1956’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a late-career noir directed by Fritz Lang, his very last production for an American studio. It’s weirdly flat in style for Lang, whose early triumphs M & Metropolois helped establish foundational cinematic language that pushed the still-young artform to its furthest extremes. Here, he’s so bored with the form that he goes through the motions of a legal procedural as if he were making a televised Movie of the Week, give or take a few lateral camera maneuvers that attempt to liven up long scenes of men talking at desks & tables. Lang even calls attention to this TV-movie quality by speeding along witness testimony in montage as presented on a local news broadcast, shot in the same multi-camera style as the film proper. However, the longer you stick with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt‘s preposterous, only-in-the-movies courtroom drama the more complicated its moral & narrative implications become, until it spirals out into a big-picture indictment of the entire American justice system and then, ultimately, lands a few unexpected jabs as a twist-a-minute thriller. What I’m getting at here is that it’s Fritz Lang’s Juror #2.

Dana Andrews (of Laura fame) stars as a hotshot novelist who’s eager to score a big hit with his second book so he can afford a high-society marriage to his newspaper heiress fiancée (Joan Fontaine, of Rebecca fame). His best lead is a hairbrained idea cooked up by his father-in-law-to-be, a newspaper man who’s in constant public battle with the local DA over the ethics of capital punishment. Incensed that the DA is “trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed men,” the father-in-law schemes to trick the aspiring politician into sentencing a provably innocent man to death based on planted, circumstantial evidence. Convinced that the scheme has the potential for national publicity, the novelist foolishly agrees to frame himself for the murder of a burlesque dancer, hoping to turn the experience into his next hit book (and, why not, make a political statement against capital punishment too, if it’s convenient enough). As anyone who’s ever seen a movie before would guess, things go awry when the evidence proving his innocence is destroyed, and his fated date with an electric chair becomes more inevitable than theoretical.

It’s how Douglas Morrow’s script disappears that exonerating evidence and what happens to the novelist once it’s gone that makes Beyond a Reasonable Doubt narratively tricky. The 80-minute potboiler doesn’t fully get cooking until the final quarter, when Morrow throws in at least one twist too many and the pot boils over. The first twist is a violent shock. The second is a disappointingly conventional cop-out that defuses the tension. Then, the third twist desperately attempts to add some traditional thriller tension back into the plot, calling the movie’s morals & politics into question in a way that can’t fully be reconciled because it happens at the very last moment. At the start, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a thought experiment cooked up by noble writers who aim to take down wicked politicians who use state-sanctioned murder to further their careers. Since the objectively evil practice of capital punishment is still alive & well today (with Louisiana & other states gassing prisoners and subjecting them to firing squads again), maybe it’s to the movie’s benefit that it ends as a cheap-thrills mystery plot instead. Lang & Morrow made no detectable impact on the American justice system, but they did pull a few gasps out of an unsuspecting audience, even if entirely out of incredulity. Like with Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, I doubt it would’ve been notable to anyone if it were filed under a workman director’s name instead of Lang’s, but there is something to its moral precarity that can’t be fully dismissed.

-Brandon Ledet