The Godfather: Peter Corris on the horrid fascination of Trial
With my limited vision I find modern films difficult to watch. They are often dark and the quick cutting means I miss crucial elements. Unless the actors are clearly different types I sometimes have difficulty recognising one character from another.
I record older, sometimes quite obscure, films from some of the pay TV channels and watch them at my leisure. Quite often I turn them off after a few minutes, finding them lame and simplistic, but I do stumble on dramatic gems and highly entertaining adventure flicks. Humour dates quickly in my view and, with notable exceptions, old comedies rarely amuse me.
Some films are made extraordinary in various ways by the passage of time and are watchable and interesting on that account rather than for their quality. Such a one is the 1955 black and white B picture Trial, featuring Glenn Ford, Dorothy McGuire and journeyman actor Arthur Kennedy.
The central element of the plot is the absorbing proposition that an under-age Mexican boy is put on trial for first-degree murder with the death penalty in prospect. Even in a Californian town beset by racial disharmony this could not happen, especially as the victim, a young girl with a defective heart, is found dead after the briefest of encounters with the boy. Her outer clothing has been disturbed, leading to the charge of attempted statutory rape, a felony. A death occasioned by a felony may constitute murder in a holdup but hardly in such a fragile case.
That flaw aside, the story develops in a manner startling to a modern viewer. Glen Ford, an academic lawyer seeking trial experience, is hired by a hotshot lawyer (Kennedy) to do the courtroom work while he raises money for the defence.
Ford falls in love with the lawyer’s assistant (McGuire) after a few tepid kisses and is persuaded to attend a New York rally organised by Kennedy. There he is appalled to find that the auditorium is filled with left-wingers he brands as communists. Kennedy admits that 60 per cent of them are.
It emerges that Kennedy is also a communist and his scheme is to raise a lot of money, only some of which is to be spent on the defence – the rest to go to subversive activities. Furthermore, his plan is to lose the case (hence his hiring of the inexperienced Ford) to create a martyr communists can use to criticise the American legal establishment.
What the film is trading on here is American paranoia about communism as the Cold War develops. But it also has another target – the House Un-American Activities Committee, which it states, via Ford and McGuire, is nothing more than a witch hunt. So, by having an each-way bet, the film undermines whatever dramatic power it might have hoped to project.
In case any reader is interested enough to seek the film out I won’t reveal the ending, which is ludicrous. Trial is well acted, particularly by Kennedy, and adequately scripted but in its conception of how to deal with complex racial and political forces it is Hollywood at its worst. I watched it all the way through with a kind of horrid fascination.
Saw a movie recently on video, Locke with Tom Hardy. On paper it doesn’t sound exciting as he’s in his car the whole time, driving and talking to people on the phone. But it’s very tense. The conversations relate to three parts of his life crashing down in real time as he tries to keep it all together. It’s almost like a radio play, and I thought you could probably turn the picture off and just listen.