from -- OK, ready? Pat Butram .... to Joey Heatherton ... to Claude Rains. Yes, in the middle of this tale of a poor low class kid (Nick Adams, suitably confused looking) caught in the midst of a class-conscious small Southern town, Rains is the patriarchal retired lawyer. Yes, Claude Rains.

He looks frail and certainly doesn't seem especially Southern. But here was a man who never turned in a bad performance.

Chamberlain is good, too, and Jeanette Nolan is touching as the wife of the man Adams is accused of murdering.

OK courtroom drama from Perlberg-Seaton, with MGM capitalizing on Richard Chamberlain's TV success by casting him as a rather Kildare-like defense attorney. He's recently widowed, and he's given the unenviable job of defending sleazy-but-polite Nick Adams, who's already confessed, twice, to murdering Pat Buttram, a well-liked local politico who was trying to make time with Adams' sluttish wife, Joey Heatherton. Chamberlain's OK, and so are the courtroom exploits, with a screenplay that seems to delight in pushing the envelope a bit in terms of sexual conversation circa 1963. There's discussion of impotence, sleeping nude, and prostitution, and several sequences of Joey Heatherton twitching luridly next to a jukebox. But the best reason to watch is Claude Rains, as Chamberlain's former professor and current legal adviser. He looks genuinely unsteady and hasn't many good lines, but it's a beautiful, modest, underplayed performance. Joan Blackman is on hand as his daughter, to provide the rather tepid romantic interest, and Jeanette Nolan is good (when wasn't she) as Buttram's protective widow. The flashback format is unwieldy, and Boris Sagal directs it like it's a big TV show, but it keeps your interest pretty steadily, especially as a barometer of what was and wasn't permissible on screen in1963.

Richard Chamberlain was as big a star as MGM ever had when Chamberlain was TV's Dr. Kildare. Chamberlain had an iron clad 7 year contract, and MGM kept him busy both on TV and in movies, and his first movie was the western A Thunder of Drums billed far below George Hamilton and Luana Patten. After his rocket to fame, MGM starred Richard Chamberlain in this first rate court room drama Twilight Of Honor to cash in on Chamberlain's tremendous popularity. In his Dr. Kildare days Chamberlain is reported to have gotten 15,000 fan letters per week more than Clark Gable ever got in his heyday as King of the MGM Lot. MGM in those days was the premier movie studio and this film reflects the quality production values the MGM studio gave its films. The production team of Perlberg/Seaton were assigned this film and cast along with Chamberlain a true star and class act Claude Rains. Nick Adams also stars. Quality film.

This is the infamous film for which Nick Adams was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar owing to his spending a great deal of his own money and time campaigning. He had promised best friend, actor Robert Conrad, that he was going to be the first TV actor to get a nomination and he did, after sparing no effort to browbeat Academy members. According to Hollywood legend, he even invited a bunch to his home for a big party and then fell asleep just as they arrived. Also, he was supposedly dumbfounded when Melvyn Douglas received the award for his old cowboy in Hud. Adams is okay, nothing more, in this film - he actually should have campaigned for another film he did that year, The Hook with Kirk Douglas, because that was his best role ever in a film. Here, he wears a black leather jacket and does a James Dean routine (they were in Rebel Without a Cause together, Dean with the lead, Adams with one line) as a misunderstood loner he gets accused of murder. His love interest, a wild child, is played by Joey Heatherton, who had been depressed ever since her father, TV's Merry Mailman, refused to let her play the title role in Lolita - which is pretty much what she does here, only doing so after Tuesday Weld passed up the part in this film. Richard Chamberlain, in his bland leading man days before he learned to act by doing Hamlet in London, is the defense lawyer, Joan Blackman his classy girlfriend, and the great Claude Raines provides the real reason for watching as an older lawyer. Watchable but routine, and not very different from any halfway decent TV lawyer show of the time except that it runs twice as long.