Review #706: 'Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' (1956)

Fritz Lang's last American film before he returned to Germany, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt suffers from the director's clear lack of interest. Lang was reportedly dismayed by the lack of visual creativity allowed by American producers (which was also clear in his penultimate American noir, While the City Sleeps (1956)), and so shortly after returned to his homeland to make the visually lavish double-bill Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959), dubbed the 'Indian Epic'. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an intriguing little noir starring Dana Andrews, is by no means a bad film, but is clearly the work of a man handicapped by the system and a film that is pessimistic in its execution.

Tom (Andrews), a novelist in search of inspiration for his second book, is approached by his newspaper publisher father-in-law Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) to help aide his opposition of state capital punishment. The plan is to plant circumstantial evidence of Tom's fake involvement in the recent unsolved murder of nightclub stripper Patty Gray. Naturally, during the trial, an incident prevents Austin from delivering the evidence and testimony that will prove Tom's innocence, so Tom's disgruntled fiancée Susan (Joan Fontaine) races against time to prevent Tom getting executed on Death Row.

Lang had already exposed the fragility of the justice system in his German masterpiece M (1931), and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt begins in suitably grim fashion with the silent execution of an inmate. The plot is a great idea (to think what Hitchcock would have made of it) but the execution is plain and predictable. Although Andrews' performance is solid and the movie sometimes threatens to push the boundaries set by the censors at the time, it simply goes through the motions until a twist reveal in the last 15 minutes livens things up a bit. You most likely won't see it coming, but it ends the film with plenty of plot-holes to pick at and left me scratching my head at exactly what point the movie was trying to make. A rather flat end to a solid period of film noir for the German master.


Directed by: Fritz Lang
Starring: Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer, Arthur Franz
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie