Ladies of the Jury (RKO, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a 1932 film that had an intriguing title, Ladies of the Jury – which turned out to be a minor gem, a courtroom comedy starring Edna May Oliver as Mrs. Livingston Baldwin Crane, a Social Register type who ends up on the jury in a murder case against Yvette Gordon (Jill Esmond, who was briefly Laurence Olivier’s first wife before she left him for a female lover with whom she stayed for decades; in one of the greatest near-misses in movie history she was set to play the female lead in the 1932 film A Bill of Divorcement, only she and Olivier high-tailed it back to England just before the film went into production and producer David O. Selznick put a New England-born actress named Katharine Hepburn into it instead), a former Broadway chorus girl who is accused of murdering her much older sugar-daddy husband for his money. The judge in the case, Henry Fish (Robert McWade) is an old acquaintance of Mrs. Crane – a fact she keeps reminding him of throughout the trial, when she isn’t absent-mindedly grabbing his gavel. The prosecutor is a vicious monster named Halsey Van Styne (Alan Roscoe) – Mrs. Crane has never met him before but recognizes his last name because their ancestors fought together during the American Revolution – and the defense attorney is a hapless young man named Rutherford Dale (Morgan Galloway) who appears to be in puppy-love with the defendant – though the writers (John Frederick Ballard, original play; Marion Dix, “adaptation”; Salisbury Field, “dialogue”; and Eddie Welch, “additional dialogue”) blessedly don’t do much more than hint at that.

Instead they and the director, Lowell Sherman (he was both an actor and director and sometimes did both in the same movie; he wasn’t much of a director but his work here is unusually stylish for him) create delightful comic chaos as Mrs. Crane uses her rarely used right to question the witnesses directly … again and again. Midway through this 63-minute programmer the attorneys make their closing statements, the case goes to the jury … and the film suddenly turns into a prototype of Twelve Angry Men (though it’s interesting that a movie made just 12 years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment has a gender-mixed jury where the 1950’s film was indeed just 12 angry men), as Mrs. Crane insists that Yvette is innocent while the other 11 are ready to convict her – and she persuades them much the way Henry Fonda did in the later film, by exposing the social prejudices that are leading them to convict the defendant whom she’s convinced is innocent. When Mrs. Crane reveals that one of the jurors is voting to convict just because he doesn’t like French people, she gets another juror to change sides because h is wife is a Frenchwoman he met while serving in World War I, and she also gets the vote of a chorus girl on the jury by getting another juror to admit that she’s prejudiced against chorus girls. The last holdout is Lily Pratt (Cora Witherspoon), who got on the jury just before Mrs. Crane did and showed up for court in a severe suit and a man’s tie and announced she was the head of a women’s “morality” group (much like the ones who would mobilize two years later and demand strict enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code and end the period of relative honesty in depicting sex often referred to as the “pre-Code” era).

In the end, she not only persuades the jury to acquit Yvette (who in her trial hadn’t made her cause any easier by constantly interrupting the court proceedings until Mrs. Crane told her to knock it off by addressing her in French; of course she and the defendant are the only two people in the courtroom who understand her!), she also uses the court bailiff to slip a note to her maid, ostensibly about dress patterns but actually a call to a private detective to investigate the man Mrs. Crane is convinced is the real culprit, Chauncey Gordon (Leyland Hodgson), nephew of the victim and the man wh oi’d inherit his fortune if his wife were convicted of the crime and executed for it. The key prosecution witness was Mrs. Gordon’s maid, Evelyn Snow (Helene Millard), who testified that Mrs. Gordon had shot her husband and then said, “What have I done?” Mrs. Gordon’s own testimony was that her husband had held a gun on her and tried to shoot her, only they both reached for the gun (this was made just six years after Chicago premiered on stage and famously used the “they both reached for the gun” gimmick) and the gun went off and killed him. Mrs. Crane insists that the jury be bused to the Gordon home, where she can see the table on which the gun was found – and when they reconstruct the crime the exhibit gun goes off and fires a bullet into a secret panel behind which Chauncey Gordon was hiding because he didn’t want anyone to know there was a connection between him and the maid (whom he had bribed to lie with the promise of a chunk of the Gordon fortune). The cops show up and arrest Chauncey and the maid, and the final “Not Guilty!” verdict is not shown but announced audibly over the RKO end title. Ladies of the Jury is one of those charming little films that got made during the studio system and give us old movie buffs real pleasure when they come to our attention; the big studios (and some of the small ones as well) turned these things out like clockwork in the 1930’s and 1940’s but sometimes they turned out a clock with really fine quality, as they did here.