The Verdict (Warner Bros., 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Lenny TCM showed the 1946 film The Verdict – not to be confused with the 1982 film of that title starring Paul Newman – but the feature-film directorial debut of Don Siegel and the ninth and last screen collaboration between stars Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Ironically, two of their previous films together had also marked the feature debuts of their directors: The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston’s first film; and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944); the first feature completed by Jean Negulesco (he’d started a previous movie, Singapore Woman, but had been fired from it in mid-shoot). Siegel had got his start at Warner Bros. as an archivist for their library of stock footage; he’d taught himself to edit film and had worked his way up to second-unit direction, specializing in montage sequences. It was he who worked out the brilliant sequence in The Roaring Twenties (1939) showing ticker-tape machines literally melting over Wall Street to indicate that the 1929 stock-market crash and the following Great Depression had happened. After World War II Siegel won a chance to make two shorts, Star in the Night (1945) – an oddball allegory of the Nativity for which he deliberately avoided montage so he could prove to Jack Warner that he could do other things – and a documentary called Hitler Lives! (1946). Both these films won Academy Awards for best short subjects – though the awards went to Gordon Hollingshead, then head of Warners’ shorts department, and Siegel never won a competitive Oscar for a feature despite a 36-year directorial career – and Siegel’s reward was this chance to make his first feature.

It was based on an ancient mystery novel called The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill, first published in 1892, which had already been filmed in 1928 (as The Perfect Crime) and 1934 (as The Crime Doctor). The Verdict’s screenwriter, Peter Milne, decided to keep the original story’s 1890’s setting instead of updating it, and though it’s at least tangentially a film noir (TCM was showing it as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series and Greenstreet and Lorre are, of course, major noir actors) the stately setting and slow, methodical pace, determined by the fact that horse-drawn conveyances are still the principal means of urban travel in London, are outside the usual canons of film noir. (Siegel would later become known as one of the fastest of all directors in terms of the pace at which his films moved, but not this first time out.) The Verdict is a classic example of the sort of story known as a “locked-room mystery,” in which the murder victim is discovered inside a room locked both inside and outside and part of the mystery is how the killer entered and exited as well as who it was. The film opens with a sequence in which a young man with a long criminal record is being executed, and police superintendent George Edward Grodman (Sydney Greenstreet) arrives on the scene just after the man is hanged. Then someone tells Grodman that the man who was just hanged was innocent after all; he claimed to have been with a minister who was on his way to Wales, police searches didn’t find such a person, but later it turned out that the minister had actually returned to England following a stint, not in Wales, but in New South Wales in Australia.

As a result of his having convicted and hanged an innocent man, Grodman is fired from the police force and his long-time rival, John R. Buckley (George Coulouris from Citizen Kane), is picked to replace him. Grodman repairs to his boarding house, where among the other tenants is alcoholic artist Victor Emmric (Peter Lorre). The two decide to throw a party featuring “wine, women and song,” though the last two are a problem; instead of going out on the town and experiencing either women or song, they hang around the building and watch as two of their neighbors, mining heir Arthur Kendall (Morton Lowry) and Labour M.P. Clive Russell (Paul Cavanagh), get into a political argument and Victor breaks them up. (I joked, “Peter Lorre, the voice of reason!”) Then Kendall himself is murdered in the proverbial locked room, and Grodman and another eccentric tenant in the building, Vicky Benson (Rosalind Ivan), discover the body. Buckley, investigating the murder for the official police, soon becomes convicted that Clive Russell is the real killer. Grodman and Emmric interview Kendall’s on-again off-again girlfriend, music-hall entertainer Lottie Rawson (Joan Lorring, who does a quite good vocal number in the film, “Give Me a Little Bit,” and uses her own voice), and the two of them ultimately deduce that Kendall actually killed the original victim, his aunt who was about to disinherit him, and framed the innocent man for the crime. Grodman decides to write a memoir of his 35 years on the London police force, and asks Emmric to illustrate it for him. The cops briefly suspect Emmric of Kendall’s murder, but ultimately it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Grodman killed Kendall himself because he had fallen for Kendall’s frame. He set up the scene so Kendall would be drugged and sleep through Vicky Benson’s knock on his door, but would not yet be dead until Grodman himself busted through the door and supposedly “discovered” – but actually killed – Kendall himself.

What makes The Verdict a great movie and a surprisingly good feature debut for Don Siegel is the deliberate pacing and Greenstreet’s performance. Well before we learn that he’s the actual killer, he’s already impressive as an unusually complex character for him, not an out-and-out villain but a genuinely sympathetic and dedicated police officer who’s understandably ashamed that he sent an innocent man to the gallows and figures out a way to retaliate against the man who put him in that position. Siegel had excellent help in making The Verdict: not only a well-constructed script by Peter Milne (though Siegel complained about it for reasons that aren’t clear) but Ernest Haller as cinematographer (he was mostly known for “women’s pictures” – he was Bette Davis’s favorite cameraman and he won his Academy Award for Gone With the Wind – but he’d just shot Joan Crawford’s comeback movie Mildred Pierce, with its trademark blend of romance and noir) and Marlene Dietrich’s favorite songwriter, Frederick Hollander, to compose the score (though I was startled that the song “Give Me a Little Bit” was not by Hollander, but by M. K. Jerome and Jack Scholl; it certainly sounds like the sort of song Hollander would have written for Dietrich).

Though it didn’t get great reviews at the time – Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, It is rather hard to figure just what the Warners saw in this antique mystery story other than roles for Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. But even those are of slight consequence … Neither gentleman approaches his assignment with apparent satisfaction or zest,” and Variety wrote, "Stock mystery tale with period background, The Verdict aims at generating suspense and thrills, succeeding modestly" – it holds up surprisingly well even though Siegel’s career at Warner Bros. didn’t last much longer. He was assigned to a romantic melodrama called Night Unto Night starring Swedish import Viveca Lindfors and, of all people, Ronald Reagan (whom Siegel would work with far more effectively in Reagan’s last film, The Killers [1964]), which was made in 1947 but not released until 1949. Siegel recalled Jack Warner telling him, “All actors are shits,” which depressed Siegel because virtually all his close friends were actors, though he admitted years later that he had fallen in love with Lindfors during the making of Night Unto Night and he hadn’t been able to be objective about her performance. Then he quit Warners and got his next film, The Big Steal (1949), from Howard Hughes’ RKO because RKO’s then-boss wanted to get his star, Robert Mitchum, released from prison on marijuana charges, so he dredged up a hapless script and told the judge in Mitchum’s case that he had 120 people on payroll eating through his money and if Mitchum weren’t released he’d have to fire them all.