Mr. District Attorney (Columbia, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 20) my husband Charles and I watched a 1947 movie on YouTube, Mr. District Attorney, a Columbia “B” from 1947 lasting an hour and 24 minutes. The YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy603XWJZVo) identified it as “Crime-Film Noir,” but there’s little noir about it aside from the opening scene and one other near the end. Mr. District Attorney began as a radio show created by Phillips H. Lord, who’d begun his career writing fiction under the persona of “Seth Parker,” supposedly telling tales of his rustic country background. Lord created “Seth Parker” as a radio series and featured himself and others singing gospel songs and hymn tunes. In 1933 he set out on an ocean voyage aboard a sailing ship he renamed the Seth Parker and broadcasted his radio show from the vessel, but his sojourn at sea ended two years later. The ship ran into a tropical storm off American Samoa in February 1935 and Lord had to summon an Australian ship for rescue. He was accused of staging the whole thing for publicity, but the Australian government announced that they’d investigated and the emergency was genuine. Once he returned home he started a new program, Gang Busters, which ran from July 20, 1935 to November 20, 1957 and featured stories of real-life criminals who hadn’t been caught yet. In a gimmick later copied by the producers of America’s Most Wanted, the program’s announcer appealed to listeners for help in catching them. In 1939 Lord launched another crime show, Mr. District Attorney, based on the exploits of New York’s real-life D.A. Thomas Dewey, later Republican nominee for President in 1944 and 1948. Mr. District Attorney was first filmed by Republic Pictures in 1941 with Dennis O’Keefe as a newly hired deputy D.A. and Stanley Ridges as the title character.

For this movie, made by Columbia in 1947, O’Keefe returned as the same sort of person but with a different character name, Steve Bennett, while Mr. District Attorney is played by Adolphe Menjou and his character name is “Craig Warren” – which made me think that the writers had had in mind not only Tom Dewey but Earl Warren, who by then had risen from Alameda County District Attorney to Attorney General of California and now was in his second term as Governor. The film was directed by Robert B. Sinclair and the writing credits were split between Sidney Marshall (“story”), Ben Markson (“adaptation”) and Ian McLellan Hunter. So the 1947 Mr. District Attorney included at least two names with quite different relationships to the Hollywood blacklist that started the year it was made: Menjou was an enthusiastic “friendly witness” to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in its investigation of suspected Communists in Hollywood, gleefully naming names and calling his targets “rats” and “vermin” (like a certain Republican Presidential candidate these days), while Hunter’s best-known credit came for a film he didn’t write at all. It was the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, directed by William Wyler and starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, and Hunter’s credit was merely a “front” for the actual author, Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo had been one of the original “Hollywood Ten” jailed for contempt of Congress following their refusal to name names to the Committee, and when Hunter himself was threatened with blacklisting and told that his name might be taken off the Roman Holiday credits, Trumbo said, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter reminded him, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script.”

Mr. District Attorney begins with a quite creatively staged scene in which a shadowy figure of a man opens an apartment window from outside, steals his way in, takes out a gun and shoots a sleeping woman to death while we hear police sirens from outside. We’re later told that the man is also dead, killed in a shoot-out with police, and the first time we meet Craig Warren a woman named Marcia Manning (Marguerite Chapman) has come to his office to complain that a photo of her ran in a newspaper and was misidentified as the woman who was killed in the opening scene. Warren explains that there’s nothing he can do about that – she’ll have to contact the newspaper, ask them to run a retraction and, if they won’t, sue them. She then explains how the police got her photo in the first place: the police department in Kansas City sent it by mistake because she’d been involved in an accidental death in a car crash in which a man was killed. Marcia explains that she was acquitted at trial but was still widely believed to have caused the man’s death, especially since she was a major beneficiary of his life insurance. Meanwhile Warren sends for Steve Bennett (Dennis O’Keefe, who’d played a similar role in the 1941 Republic Mr. District Attorney but under a different character name, “P. Cadwallader Jones”), who’s just walked out of a promising job with a major private law firm over a workplace safety suit against manufacturer Ed Jamison (Ralph Morgan). He quit the case and the law firm because he did his own investigation and found Jamison was guilty of deliberately running an unsafe workplace and putting his employees at risk. Warren offers him a job as an assistant district attorney and assigns him to prosecute Jamison on the same charges he was being sued over. But Bennett also starts dating Marcia Manning even though she’s the secretary of James Randolph (George Coulouris), who stood to lose a large amount of money if Jamison were either criminally convicted or civilly held liable.

Marcia is what Nunnally Johnson, in a later movie (the 1954 Black Widow), called a “purpose girl,” amoral rather than immoral. She’s determined to assure herself a comfortable future by marrying a rich man, and she’s set her sights on Randolph because he’s not only wealthy but single. (Her problem with the man she was accused of killing in Kansas City had been that he had a wife and wouldn’t divorce her to marry Marcia.) Bennett unwittingly blows his case against Jamison because he calls Warren from Marcia’s apartment (where he’s just having dinner, this being a Production Code-era movie) to tell him he’s located a key witness, only Marcia overhears the call and immediately relays the information to Randolph, who arranges the man’s “disappearance.” (We never definitively hear what happened to the man – whether the thugs in Jamison’s and/or Randolph’s employ killed him or bribed him to go away, or he simply left town to avoid the pressure. I was expecting the witness’s body to turn up and Warren to launch an investigation into how he was killed and use that to bust Randolph’s gang, but no-o-o-o-o.) Because his key witness isn’t available, the best Bennett can do against Jamison is a 90-day misdemeanor sentence, and Warren is predictably pissed at him but it never occurs to either of them that Marcia was the source of the leak. Bennett obliviously continues to date Marcia and even proposes marriage to her, while Warren decides to break them up by any means necessary not because he’s realized Marcia is corrupt, but simply out of jealousy that Bennett’s burgeoning relationship is taking Bennett’s attention from the seven-day work schedule Warren imposes on his associates. Warren sends Bennett out of the country to bring back a witness from Rome, and by the time Bennett returns from his three-month assignment Marcia has already married Randolph. After Bennett angrily quits the D.A.’s office, Marcia turns on her sexual charms long enough to recruit Bennett to work for Randolph as an attorney and allow Randolph to set him up in his own office with rent and law books covered as part of Randolph’s retainer.

Warren and his investigator, Henderson (played in all-out Irish schtick by Michael O’Shea, whose best-known credit is for his role as Jack London in a 1943 biopic), are shown drinking together, and eventually it dawns on Bennett that Marcia is not what she seems despite her protestations of love for him even though she’s married to the other guy. The climax involves a nightclub owner named Berotti (Steven Geray) whose enterprise is part of Randolph’s empire, and who’s arrested for allegedly pushing someone else off a balcony. Warren and Bennett appear on opposite sides of the case, and in a final confrontation Bennett overhears Marcia talking on the phone with Randolph and finally realizes she’s set him up. The two confront each other on the same balcony and Marcia tries to kill Bennett by pushing him off, but in the end it’s Bennett who survives and Marcia who takes the fatal fall. Warren offers Bennett his old A.D.A. job again and once again warns him that he’s going to work him seven days a week and he won’t have any time for himself. While almost none of Mr. District Attorney qualifies as film noir (had the character of Marcia been more developed and more complex, she could have been a quite interesting femme fatale, but the writers and director Sinclair didn’t go there), it’s a competent, workmanlike crime drama and an entertaining time-filler even though it’s hardly a great movie. Certainly it’s hard for people with the political orientations of Charles and I to take Adolphe Menjou seriously as a fine, upstanding hero, though we’re A-O.K. with watching him play scumbags like he did in Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war masterpiece, Paths of Glory!