by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the 1951 film Criminal
Lawyer, one of the odd items TCM showed
about a month ago as part of a tribute to actress Jane Wyatt. It turned out to
be a nice 74-minute quasi-noir
“B” in which Pat O’Brien, seedier and considerably more restrained as an actor
than usual, played alcoholic attorney James Edward Reagan (incidentally the
last name is pronounced “REE-gun,” the way Ronald Reagan pronounced his name
when he was an actor, not the “RAY-gun” pronunciation Ronnie adopted when he
got into politics). Reagan is a standard-issue high-class shyster, following a
character template set in the early 1930’s based on such flamboyant real-life
attorneys as New York’s Bill Fallon and L.A.’s Earl Rogers (Rogers was the
father of Hearst reporter turned screenwriter Adela Rogers St. John and was
Erle Stanley Gardner’s real-life model for the character of Perry Mason). He’s
skilled at winning acquittals for gangsters and high-paying clients by staging
scenes outside the courtroom that convince juries to vote his way; in the
opening scene he discredits the one eyewitness to a killing committed by
gangster Vincent Cheney (Mickey Knox) by staging a scene in which the two get
photographed together but the witness didn’t recognize Cheney when the picture
was taken, contradicting his statement that “I’d know him anywhere.” Reagan
alternates between periods of relative sobriety (there’s a clever and amusing
scene in which he’s at a bar drinking … milk, which the bartender shame-facedly
confesses he’s never served anyone
before) and full-scale binges that are jeopardizing not only his legal skills
but his physical health as well. The plot by Harold R. Greene shows off the
skill of old-time screenwriters at packing numerous incidents in a relatively
short (74-minute) running time, as Reagan gets nominated for a judgeship and
hopes the promotion will get him out of the sleazy business of representing
high-paying clients and getting them off on legal but unethical tricks. Only
his judicial appointment first has to be approved by the Bar Association, and a
well-connected state senator, Tucker Bourne (Carl Benton Reid), sandbags the
appointment.
Then Bill Webber (Darryl Hickman), ne’er-do-well son of
1-percenter Melville Webber (Wallis Clark), gets arrested for manslaughter — he
was on his way home from a drunken party when he ran down and killed a
pedestrian — and Webber père and
Bourne see Reagan together and basically say that if Reagan takes Bill’s case
and gets him off, the judgeship will be his. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the
judicial appointment, Reagan has turned over both his law office and his
long-suffering secretary Maggie Powell (Jane Wyatt) to his partner, Clark P.
Sommers (Robert Shayne in a quite good Warren William-style performance), and
Sommers has cut a deal with gangster Harry Cheney (Douglas Fowley), Vincent’s
brother, to represent him exclusively in exchange for a cut of the profits from
Cheney’s criminal enterprises. By staging three fake accidents in which members
of the Webber jury nearly run down pedestrians themselves — the “pedestrians”
are actually actors hired by Reagan, who’s masterminding Webber’s defense
behind the scenes even though Sommers is actually the attorney appearing in
court — Reagan wins Bill Webber’s acquittal, only he’s confronted at his home
by Mrs. Johnson (Mary Ann Hokanson), widow of Bill Webber’s victim, who pulls a
gun on Reagan and tells him that the money the Webber family was originally
going to pay her as a settlement instead went to Reagan as a fee, and therefore
she is destitute. Reagan’s conscience and his alcoholism both go into overdrive at this revelation, and he’s
traced down after a week-long binge by his long-suffering chauffeur, Moose
Hendricks (Mike Mazurki, the marvelous character actor from Murder,
My Sweet — once again cast as a character
named “Moose”!), an ex-wrestler Reagan once saved from a murder charge. Then
Harry Cheney is found clubbed to death in his apartment and Moose is arrested
for the crime; Reagan comes back and at first is unsteady on his feet in the
courtroom, but later pulls himself together and establishes not only that Moose
is innocent but the real killer is … frankly, I was expecting it to be Reagan
himself having killed Cheney in a drunken stupor and then forgotten about the
crime when he sobered up, but instead [spoiler alert!] it’s Sommers, who fought with Cheney when Cheney
wanted to renegotiate their deal and hit him with a bowling trophy Cheney had
won years before and kept displayed on his desk. Criminal Lawyer is the sort of movie that doesn’t break any ground —
though the script does achieve
originality through an artful and unusual blending of clichés — but does achieve the sort of reliable entertainment the
studio system (just breaking down when this film was made) was good at, and
it’s better than average in its understated but still very much discernible
social critique of how people with money (legally or illegally obtained) can
buy favorable treatment from the courts and thereby avoid paying for crimes
that the 99 percent get popped for and sentenced to long prison terms.
