by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I looked for something
relatively short Charles and I could watch last night, and found it in one of the eight
episodes of the 1950’s TV anthology series Climax! I had recently downloaded from archive.org. Alas,
the download sounded O.K. during the first half of the program but then the
sound got muddy, soft and badly distorted — it was almost impossible to hear what
the actors were saying — a real pity because the episode itself was quite good,
a compelling if not exactly original drama. It was called “Jacob and the Angel”
and starred Gig Young as Edgar Holt, an unscrupulous defense attorney whose
guilty conscience over using tricky trial tactics to get the guilty acquitted
has led him to a heavy-duty drinking problem (he’s got a way of sneaking out of
the courtroom for brief hits from his omnipresent flask). He’s been dating
Irene Mitchell (June Lockhart), daughter of a judge (Otto Kruger), but he also
drifts into an affair with his most recent client, Elissa Carlton (Eva Gabor),
and his key crisis of conscience comes when he has to defend a young man named
Ricardo Andrada, son of his cleaning woman.
His drinking and mental state
results in him screwing up the case big-time, antagonizing Judge Mitchell (who
retaliates by overruling virtually all his objections; in the real world a
judge whose daughter was dating one of the attorneys would recuse himself) and
ending up so sloshed the night before he has to deliver his closing statement
that he winds up quoting the Sermon on the Mount twice until the judge stops him. The jury convicts
Andrada (the irony is that he’s the first defendant Holt has had in years who
he genuinely thought was innocent) and the judge holds Holt in contempt, and
his subsequent receipt of a letter from the Bar announcing that they’re going
to try to disbar him sends him streaking down to the gutter big-time: faithful
Irene Mitchell and Holt’s Chinese houseboy Chen (Keye Luke, 20 years older than
when he played Charlie Chan’s Number One Son and visibly that much older but
still good looking and the voice of reason among all the crazy,
self-destructive and/or co-dependent white characters) try to stop him from
drinking himself to death. They trace him to a flophouse and bring him back to
his law office, where Mrs. Andrada confronts him and compares him to the
Biblical character of Jacob wrestling with the angels; he agrees not to fight
his disbarment in hopes that his confession that he was so under the weather
during the trial that he couldn’t give Andrada adequate counsel will help him
get a new trial.
This isn’t exactly the freshest premise for a drama in the
world, and the original story was co-written by Rowland Brown — who wrote, and
in some cases directed, some of the toughest gangster stories of the 1930’s (Quick
Millions, Blood Money, The Devil Is a Sissy and Angels with Dirty Faces, which he wrote for James Cagney at Grand National in 1937, only when
Warner Bros. won back Cagney’s contract on appeal they bought the script but
assigned one of their own contractees, Michael Curtiz, to direct) — and has
some of his toughness and resistance to sentiment. It’s also surprisingly well
acted by Young, who had played an alcoholic six years earlier in the movie Come
Fill the Cup (a vehicle for James
Cagney, who plays a recovering alcoholic trying to keep Young’s character sober) and won an Academy
Award nomination, though perhaps because it was only a one-hour TV show and not
a feature film Holt’s descent down the primrose path seems to be
rocket-propelled. Still, it’s a tough show (directed by Don Melford from a
script by Oliver Crawford based on the original story by Brown and someone
named Clemmie Galloway), unoriginal but well done and indicative of the
seriousness with which a lot of TV dramas, especially on anthology shows like Climax!, were done in the early days — and the
slice-of-history commercials by the show’s sponsor, Plymouth (particularly the
elaborately ornate “Space-Age Design” that was one of their principal selling
points) add to the appeal.
