Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

     By juriscinema I mean those movies that take law, lawyers, lawyering and justice as their province. Between the dawn of talking films ("talkies") in the late 1920s and the descent of strict self-censorship on Hollywood in mid-1934, such films enjoyed the first of three golden ages-the only one that commentators by and large have overlooked. Most of the classics from juriscinema's second golden age, which roughly coincides with the flourishing of the Warren Court, and most of those from the post- and anti-Warren Court third golden age, which roughly coincides with the last decades of the twentieth century, are readily available on videocassette and, to an increasing extent, on DVD. On the other hand, very few of the significant films from juriscinema's first golden age have been released in those formats. Small wonder then that not a single film from the period is discussed in the leading guide to juriscinema,¹ the authors of which restricted themselves, for the most part, to commercially obtainable titles. Discussion of the first golden age would be all but impossible except for the fact that hundreds of early talkies, including those with significant legal aspects, have been broadcast by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and thus made accessible at least to people with cable or satellite. Reference sources, primarily the American Film Institute's massive catalogues, provide a less than ideal but still adequate basis for discussion of films from studios whose backlist is not controlled by TCM.
     Much of this Essay consists of capsule summaries of movies, each one intended as a sort of miniature model that will provide an idea of both the film and the role law, lawyers, and/or lawyering play in each. After some discussion of the very earliest Hollywood films of the period with strong juriscinematic interest (all of them dating from 1928-29), the Essay moves to the films of this type released between 1930 and mid-1934. Those films that fall into the "general drama" category are discussed in a potpourri Part, while the rest are explored in separate Parts devoted to narrower genres, such as comedies and Westerns. Finally, the Essay considers how the first 

golden age of juriscinema came to an end after the imposition of strict self- censorship. In order to prevent this Essay from becoming a book, films from the so-called Poverty Row studios and movies with only peripheral legal significance are, with a handful of exceptions, excluded.
     Many of the films of juriscinema's first golden age focus either on the emotional entanglements of one or more women or on the personal and professional entanglements of one or more men. Films of the first sort were aimed primarily at female viewers and tell the story of a woman who either becomes involved with a lawyer, or goes on trial, or both. These so-called "women's pictures" or "weepies" predate the coming of sound, but became dominant in the first years of talking pictures when, far more often than in silent days (and for obvious reasons), the female lead would find herself in a courtroom. Films in the second category were aimed primarily at a male audience and tell the story of a man who may or may not have a law degree, but in one way or another gets caught up in a situation involving lawyers and the law. The films aimed at women tend to be slowly paced and full of emotional outbursts, while those aimed at men tend to move like greased lightning, with plenty of crackling dialogue, physical action, and a bitingly cynical take on whatever milieu they portray. These two categories are mutually exclusive. However, a film in either category or in neither (a comedy, for example, or a Western) may also have one or more lawyer characters whom viewers are clearly meant to despise. In considering these cinematic lawyers it is worthwhile to distinguish between those whose perfidy is specific to their profession and those whose profession is unconnected with their villainy. I offer these life preservers in the hope that they will save readers from drowning in the sea of detail that follows.

     One cannot begin to understand the early films dealing with law, lawyers, lawyering, and justice without a capsule survey of certain aspects of the American scene in the years just before the birth of talking pictures. It wasn't the dead Puritanical time that one who lived through the cultural upheavals of more recent decades might imagine. Those who were lucky enough to be young back then saw their time quite differently, as undreamt-of freedoms exploded into life all around them. Radical iconoclasts like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis were publishing novels that would never have seen print in earlier decades.² Equally radical journalists like H.L. Mencken and Ring Lardner were writing essays and short stories that 

debunked everything dear to the conventional American heart.³ Young men and women discarded their parents' inhibitions and joined the sexual revolution recently described by the sardonic nonagenarian Jacques Barzun-perhaps the last person with memories of that decade who remains intellectually active today.

Lovemaking as an art and the techniques to be mastered for adequate, not to say professional, performance became a concern of the wider public. Sexology was welcomed to the circle of ologies, while the popularization of Freud led to the belief that repressing the sexual instinct was dangerous.
     . . . . .
     . . . [N]early everywhere the previous requirement of adultery as the sole ground [for divorce] gave way. . . . Those who resisted this great drive to acknowledge copulation as a human right and a subject of constant public interest waged a losing battle.⁴

     Almost as soon as talking films were feasible, their patrons began to see and, of course, to hear a cycle of courtroom melodramas. "Such movies," says Alexander Walker, "had obvious attractions: they were cheap and quick to make, required few sets, even when obligatory 'flashbacks' from the evidence were involved; and, above all, they gave the studios ample opportunity to do what they had spent many millions equipping themselves for - namely, talk.”⁶
     Perhaps the first of the breed was On Trial,⁷ which was directed by Archie Mayo and based on the 1914 stage play of the same name by Elmer Rice,⁸ who later earned juriscinematic immortality as the author of the 1931 stage play Counsellor-at-Law and the screenplay for William Wyler's classic 1933 film of the same name.⁹ During the trial of Robert Strickland (Bert Lytell) for the murder of his business associate Gerald Trask (Holmes Herbert), Strickland takes the stand, confesses his guilt, and asks for an end to the proceedings. His request is denied and the next witness is the dead man's widow Joan Trask (Pauline Frederick), who describes the events surrounding her husband's murder. (If she's a prosecution witness as she must be, how did the defendant get to testify ahead of her?) The next day Strickland's young daughter Doris (Vondell Darr) is called - by which side, once again, is not specified - and testifies that shortly before shooting Trask her father had learned that his wife May Strickland (Lois Wilson) had spent the day with the man. Finally, May takes the stand and describes Trask's penchant for lechery and blackmail. On this basis the jury returns a verdict of not guilty! The talking sequences of this film were either recorded or reproduced with a faulty system, which made the actors' lines "no more than muffled sounds, almost indistinct . . . and imperfectly synchronized.”¹⁰
     Next out of the can was The Bellamy Trial,¹¹ which was directed by Monta Bell from his own scenario based on the 1927 novel of the same name by Frances Noyes Hart. Stephen Bellamy (Kenneth Thomson) and the lovely Sue Ives (Leatrice Joy) are put on trial for the murder of Bellamy's wife Mimi (Margaret Livingston). Both defendants take the stand - whether they knew they had a constitutional right not to is unclear, 

like all other legal issues in these primitive talkies - and are brutally cross-examined by the District Attorney (Charles Middleton), who repeatedly jabs a knife into a cast of Mimi's bust while questioning them. Despite prosecutorial tactics worthy of Middleton's later Ming the Merciless character in Flash Gordon serials, both defendants are found not guilty. Finally, a surprise witness comes forward who saw the murder and clears Bellamy and Ives of the slightest suspicion of guilt.
     Third in the cycle came His Captive Woman,¹² directed by George Fitzmaurice from a scenario by Carey Wilson based on Donn Byrne's short story Changeling.¹³ The film opens with cabaret dancer Anna Janssen (Dorothy Mackaill) on trial for murdering her wealthy lover. But once the witness stand is taken by Tom McCarthy (Milton Sills), the stolid policeman who had arrested her and brought her back from the South Seas for trial, the film morphs from forensic oratory into a long silent flashback depicting how he and Anna had fallen in love after being shipwrecked on a desert island. The judge is so impressed that he sentences the couple to get married and live on that same island for the rest of their lives! Variety's verdict was that the filmmakers "have so strained, twisted, pummeled and otherwise mistreated plausibility that the resultant product is pretty silly.”¹⁴ Sounds like one of the world's great understatements to me.
     Perhaps the best known among the early specimens of juriscinema is Coquette,¹⁵ which was the first talking film for silent superstar Mary Pickford and the beginning of the end of her career. Sam Taylor directed this adaptation of the 1928 play of the same name by George Abbott and Anne Preston Bridgers. Taking the part played on the stage by Helen Hayes, Pickford played Norma Besant, a flirtatious Southern belle whose latest conquest is the proud but crude hillbilly Michael Jeffery (John Mack Brown). Norma's physician father (John St. Polis) refuses to let the couple marry, orders Jeffery out of his house, and later, learning that they have spent a night together (perhaps under innocent circumstances), shoots the young man down in cold blood. His friend and attorney Robert Wentworth (George Irving) pressures Norma to claim - without either of them ever using the word of course - that Jeffery had raped her.

WENTWORTH: Norma, our only chance to save your father is based on the unwritten law -to say that he killed a man who had ruined his daughter's good name. You understand? You've got 

to say that he has avenged a wrong - that Michael was a beast.

NORMA: A beast. My Michael - a beast?

WENTWORTH: Norma, darling, I know you're innocent and that your father was mistaken. But don't you see, if he was mistaken he had killed an innocent man! And to save his life, you must say he was justified in killing Michael  - and that you're proud of him.

NORMA: Pwoud of him? [She delivers all her lines Elmer Fudd style.] I wish I'd never seen him! I hate him! I hate him! He killed the only thing in life I love. He did that to me and I don't care what happens to him now. . . . I'd be glad to see him hang!

WENTWORTH: Did Michael Jeffery make love to you there?

NORMA: Yes.

WENTWORTH: Did you resist him?

NORMA: Yes.

WENTWORTH: But he forced his attentions?

NORMA: Yes.

WENTWORTH: And you could not resist his lovemaking?

NORMA: No.

WENTWORTH: And he made you yield?

NORMA: Yes.

WENTWORTH: He made you yield to an extreme?

NORMA: Yes.

WENTWORTH (obviously playing to the jury): Then he did 

what would justify any father in killing him!

NORMA: Yes.

DR. BESANT: Your Honor, my daughter wishes to retract all of her testimony. What she told you about herself and Michael Jeffery was a sacrifice on her part to save my life. And I cannot accept that sacrifice. My daughter's an innocent girl, and I killed a man who was guilty of no wrong. I'm aware that I owe my life to the state. As a Southern gentleman, sir, I have never failed to pay my debts. And I stand ready now to offer my life for one I've taken.

had driven him to suicide. The jury finds Manning guilty, but then Viola takes the stand and, in testimony shown in yet more flashbacks, claims that she killed Winfield herself to get even for his having impregnated and dumped her years before. Which story are we to believe? Clearly what makes Thru Different Eyes of greater cinematic and historical interest than its coevals is that to a certain extent it prefigures such classics as Citizen Kane¹⁷ and Rashomon,¹⁸ depicting key events and characters several times,and each time from a different viewpoint.
     Silent star Norma Shearer made her talkie debut in The Trial of Mary Dugan,¹⁹ which was directed by the playwright Bayard Veiller and based on his own 1928 stage drama of the same name. Like few if any movie directors then or now, Veiller rehearsed his cast in front of a live audience for two weeks before shooting began. The prologue shows Shearer as the title character having a fit of hysteria as she's taken from her cell to the courtroom where she is to stand trial for the murder of her wealthy paramour, who was found stabbed to death in their love nest. When defense attorney Edmund West (Lewis Stone) does little or nothing to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, Mary's fledgling lawyer-brother Jimmy (Raymond Hackett) protests and eventually takes over his sister's defense. He puts her on the stand but is horrified at the gist of her testimony: that she had been the mistress of four different men in order to get the money to put him through law school! Undaunted, Jimmy goes on to prove that the real murderer was none other than Edmund West. He first establishes that the murderer was left-handed, then tosses a knife at West, who instinctively catches it with - well, enough said. Could this be the origin of the device Atticus Finch used in To Kill a Mockingbird more than thirty years later to show that his client was innocent?²⁰
     Madame X²¹ was directed by stage actor Lionel Barrymore, who improved on existing talkie technique by having the recording microphones put on fishing poles so that the actors could move around during dialogue. The device didn't improve their performances, which are so absurdly hyperemotional that audiences today are more likely to roll on the floor giggling rather than break down in tears as intended. Unlike the other primitives considered in this section, this one was set in France - naturally 

since it was based on a French play by Alexandre Bisson which debuted on the New York stage in 1910 and had been adapted into a silent feature ten years later. The backstory shows Jacqueline Floriot (Ruth Chatterton) leaving her diplomat husband (Lewis Stone) for a playboy. When she returns to care for her sick son, her husband throws her out. Eventually she meets and forms a liaison with the international cardsharp Laroque (Ulrich Haupt). Years later they return to France penniless and in a rage she shoots Laroque when she learns that he plans to blackmail her husband. Since she won't reveal her name to the authorities, and the brand new young attorney (Raymond Hackett) assigned by the court to represent her never volunteers his, neither of them are aware that he is not only her lawyer but also her son.
     The elder Floriot offers young Raymond advice that will soon break his heart. "It's an old trick in law but it's always been a good one. Whenever you find a woman in grave distress as this one is, you blame everything she is upon some man." As a favor to the former Attorney General of France, who is eager to observe his son's first case, the court makes a place for the older man on the bench. It is from that vantage point that he and "Madame X" recognize each other and the climactic tear-jerking begins.
     From her box the defendant addresses the jury, still without identifying herself but claiming she shot Laroque so that her son, whom she also won't identify, wouldn't discover her degrading life.

MADAME X: I have said I wouldn't speak but I will. Oh yes, yes, I will! But no one else must. No one! . . . . I'm only trying to stop anyone from trying to help me-from trying to save me. That someone is a boy! A son of mine! Somewhere in this world . . . . That boy thinks I'm dead. Oh, I want him to think it! . . . I killed [Laroque] to keep that boy, who is flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, from knowing what I was - what I am.

RAYMOND: Here she is, willing to go to her death that others might never feel the shame which they should. . . . This man, this husband of whom she speaks, should not be protected! . . . . He should be here on trial and not she! For he is without heart-without soul. . . . The man who is so good, so pure himself, he wouldn't give another creature one more chance! Who is this man? Where does he come from? . . . . It would be well for all men and women in France that we know the name of this-this paragon who lives amongst us. And the boy of whom she speaks! . . . . The young man who would not pick this poor creature up and take her to his heart and call her mother, in preference to touching the hand of the man who calls himself his father, is no man, and has no right to a mother! . . . . Even now she asks that nothing be done for her. Oh, gentlemen, you must believe, you must feel what I do! . . . . Something within my heart here today tells me we are crucifying this woman without understanding her. You cannot convict this woman! You cannot deny her mercy. For mercy is something she has never known.

MADAME X: I don't care about anything now that I know that it's you - you, who pleaded for me. Because, you see, after listening to you I know that my son, wherever he is, would treat me as his mother - no matter what I've done - no matter what becomes of me. . . . This boy has just told me what my boy would do . . . . I haven't got anything to pay you with for what you've done for me. But I can give you a mother's-kiss. If-if you'll let me.

     By late 1929, if not earlier, it had become clear that the transition from silent to talking films was permanent and irrevocable. In the new era of talkies one of the staple items of commerce would be movies about lawyers, who for obvious reasons appeared very seldom on the silent screen. In 

what became the foremost subtype of juriscinema, the protagonist was a lawyer whom the audience saw and heard as he (like the real-world lawyers of the period, it was almost always a man) performed lawyerly functions - as imagined by the film-makers. In an earlier essay,²² I discussed some of the most rewarding works of this sort, including William Wyler's Counsellor-at-Law,²³ certainly the finest film of its time with a lawyer protagonist and perhaps the finest ever. Five such titles either not discussed at all or given very short shrift in my earlier essay deserve coverage here.

     Manslaughter²⁴ features that rara avis of early juriscinema - a lawyer acting honorably as a lawyer. Spoiled heiress Lydia Thorne (Claudette Colbert) is sweet on crusading District Attorney Dan O'Bannon (Fredric March), but when her reckless driving causes the death of a traffic cop who was trying to give her a speeding ticket, he prosecutes her for the film's titular crime and the result of his impassioned no-one's-above-the-law oratory is that she gets sent to prison. She vows to get even with him, but her time behind bars teaches her compassion for the lowly. Released after two years thanks to influential family connections, she finds that O'Bannon has gone into private practice and tries her damndest to get him fired until she realizes that she still loves him. How the film ends is too obvious to need recounting.
     The Lawyer's Secret²⁵ seems to be the only film of the early 1930s that deals with the attorney-client relationship. One night at a sleazy gambling joint, sailor Joe Hart (Richard Arlen) loses heavily and, in order to keep playing, sells his gun to fellow gambler Laurie Roberts (Charles "Buddy" Rogers). After losing his last cent, Joe steals a car to get back to his ship. Meanwhile Laurie, who also lost heavily, is convinced by a gambler known as The Weasel (Francis McDonald) that the wheel was fixed. They break into the joint after hours and are trying to open the safe when they are caught by the proprietor, whom The Weasel kills with the gun Laurie bought from Joe. Laurie returns home late to his sister Kay (Fay Wray), who is engaged to lawyer Drake Norris (Clive Brook). He tells Norris the 

story under attorney-client privilege. What happens next, of course, is that poor Joe Hart is charged with the murder, put on trial, and sentenced to hang. His girlfriend Beatrice Stevens (Jean Arthur) begs Norris to handle the appeal but, for reasons obvious to the viewer, he refuses. When Kay begs him to reconsider, he admits that he was told the truth about the murder in a confidential communication but refuses to identify his client. He urges Laurie to clear Joe but Laurie refuses. When Joe's appeal is denied, Drake goes first to the District Attorney and then to the governor, telling them everything but the name of his client, but to no avail. The night before Joe is to be executed, two of his sailor friends trick The Weasel into a meeting with Laurie Roberts, which leads to Laurie blurting out the truth where others can hear it. The Weasel gets the death penalty, Laurie draws a few years in prison, and Joe is released.
     The lawyer character in A Free Soul²⁶ is Stephen Ashe (Lionel Barrymore), a widower and hard-drinking San Francisco criminal lawyer apparently modeled on Earl Rogers, whose daughter wrote the novel on which the film was based. Stephen's high-spirited daughter Jan (Norma Shearer) is the only member of the Ashe family who is not appalled when he shows up at a family dinner drunk and accompanied by gangster Ace Wilfong (Clark Gable), whom he's just gotten off on a murder charge.²⁷ Attracted by Ace's dangerous quality, Jan leaves her stuffy fiance Dwight Winthrop (Leslie Howard) behind and goes along when her father and Ace walk out of the party. That is the beginning of the affair which, despite Stephen's outrage at her having taken up with a "mongrel," continues until one night she makes a deal: if Stephen will give up liquor, she'll give up Wilfong. They go off to the mountains for a vacation, but resume their bad habits as soon as they're home. While Stephen goes on a binge, Jan returns to Ace but finally sees that he's a swine and dumps him for Dwight Winthrop. When Ace threatens to kill Winthrop and expose Jan's sordid affair with him unless she returns to his bed, Dwight visits his casino and shoots him in cold blood. In order to keep Jan's sex life out of the papers, Dwight claims his motive was a gambling debt.
     His trial has reached the phase of closing arguments when Stephen 

lurches out of the gutter, takes over the defense, and, with the court's permission, calls one more witness - Jan herself. This tactic is ostensibly to show that Winthrop killed Ace in a fit of temporary insanity, but in reality acts to establish himself as juriscinema's next Jesus figure after Madame X. "Don't you see my hands are bleeding where the spikes are being driven through?" he asks the jury before pausing for a quick nip. The prosecutor punctuates Stephen's questions to Jan with not precisely legalistic but totally justified objections: "This is theatrical! Emotional!" After forcing Jan to admit her affair with Wilfong, Stephen makes his final address to the court and jury.

STEPHEN: I'm going to ask you to listen with your hearts. . . . It was through her father that [Jan] met this gambler, this beast! Her father endorsed this unholy friendship! . . . There's only one breast that you can surely pin the responsibility of this crime on. Only one! Stephen Ashe is guilty and nobody else. Stephen Ashe!

married sister Corinne (Helen Vinson), who was indeed having an affair with Linley, Adell goes on to testify falsely that Bob told her he had shot the man "because he had reason to believe that the honor of my name demanded it." The result of her perjury is a not guilty verdict based on the "unwritten law." As the film ends, David tells Adell that he knew she was lying on the stand to shield her sister but, because he loves her, did nothing about it. Small wonder that this cynical gem was never remade in the era of strict censorship.
     The Kiss Before the Mirror³⁰ takes place in Vienna but its courtroom aspects would probably astound Austrian lawyers too. Walter Bernsdorf (Frank Morgan), on trial for murdering his unfaithful wife (Gloria Stuart), is being defended by his best friend Paul Held (Paul Lukas), who in the course of the trial discovers that his own wife Maria (Nancy Carroll) is also unfaithful. After following her to a tryst with her current lover (Donald Cook), Paul becomes obsessed with the similarity between his own situation and his client's and insists that Maria come to court and hear his final argument on Bernsdorf's behalf. "The more a man loves and the more he is deceived," he orates, "the greater his desire for revenge!" Then he takes a gun from his pocket and aims it at Maria, who screams and faints. This would be grounds for mistrial in the real world, but here in the magic kingdom of juriscinema the court simply takes a recess and the jury starts deliberating. Later, still expecting Paul to kill her, Maria swears that she still loves him and Bernsdorf, having been acquitted, begs his lawyer not to follow in his own footsteps. Paul forgives his erring wife and they embrace.

     It is likely, but not inevitable, that the protagonist in a law-related film will be described as a lawyer and seen functioning as a lawyer. In another type of juriscinema the main character is described as a lawyer but never seen working as one. Three such films from the first golden age deserve discussion here.
     Brothers³¹ starred Bert Lytell as twins who are adopted into different social classes and don't learn of each other's existence until they're adults. Eddie Connolly becomes a piano player in a gin joint while his luckier 

sibling Bob Naughton is taken into the home of a well-to-do lawyer (Howard Hickman) and becomes a brilliant attorney, although one with a drinking problem. The story heats up when Bob gets into a fight with and kills an understandably miffed criminal whose wife had become Bob's mistress after Bob had unsuccessfully defended him. Where does this fight take place? Why, in the gin joint where Eddie Connolly tickles the ivories! The result of course is that Bob's unknown twin brother is identified as the murderer. Bob clears Eddie but then collapses and is taken to a sanitarium. At the request of Bob's adoptive father, Eddie impersonates his twin and comes to live in the Naughton house, where he falls in love with Bob's fiancee Norma (Dorothy Sebastian). Just as he's about to do the noble thing - forsake Norma, leave the haunts of the rich, and return to his humble origins - word arrives of Bob's death, and he decides to continue as his brother and marry the woman they both loved. One can't help wondering what happened the first time he had to pass as a lawyer.
     Soon after appearing in A Free Soul,³² and several months before he won an Oscar for his performance in that film, Lionel Barrymore played another lawyer in Guilty Hands,³³ which opens with a fascinating conversation among "strangers on a train" bound from New York to a nameless seaside community. The train is going through a tunnel as we join attorney Richard Grant (Barrymore) and two fellow passengers.

P1: You mean a man has a right to commit murder?

GRANT: Oh, not legally of course.

P1 (shocked): You can't mean morally!

GRANT: My dear sir, we haven't morals anymore, just laws. A man isn't punished for committing a murder. We put him in jail for his mistakes, because he's been caught. Of course, it's possible to commit a murder and not be caught.

P1: Of course! I've read books about that. Detective stories. The perfect murder, the perfect alibi.

GRANT: I'm not talking about books. It's possible to commit a murder and not be caught. I believe that under certain conditions murder is justifiable.

P1: Speaking as an expert?

GRANT: Yeah. For ten years I was district attorney of New York, and in that time I sent over fifty men to the electric chair. [Pause while an obsequious black attendant lights cigars for the passengers.] Now that I've retired to private practice, I've kept a hundred of 'em out of it!

P1: I guess I'm old fashioned. It seems all wrong to me. The Bible says "Thou shalt not commit murder."

GRANT: The Bible says "A life for a life" too, doesn't it? Well, doesn't it?

P1 (reluctantly): Yes.

P2: What I can't understand is you, a lawyer, advocating murder.

GRANT: Oh, now, my dear sir, I didn't say any such thing, no no no no! I simply said that in certain cases murder was justifiable. And I voiced the belief that a clever man in such a case could commit a murder so skillfully - you know what I mean? - so brilliantly, that he could get away with it.

P1: Mr. Grant, what would you call a justifiable murder?

GRANT: Justifiable murder?

P1: Yeah.

GRANT: Oh - a justifiable murder is a murder that's justifiable. Well, this is my station.

to sit through except out of a sense of scholarly duty.
     In The Woman Accused,³⁴ Glenda O'Brien (Nancy Carroll) accepts a proposal from New York attorney Jeffrey Baxter (Cary Grant) and the couple make plans to leave immediately for a cruise on which they'll be married. That evening Gladys commits the faux pas of seeing her jealous ex-lover Leo Young (Louis Calhern), who threatens to have his gangster friend Little Maxie (Jack LaRue) kill Jeffrey if Glenda doesn't give him up. Glenda brains Leo with a statue, then leaves to meet the cruise ship and Jeffrey. When the murder is discovered and Glenda comes under suspicion, District Attorney Clarke (Irving Pichel) authorizes Leo's friend Stephen Bessemer (John Halliday) to join the cruise and dig up evidence against her. The climax takes place at a shipboard masquerade party where Stephen conducts a mock murder trial with Glenda as defendant. Under the pressure of his questioning she breaks down and confesses but all the passengers except Stephen think she's acting. Just before being arrested she tells Jeffrey the truth. Back in New York, Jeffrey beats Little Maxie into confessing Leo's plan to kill him, then visits the DA and convinces him that there's not enough evidence to put Glenda on trial. With the case dropped, lawyer and client are free to marry.

     In all the law-related films considered thus far it was the actor top-billed in the credits who portrayed an attorney. But a film may still count as juriscinema if the lawyer character is a significant cast member other than the protagonist. In most such films, including the pair described here, that character is a swine.
     The Furies³⁵ begins with Fifi Sands (Lois Wilson) announcing at a dinner party that her husband, a notorious womanizer, has agreed at last to give her a divorce, although she is refusing any alimony. Then Mr. Sands is found murdered and suspicion soon falls on Fifi's childhood sweetheart Owen McDonald (Theodor von Eltz), who still loves her. Fifi prevails upon her late husband's lawyer Oliver Bedlow (H. B. Warner) to represent McDonald but it's a poor choice for at least two reasons (beyond the obvious conflict of interest): Bedlow wants Fifi for himself and he's the murderer. At the climax of the film Bedlow locks Fifi in an apartment and 

reveals the truth to her and, when rescuers come pounding at the door, leaps out a window to his death.
     As the Devil Commands³⁶ is surely the appropriate title for a film about one of early juriscinema's most diabolical lawyers. Wasting away from an incurable disease, wealthy John Duncan (Charles Sellon) intends to divide his estate between his cousin Robert Waldo (Alan Dinehart), who is a lawyer, and his protege and caregiver Dr. David Graham (Neil Hamilton). Graham is in love with Duncan's nurse Jane Chase (Mae Clarke) and does not know that in fact he is Duncan's son. Waldo persuades the old man to leave David everything, not out of altruism but as part of an Iagoesque scheme to take both Jane and the entire Duncan estate. After David refuses Duncan's deathbed request to be euthanized, Waldo sneaks into the sickroom and gives the dying man an overdose of the medicine David had prescribed. What follows is the predictable result that David, now the only person with financial motive to kill Duncan, is charged with his murder. Volunteering as defense counsel is Waldo, who of course throws the case. David is sentenced to life imprisonment and is divested of the Duncan estate, which now passes by intestate succession to Waldo - except for the valuable real property, which for some unfathomable legal reason he can't take while David is still alive. Waldo therefore unframes his victim by forging and finding a suicide note supposedly signed by John Duncan, with a view to getting David out of prison and then killing him in a death chamber that he's prepared in his basement. Jane catches on to the scheme just in time to kill Waldo and save David's life.

     We have seen that in many of the primitive law-related talkies of 1928-29 no significant character was a lawyer but the film climaxed in court. That variety of juriscinema didn't vanish when the first golden age dawned but survived in at least four interesting films of the early 1930s, two of which have the distinction of being based on novels with a literary reputation.
     An American Tragedy follows the broad outlines of Theodore Dreiser's novel, which was based on the celebrated Chester Gillette murder trial.³⁷ Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes), the neglected son of dirt-poor street evangelists, is working as a bellhop in a large Chicago hotel when he 

happens to meet his prosperous Uncle Samuel (Frederick Burton) and is offered a job in the latter's upstate New York shirt factory. In due course, Clyde becomes foreman of a department within the factory and, in defiance of plant rules, begins a furtive affair with newly hired worker Roberta Alden (Sylvia Sidney). He loses all interest in her, however, when he meets and falls for the beautiful and wealthy Sondra Finchley (Frances Dee), whom he sees as his ticket to money and social prestige. Then disaster strikes: Roberta tells him she's pregnant. Clyde devises a plan to take her out on the lake in a canoe and drown her so that her death looks like an accident, but when the two are actually on the lake and out of others' sight he changes his mind (or does he?) and agrees to jettison his plans for social advancement and marry her. Roberta, who cannot swim, accidentally overturns the boat. Clyde ignores her screams for help and swims to shore, letting her drown as he had first intended. He is soon arrested and charged with murder, but thanks to his uncle's money he has two lawyers (Emmett Corrigan and Charles Middleton) who are as fine a pair of shysters as a defendant might hope for.

And for that reason we've invented this other story about a change of heart. It's not quite as true as yours, but it is true that you did experience a change of heart in that boat. And that's our justification. . . . You're not guilty. You've sworn to me you did not intend to strike her there at the last, whatever you might have been provoked to do at best, and that's enough for me. You're not guilty.³⁸

court. District Attorney Orville Mason (Irving Pichel) brings the fatal canoe into court and makes Clyde sit in it as he's cross-examined. "She was drowning as you wanted her to drown! And you let her drown!" A spectator interrupts the proceedings, shouting: "Why not kill the dirty sneak now and be done with it?" Once again, this would be grounds for a mistrial in the real world but not here in the magic kingdom of juriscinema. The case goes to the jury and we are treated to less than a minute of their deliberations. "I don't believe his lawyers would let him lie about it," says one naif before his colleagues shout him down. The verdict of course is guilty and Clyde is sentenced to death. In the final scene he is visited on death row by his mother (Lucille LaVerne), who blames herself for his plight and urges him to take his punishment like a man.
     In the story as Theodore Dreiser told it, Clyde Griffiths was a toad beneath the harrow, victimized by a money- and status-obsessed society. In Josef von Sternberg's version, society is never indicted in the least and Clyde, despite his good looks, comes across as a cold, calculating, shifty-eyed opportunist; a close cousin to those prime-time murderers of a later generation whose best laid plans were undone regularly by Lieutenant Columbo. Dreiser was so infuriated by the film's message - the system works, all is well - that he sued Paramount for making a distorted version of his novel, harmful to his literary reputation. He lost.⁴⁰
     The Woman in Room 13⁴¹ is a melodrama of love and intrigue that culminates in the murder of philandering concert singer Victor LeGrand (Gilbert Roland) by his scorned mistress Sari Lodar (Myrna Loy) at the same time that Paul Ramsey (Neil Hamilton), who wrongly suspects that his wife Laura (Elissa Landi) has been sleeping with LeGrand, is hammering on the door of the singer's apartment. Caught in the apartment with the murder weapon in his hand and wrongly thinking that it was Laura who killed LeGrand, Paul confesses to the crime himself. At his trial Laura reciprocates, as it were, by falsely testifying that she had indeed been sleeping with LeGrand. Her perjury gives Paul the benefit of the so-called "unwritten law" excuse and the jury, though finding him guilty, spares him the death penalty. Eventually Sari writes Laura a letter confessing the truth and kills herself. The film ends with Paul out of prison and reunited with his wife.
     Broadway Bad⁴² stars Joan Blondell as showgirl Tony Landers, who is 

lusted after by wealthy stockbroker Craig Cutting (Ricardo Cortez) but is secretly married to college student Bob North (Allen Vincent), the marriage being kept under wraps because Bob would be expelled if it became known. When Bob wrongly accuses Tony of infidelity and sues for divorce, naming Craig as co-respondent, the resulting scandal makes Tony a Broadway star and she and Craig become fond of each other. Four years later the jerk Bob discovers that Tony was pregnant when he divorced her and snatches the boy she was secretly raising. The film climaxes at a trial where Tony and Craig testify that Tony was indeed cheating during her marriage and that the child's real father is Craig, defeating Bob's custody demand by brazenly committing perjury, albeit of a sort that a simple DNA test would expose today. The false testimony brands Tony as a slut and her perfectly legitimate child as a bastard, but in Hollywood terms it's a happy ending with the formation of a new family rooted in love.
     The second law-related early talkie adapted from a novel by a major American author - albeit one of his lesser works, written when he was desperately in need of money - was The Story of Temple Drake,⁴³ a film so full of sleazy sexuality that it was subjected to industry censorship when most Hollywood movies weren't.⁴⁴ Temple (Miriam Hopkins), the uninhibited daughter of a Southern judge (Sir Guy Standing), refuses to marry local lawyer Stephen Benbow (William Gargan) and continues to flirt with and tease countless other men. Then one drunken night in a thunderstorm she's trapped in a remote plantation house occupied by bootlegger Lee Goodwin (Irving Pichel). Goodwin goes away, leaving his feeble-witted hanger-on Tommy (James Eagles) to guard her, but his sadistic henchman Trigger (Jack LaRue) kills the halfwit, rapes Temple in the barn behind the house, then takes her to the brothel run by Miss Reba (Jobyna Howland), and makes her his moll. Goodwin is charged with Tommy's murder but refuses to rat on Trigger to his assigned counsel Stephen Benbow, who eventually visits Miss Reba's place after learning from Goodwin's wife (Florence Eldridge) that Temple is living there with Trigger. To keep the psychotic Trigger from killing Benbow, Temple claims that she's staying at the brothel voluntarily. After Stephen leaves she tries to escape and, to keep from being raped again, shoots Trigger dead. Then she tells Stephen the truth and begs him not to make her testify 

at Goodwin's trial, which is being presided over (of course) by her father. Stephen's duty to his client compels him to call her as a witness but he finds himself unable to ask her the crucial questions about Tommy's murder. Temple breaks down and - in censored language that blurs much of the content - tearfully confesses the truth.⁴⁵ Then she faints and Stephen carries her from the courtroom. "Be proud of her, Judge," he tells her father. "I am."

     Hollywood movies of the early 1930s that weren't straight dramas usually fell within one of the tried-and-true genres of the time: comedies, gangster films, whodunits and Westerns. Before we consider these categories, however, a word is in order for the very popular kind of early talkie known as women's pictures or weepies. The 1929 version of Madame X,⁴⁶ discussed in Part III above, was the grandmother of this genre, but untypical in that the lawyer character (young Floriot) was both seen acting as a lawyer and presented as an honorable man. In most weepies the lawyer characters are portrayed as honorable men but rarely if ever seen acting as lawyers. That type of film is interesting enough to deserve treatment on its own, and in another essay I hope to do that. For now we shall concentrate on other genres.

     Comedy movies come in almost as many varieties as Heinz products, and reasonable minds may often differ as to whether a particular film belongs in this genre at all. Of the early talkies that clearly or at least arguably fall into this category, a baker's dozen involve lawyer characters or legal aspects to a significant degree.
     The protagonists of Queen High⁴⁷ are partners in the garter 

manufacturing business. After interminable fussing and feuding, T. Boggs Johns (Charles Ruggles) and George Nettleton (Frank Morgan) take the advice of their lawyer Cyrus Vanderholt (Rudy Cameron) and play a hand of draw poker, the winner to run the business for a year and the loser to serve as his butler. Amid the forgettable songs and jokes, Johns' nephew (Stanley Smith) and Nettleton's niece (Ginger Rogers) fall in love. Eventually the partners discover that their poker pact isn't legally binding and chase the lawyer out of the picture.
     Silent star Gloria Swanson made her talkie debut in What a Widow!⁴⁸ as Tamarind Brooks, a woman made wealthy by her much older husband's death. She sails for Paris in search of romance and finds it with several men on the ship including lawyer Gerry Morgan (Owen Moore). Eventually she drops all the Europeans she's been flirting with and marries Gerry as the plane returning them to the United States flies over the Statue of Liberty.
     The Naughty Flirt⁴⁹ kicks off when Kay Elliott (Alice White), the daughter of a prosperous lawyer (George Irving), throws a wild party that ends in night court. Alan Ward (Paul Page), a young lawyer in her father's office, gives her a tongue-lashing about her behavior, which sparks her into making a play for him. Everything goes Kay's way until Alan overhears someone say she had made a bet that she'd have him eating out of her hand in short order. For trying to make a fool out of him he gives her a sound spanking which instantly reforms her. She takes a secretarial job with her father's firm and she and Alan begin to fall genuinely in love. This love lasts only until Elliott's false friend Linda Gregory (Myrna Loy), whose brother Jack (Douglas Gilmore) wants to retrieve the family's Depression-battered fortune by marrying Kay himself, makes it seem that she and Alan are having an affair. This is a romantic comedy so all ends happily - except for the audience which has had to endure Alice White's screechy Noo Yawk accent for more than an hour. Paul Page's lawyer character is certainly honorable enough, but very little in the film would have needed to be changed if he'd been an accountant or junior executive, and juriscinemaphiles would have been spared his stick-like performance.
     The Gang Buster⁵⁰ is about Charlie Case (Jack Oakie), a naive and superstitious young man who sells insurance policies protecting against 

cyclone damage. After inadvertently saving the life of lawyer Andrew Martine (William Morris), Charlie falls in love with the attorney's daughter Sylvia (Jean Arthur) and sells her grateful father a $100,000 life policy - only to discover later that Martine has been targeted for death by one of his former clients, gangster Sudden Mike Slade (William "Stage" Boyd). When Slade snatches Sylvia in a scheme to trade her for some incriminating papers in her father's possession, Charlie endeavors to get her back by informing the gangster that kidnapping is illegal. That plan doesn't work but all ends well anyway.
     Billed immediately after the stars of Don't Bet on Women⁵¹ is Roland Young as smug and self-satisfied lawyer Herbert Drake. After advising his divorced and woman-averse client Roger Fallon (Edmund Lowe) to learn the art of controlling women without their knowledge - an art he himself claims to have mastered - Drake bets $ 10,000 that Roger can't, within forty-eight hours, kiss the first woman who joins them on the veranda. When that woman turns out to be Drake's so-carefully-controlled wife (Jeanette MacDonald), the lawyer insists that the bet is on and romantic complications start multiplying like rabbits, albeit without any legal component.
     The main character in Lonely Wives⁵² is Richard Smith (Edward Everett Horton), a stern and proper attorney who has both a wife and a habit of womanizing at every opportunity. Learning of his penchant, Diane O'Dare (Laura La Plante) tries to flirt her way into getting him to handle her divorce at a deep discount. As luck would have it, Diane's estranged husband Felix (Edward Everett Horton) is a dead ringer for Richard. For reasons I won't go into here, Felix is impersonating Richard when the lawyer's lovely wife Madeline (Esther Ralston) returns from a solo vacation itching for amour. The mock-Shakespearean comedy of mistaken identities runs its course with plenty of innuendo but no adultery and with both Madeline and Diane reunited with their look-alike husbands.
     The Girl Habit⁵³ is another of those comedies of errors rich in sexual innuendo that flourished in the early 1930s until self-censorship killed the genre. When wealthy philanderer Charlie Floyd (Charles Ruggles) gets engaged to equally prosperous Lucy Ledyard (Sue Conroy), his lawyer 

Huntley Palmer (Douglas Gilmore), who wants to marry Lucy for her money, begins pulling all sorts of tricks to break the couple up - like forging risque letters supposedly written by Charlie to his former mistress Sonya (Tamara Geva), whose present husband Tony Maloney (Allen Jenkins) is a gangster. This is a comedy, so no one gets hurt and all ends well, though not for the lawyer.
     Peach O'Reno⁵⁴ stars vaudeville comics Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey as Wattles and Swift, a pair of divorce lawyers in Reno, the city that at the time was the marriage dissolution capital of the United States. The hijinks begin when each partner inadvertently undertakes to represent the spouse of the other's client. Smith arranges for middle-aged Aggie Bruno (Cora Witherspoon) to be caught with a professional co-respondent of the male gender while Wattles is setting the stage for Joe Bruno (Joseph Cawthorn) to be caught with a woman in the same line of business. Then Wattles gets a death threat from an Arizona gambler whose ex-wife he had represented and, in a frantic effort to protect himself, dresses up in women's clothes and poses as the female co-respondent, only to be exposed when his wig catches fire. Eventually there's a divorce trial (broadcast on radio) but the film ends with the Brunos reunited and their daughters, Prudence and Pansy (Dorothy Lee and Zelma O'Neal), engaged respectively to Wattles and Swift.
     The Heart of New York⁵⁵ is the kind of ethnic comedy that even Turner Classic Movies won't show today. Mendel (George Sidney) is a wacky inventor who lives with his wife and three children on (where else?) the Lower East Side. His older daughter Lillian (Ruth Hall) is engaged to Milton (Donald Cook) who, being at one and the same time a doctor, a dentist, and a lawyer, is the perfect (or should that be poifect?) nice Jewish boy for any nice Jewish girl (or shouldthat be goil?). Milton puts on his lawyer hat when the rapacious manufacturer Gassenheim (Oscar Apfel) tries to halt production on Mendel's revolutionary new dishwashing machine.
     Love, Honor, and Oh Baby!⁵⁶ seems to be Hollywood's only comedy of the first golden age that deals with a subject most of us associate with much later decades. Struggling small-town lawyer Mark Reed (Slim 

Summerville) is introduced by his girlfriend Connie Clark (ZaSu Pitts) to her friend Louise (Adrienne Dore), who wants to sue vegetarian banker Jasper B. Ogden (George Barbier) for sexual misconduct. When Mark tells the woman she has insufficient evidence to succeed, Connie decides to take a job at the bank and entrap Ogden in a sex scandal. She encourages the randy banker's advances to the point that on his next business trip out of town he reserves train berths for two. Mark finds out what Connie is up to and substitutes his own trap, manipulating Ogden into sneaking into Connie's bedroom at night with the upshot that the banker is sued for what today we call sexual harassment. Mark's shyster tricks - like having Connie read on the witness stand from her diary and implying all sorts of sexual connotations in her descriptions of the vegetables Ogden had recommended to her - force the banker to cough up $ 100,000 in settlement money and stop hitting on his female employees. This may sound like a serious film but it was clearly intended for chuckles.
     I'm No Angel⁵⁷ is the story of Tira (Mae West), a circus performer whose star turn gains her fame, wealth, and a bevy of well-to-do admirers, the one for whom she falls hardest being Jack Clayton (Cary Grant). The two plan to marry, but the romance sours on the night Jack visits Tira's penthouse while she's out and encounters her jealous former main squeeze Slick Wiley (Ralf Harolde), who claims he's still her lover. Jack calls off the engagement and Tira, unaware of Slick's deception, hires shyster Benny Pinkowitz (Gregory Ratoff), whose motto is "Give me that much loophole and I'm through it like an eel," to sue for breach of promise. On cross-examination, Clayton's lawyer (Irving Pichel) confronts Tira with several of the previous men in her life.

LAWYER: And no doubt you recall those five gentlemen seated in the first row, right inside the railing? Mr. Blake, Mr. Larson, Mr. Willard, Mr. Foster, and Mr. Harris?
TIRA: Well, I do recall their faces but them ain't the names they gave me.

witnesses, Tira makes side comments like: "I'm just askin' good, honest and intelligent people not to take the word of an ex-convict [i.e. Slick Wiley] against a good, honest and innocent woman." Jack interrupts the juristic farce with an offer to settle the case. Later Tira entertains the bug-eyed judge in her penthouse, a tryst which is interrupted by a phone call from the no less smitten Juror Number 4, to whom she addresses the immortal line: "Don't forget, come up and see me sometime." The film ends as Jack learns he was mistaken about Tira's involvement with Slick and the couple get back together.
     In Tillie and Gus,⁵⁸ genial flimflam artist Augustus Winterbottom (W.C. Fields) joins forces with his ex-wife Matilda (Alison Skipworth), who is equally skilled at the game, to save their young niece Mary Sheridan (Jacqueline Wells) and her family from wily lawyer Phineas Pratt (Clarence Wilson). After Pratt has swindled the Sheridans out of Mary's inheritance from her father, the family's only remaining possession is a decrepit ferry, which Tillie and Gus help them restore to working condition. When Pratt purchases a ferry of his own and tries to put the Sheridans out of business, the issue of who gets the franchise is settled by a Fourth of July race between the boats - which ends with the Sheridans winning and Phineas dunked in the drink.
     The protagonists in Havana Widows⁵⁹ are out-of-work showgirls Mae Knight (Joan Blondell) and Sadie Appleby (Glenda Farrell), who go to Havana on borrowed money and pose as wealthy widows, hoping to entrap rich men they can sue for breach of promise. Mae meets and falls for young Bob Jones (Lyle Talbot) but, when the girls' lawyer Duffy (Frank McHugh) tells them Bob has no money of his own, they decide to target his randy father (Guy Kibbee). Then they meet Deacon Jones' wife (Ruth Donnelly) and, realizing they can't sue a married man for breach of promise, take Duffy's advice to get the old philanderer into a compromising situation and then blackmail him. One comic complication piles atop another but all ends well with Deacon divorced from his shrewish wife and his son Bob married to Mae.

     One of the most potent and popular genres of the early 1930s was the gangster film. Nothing in that genre requires a lawyer character and in fact 

there are no such characters in Little Caesar,⁶⁰The Public Enemy,⁶¹Scarface,⁶² or any of the other classics of the genre. Yet a few of the lesser known gangster films did have a legal component.
     In Bad Company,⁶³ Helen King (Helen Twelvetrees) agrees to marry lawyer Steve Carlyle (John Garrick) without knowing that Steve's sole client is gang boss Goldie Gorio (Ricardo Cortez) or that her own brother Mark (Frank Conroy) is the head of a rival gang. Gorio, who has his own designs on Helen, finances a extravagant wedding for her and Steve and lavishes gifts on the newlyweds. Later the gang boss learns that federal agent McBaine (Harry Carey) is planning to kill him and sends Steve into the G-man's trap, where he's seriously wounded. Finally, Helen understands the truth about her husband and her brother. Gorio wipes out Mark and his gang in a scene inspired by the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, then makes moves on Helen, who encourages him because she knows that the only way she can save Steve is by killing the mob leader. The film climaxes with a police raid on the fortified apartment hideaway where Helen is trapped with Gorio and his men. Steve escapes from the hospital and makes his way through the battle lines to the apartment and Helen shoots Gorio down in her husband's presence.
     Afraid to Talk⁶⁴ is one of those grim and cynical films of big-city corruption that vanished with strict self-censorship. Bellboy Eddie Martin (Eric Linden) is framed for a gangland murder in his hotel that he happened to witness. After a brutal beating supervised by Assistant District Attorney Wade (Louis Calhern), he confesses. The outraged doctor who treats the young man calls in criminal lawyer Harry Berger (Gustav von Seyffertitz). Despite his efforts Eddie is sent to prison, but because he still knows too much, Wade sends some thugs to kill Eddie in his cell and make it look like suicide. The plot is thwarted (though not by Berger) and some of the corrupt politicians in the city are brought to justice, but Wade remains unscathed and, as the film ends, issues a press release claiming that the city has been totally cleaned up.
     20,000 Years in Sing Sing⁶⁵ is a gritty little picture featuring one of the 

slimiest attorneys in early juriscinema. Soon after gangster Tommy Connors (Spencer Tracy) is sent to Sing Sing, his lawyer Joe Finn (Louis Calhern) tries and fails to get special privileges for his client by bribing the enlightened and progressive prison warden (Arthur Byron). Later during an automobile drive, Finn makes moves on Tommy's girlfriend Fay Wilson (Bette Davis), who is seriously injured jumping from the car to escape him. The warden allows Tommy to visit her. When he learns how she was hurt, the two of them go to have it out with Finn. The confrontation ends with Fay shooting the lawyer to death but Tommy takes the blame and the radically downbeat final scene shows him about to be electrocuted.
     The Mad Game⁶⁶ takes place as Prohibition is coming to an end. Bootlegger Edward Carson (Spencer Tracy) is prevailed upon by his lawyer William Bennett (John Miljan) to plead guilty to a federal income tax evasion charge for which, the fix supposedly being in, he'll receive only a fine and a suspended sentence. Actually there is no fix-Bennett wants Carson put away so he can take up with his client's mistress Marilyn Kirk (Kathleen Burke)-and Judge Penfield (Ralph Morgan) sentences Carson to five years in prison. Chopper Allen (J. Carrol Naish) takes over Carson's mob, has Bennett and Marilyn bumped off, and launches a series of kidnappings-for-ransom that terrorize the nation. Carson, whose wife and daughter had been murdered by kidnappers years before, offers the authorities a deal: if he's paroled, he'll undergo plastic surgery and infiltratethe mob in order to destroy it. At the violent climax, he gives his life to save Judge Penfield's kidnapped son.
     In Sleepers East,⁶⁷ parolee Lena Karelson (Wynne Gibson) meets Jack Wentworth (Howard Lally), the mayor's son, and foolishly accompanies him to a gambling club where, after losing heavily, he kills the club's owner in Lena's presence. When the police pin the crime on a gangster who was also about to kill the gambler, Lena promises Jack that she'll keep her mouth shut and leaves town. Martin Knox (Harvey Stephens), the accused gangster's lawyer, trails her to Toledo and threatens to get her put back in prison as a parole violator if she doesn't come back and testify for the defense. As the train returning them passes through Lena's old home town, her childhood sweetheart Jason Everett (Preston Foster) comes on board. Then political operator Carl Izzard (J. Carrol Naish) takes Lena aside and tells her that if she testifies for the defense she'll be tried as an accessory to the gambler's murder. The film climaxes of course in the courtroom. With 

great reluctance Lena testifies to the truth and is about to identify Jack as the killer when he stands up in court and shoots himself. Jason and Lena are reunited at the fade-out.

     Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, one of Hollywood's most popular genres was the detective film, centering on the protagonist's solution of one or more crimes, almost invariably murders. Lawyers were no more necessary in this genre than they were in gangster films, but in fact they appeared in several whodunits in a variety of roles: as detectives, victims, suspects, and, needless to say, murderers.
     The earliest lawyer character to function as a cinematic sleuth seems to have been Andrew Bullivant, whose irascibility has earned him the nickname Grumpy. This juristic curmudgeon, who may well be the spiritual grandfather of John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey, was reportedly portrayed on stage by English actor Cyril Maude more than 1400 times before he was brought to the screen in Grumpy.⁶⁸ Bullivant (Cyril Maude) is living in retirement on his country estate with his granddaughter Virginia (Frances Dade) and house guest Chamberlain Jarvis (Paul Cavanagh) when Virginia's boyfriend Ernest Heron (Phillips Holmes) shows up for a visit, bringing with him a valuable diamond that he was commissioned to carry from South Africa to England. Ernest is attacked in the Bullivant library on the night of his arrival and the diamond is stolen and replaced with a camellia. Suspecting that the culprit is Jarvis, Grumpy follows him to London and begins to accumulate evidence that in due course leads to a confession and the stone's return.
     Charlie Chan, the protagonist of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) and more than forty films plus radio and TV series, was not a lawyer but encountered lawyers now and then in the course of his sleuthing, for instance in Charlie Chan Carries On.⁶⁹ The film opens in London with the murder of one of the members of a round-the-world tour. When Inspector Duff of Scotland Yard (Peter Gawthorne) is unable to solve the crime before the travelers leave London, he joins the party, which includes elderly criminal lawyer Patrick Tait (William Holden). More murders take place as the tour proceeds around the world. In Honolulu 

Duff comes too close to the answer and is himself shot, leaving his old friend Chan (Warner Oland) to carry on with the cruise and find the killer - who turns out not to be the lawyer.
     The Trial of Vivienne Ware⁷⁰ bears certain similarities to Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels, which began appearing the year after this film's release, but there are also significant differences. While Gardner in his early novels allows us to see only what happens in Mason's presence, the film makes us privy to the events leading up to the trial. Vivienne Ware (Joan Bennett) and her fiance, architect Damon Fenwick (Jameson Thomas), go to the Silver Bowl nightclub where Vivienne is insulted by singer Dolores Divine (Lilian Bond), Fenwick's former lover. After taking Vivienne home, Fenwick returns to the club to pick up Dolores. The next day Vivienne sends Fenwick a letter she'll soon regret. Several hours later the police arrest her for his murder. Representing her is attorney John Sutherland (Donald Cook), who is also in love with her - another element one never finds in a Perry Mason novel.
     The trial, perhaps the most swift-paced in any film, begins with a mountain of evidence against Vivienne. One: on the morning after the nightclub scene she walked in on Dolores in sexy pajamas eating breakfast with Fenwick in his house and stormed out furious. Two: immediately afterwards she sent Fenwick a letter, which might be construed as threatening. Three: her handkerchief was found near Fenwick's body. Four: a neighbor claims to have seen her entering Fenwick's house that night. Vivienne denies being anywhere near the house at the time of the murder but Sutherland doesn't believe her. Nevertheless, he puts her on the stand and she testifies as follows. One: her letter to Fenwick was meant to break their engagement, not threaten him. Two: she must have dropped her handkerchief during her breakfast visit to Fenwick's house. Three: at the time of the murder she was at a hockey game, which she left early because she felt ill. The District Attorney (Alan Dinehart) cross-examines Vivienne so ruthlessly that she breaks down, sobbing that even her own lawyer doesn't believe her. At this point we find ourselves in the juristic cloud-cuckooland that most Hollywood law films sooner or later enter: the prosecutor calls the defense lawyer as a witness!
     Changing Vivienne's plea from not guilty to self-defense, Sutherland testifies that he attended the hockey match with her and, when she left early, followed her to Fenwick's house. The next day, Sutherland proceeds as if his client were still pleading not guilty. First he calls witnesses who 

put Dolores Divine at Fenwick's house at the time of the murder, then he calls Dolores herself, who testifies - as dozens of characters in Perry Mason novels would do after her - that she found the body and said nothing about it but isn't the murderer. (Apparently Vivienne, like countless clients of Perry Mason, had done the same thing.) Dolores also testifies that she saw the real killer leaving the scene, and that it was either her jealous boss, nightclub owner Angelo Perone (Noel Madison), or his look-alike cousin Joe Garson. Perone shoots Garson as he's about to testify, and then is himself shot down by the police and Garson's dying confession implicates both cousins. Spectators roar, flashbulbs blaze, lawyer and client embrace, the verdict is not guilty. All this in less than 60 minutes!
     In Miss Pinkerton,⁷¹ Nurse Hilda Adams (Joan Blondell) is hired to care for wealthy Juliet Mitchell (Elizabeth Patterson), whose nephew Herbert Wynne (Allan Lane) was recently murdered. The person who murdered Wynne and later kills Aunt Julia, too, turns out to be the family lawyer (Holmes Herbert).
     Penguin Pool Murder⁷² was the first of six detective films about Stuart Palmer's spinster schoolteacher character Hildegarde Withers. Miss Withers (Edna May Oliver) is touring New York's Battery Park Aquarium with her class when the body of stockbroker Gerald Parker (Guy Usher) plops into the penguin tank. Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) soon establishes that the murder weapon was a hatpin stolen from Miss Withers and driven through Parker's right ear, but at the schoolteacher's suggestion he tells reporters that the weapon went through the dead man's left ear. Eventually Parker's wife Gwen (Mae Clarke) and her former lover Philip Seymour (Donald Cook) are charged with the murder and put on trial. Their defense counsel is Barry Costello (Robert Armstrong), who was visiting the aquarium at the time of the murder. Costello puts Miss Withers on the stand as a defense witness and, defying a cardinal rule of evidence, starts cross-examining her savagely, trying to make the jury think she killed Parker herself.

You didn't notice the defendant in this case, Mr. Seymour, drag the unconscious body of the man you had once loved and then hated behind the tanks and then come out? You didn't . . . steal behind the tanks with your deadly stiletto of a hatpin and drive it 

most cruelly and foully into the right ear of the unconscious man? (Miss Withers sits silent.) Your Honor, I have finished with this witness.

censorship differ widely not only in quality but in the function of the attorney character. The Thin Man⁷⁵ is the high-spirited (pardon the double entendre) classic that kicked off the cinematic exploits of Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) - those madcap amateur sleuths, never without cocktails in their hands, who in their unique manner investigate the disappearance of wealthy inventor Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) and the murder of his mistress Julia Wolf (Natalie Moorhead). At the climax, they give a dinner party for all the suspects and expose Wynant's lawyer Macaulay (Porter Hall) as a double murderer.
     About a month later came Murder in the Private Car,⁷⁶ which kicks off with attorney Alden Murray (Porter Hall) informing Los Angeles telephone operator Ruth Raymond (Mary Carlisle) that she's the long-lost daughter of railroad magnate Luke Carson (Berton Churchill). Most of this inane comedy-melodrama takes place as Ruth, Murray, eccentric sleuth Godfrey D. Scott (Charlie Ruggles), and an assortment of others are traveling to New York in Carson's deluxe private railroad car. The passengers encounter an escaped gorilla from a circus train, mysterious radio messages, a few murders including that of lawyer Murray, and an imminent collision with another choo choo.

     The coming of sound offered huge opportunities for certain forms of American film and made possible the first wave of movies dealing with law, lawyers, lawyering, and justice but seemed for a while to be the death knell for that peculiarly American genre, the Western, which had flourished through most of the 1920s. When Hollywood's new gurus, the sound technicians, insisted that it was impossible to record sound except indoors under tightly controlled conditions, it became the accepted wisdom that the Western, which depended on rugged outdoor action and spectacular stunts, was doomed. Between 1928 and 1930 all the major studios dropped their profitable Western stars.
     Exactly who was first to prove that sound could be recorded outdoors remains in dispute. John Ford, a contract director at Fox during these crisis years, claimed the credit for himself,⁷⁷ but so did Raoul Walsh who was 

also directing at Fox at the time.⁷⁸ Whether credit rightly belongs to one or the other or both or neither, the floodgates were soon opened wide to talking Westerns and most of the big stars of the 1920s found homes on the range once more. Most of Hollywood's studios large and small joined in the new Western boom, bringing back stars from the 1920s like Buck Jones and launching the careers of newcomers including a brawny Iowan who called himself John Wayne.
     Shoot-em-ups and juriscinema would seem at first glance too antithetical to have interfaced, and indeed the juristic component in early Westerns is usually minor in nature, where it exists at all. The sprawling epic Cimarron⁷⁹ starred Richard Dix as freewheeling lawyer and newspaper editor Yancey Cravat, who persuades his Eastern-born wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) to come West and settle with him in the newly-opened Oklahoma territory. Among the episodes in this film's forty-year time span is one of legal interest: Yancey returns from the Spanish-American War to put on his lawyer hat and defend his old friend Dixie Lee (Estelle Taylor), who is being tried as a "public nuisance," i.e., a hooker. This is one of the few instances in a film of the first golden age where a lawyer character is shown doing something both lawyerly and admirable.
     One of the same studio's sixty-minute quickie Westerns, released about nine months after Cimarron, is much more typical of the interface. In Sundown Trail,⁸⁰ ranch manager Buck Sawyer (Tom Keene) falls in love with his late employer's daughter (Marion Shilling) when she comes West to take over her father's spread. Accompanying her is a greedy lawyer (Hooper Atchley) who warns her against Buck, but the principal bad guys in this low-budget oater are a crooked neighboring rancher (Stanley Blystone) 

and his gang.
     Although many sixty-minute Westerns of the decade engage the desperation of the time only in relatively simple ways of this sort, a few penetrate deeper, portraying the conflict between the simple sense of decency in a community and the legal system founded on the sanctity of property and of its own rules legitimizing economic exploitation. The finest such film is One Man Law,⁸¹ fourteenth in a series of twenty-eight Westerns, roughly an hour in length each, which shoot-em-up superstar Buck Jones made at the studio between 1930 and 1934. Director Hillyer's acid contempt for a system that employs property concepts to enforce exploitation permeates almost every aspect of this extraordinary little picture. Brand Thompson (Buck Jones) is tricked by entrepreneur Jonathan P. Streeter (Robert Ellis) into accepting the position of sheriff of Grass Valley, charged with "upholding the law. The very letter of the law." What precipitates the moral conflict in this film is that Streeter and his eastern partners own title to much of the land in the valley. He has leased it out in parcels to dozens of small ranchers who have spent years improving the property but without the security of legal ownership, which Streeter has often promised but never delivered. Now his eastern associates have sold these parcels of land to people who want to resettle in the West. When the newcomers arrive with their deeds, they demand possession of the land to which they have clear title under the rules of property law. This is when Thompson learns that he's legally required to evict his friends and neighbors.

STREETER: It's the law. An unfortunate case, but nevertheless the law.

THOMPSON: Why, that's robbery!

STREETER: It may seem so. But it's legal. And it's your duty to enforce it.

THOMPSON: It's inhuman and I won't do it!

THOMPSON: Do you think I'd keep a job that forces me to drive my friends, people who have trusted me, off the land they've really earned?

COOPER: Son, if you and I are going to have any chance to save those people, you've got to do that. . . . With you wearin' that star, maybe we can find a way.

THOMPSON: I tell you I can't stand it any more!

COOPER: You've got to! . . . . The law is his weapon and we've got to turn it back on him somehow . . . . He's got to be forced to give back that land willingly!

type courtroom dramas. Sheriff Tim Laramie (Tim McCoy) acts as defense attorney for ranch foreman Moody Pearson (Niles Welch), to whom he owes his life, when Moody is charged with the murder of his boss, the father of Jane Herrick (Shirley Grey), with whom both Tim and Moody are in love. Moody is convicted but Tim lets him escape, then turns in his badge and follows the fugitive to a distant county where he meets Laughing Red Slavens (Noah Beery), the real killer and perhaps the juiciest psychotic in any Western.
     The title of The Cowboy Counsellor⁸⁴ suggests a full-fledged piece of frontier juriscinema, but appearances are misleading. Former rodeo champ Hoot Gibson stars as Dan Alton, a book salesman who roams the West hawking copies of a tome entitled The Ranchman's Own Lawyer. When Luke Avery (Fred Gilman) is charged with a stagecoach robbery, Dan becomes attracted to the defendant's sister Ruth (Sheila Mannors) and agrees to "represent" him. Some lawyer! First, suspecting that the real holdup man was Ruth's neighbor Bill Clary (Jack Rutherford), he ransacks Clary's house in a vain search for incriminating evidence. Then he "borrows" from the sheriff's office the Mexican scarf worn by the bandit and, conspicuously wearing it around his neck, holds up the coach bringing the judge and the state's attorney to town. Once the trial begins and the jurymen learn of this incident, they develop a reasonable doubt and find Luke not guilty. At this point, the judge recognizes Alton as the man who stopped his coach and orders him arrested, but Dan escapes and captures Clary with money from the original robbery still on him. At the conclusion of this lighthearted romp, Dan and Ruth ask the judge to marry them. When His Honor admits that he's forgotten the words for the ceremony, Dan reverts to his original status and tries to sell the jurist a copy of The Ranchman's Own Lawyer.
     Fighting for Justice⁸⁵ tells of Tim Keane (Tim McCoy) and his fight to regain the family ranch, which was sold out from under them after the odious Mr. Trout (Hooper Atchley) kept the money the old man had given him to pay the back taxes on the property. No one will be surprised to learn that Trout is a lawyer.
     The Mysterious Rider⁸⁶ boasts one of the slimiest lawyer characters in a Western. Cliff Harkness (Irving Pichel) begins by falsely claiming legal 

ownership of ranchland that is about to skyrocket in value thanks to a dam project. After selling their own property back to Wade Benton (Kent Taylor) and his neighbors, Harkness sells the same land to Mark King (Berton Churchill). Then he steals the receipt he gave Benton and claims never to have been paid at all, so that Benton's outraged neighbors have the poor guy thrown in jail for stealing the money with which he was supposed to have repurchased the property. The ranchers are about to be evicted when a "mysterious rider" begins harassing Harkness and his cohorts. The masked hero turns out, of course, to be Benton, who knows a secret way out of his jail cell.
     In Silent Men,⁸⁷ Tim Richards (Tim McCoy) gets a job on a ranch whose owner is in the middle of a feud with another rancher. After the usual riding and shooting, he discovers that the feud is being manipulated by the foreman of one ranch (Mathew Betz), the local sheriff (Lloyd Ingraham), and the lawyer for the Cattlemen's Association (William V. Mong).
     Legal advice is much more central to Rainbow Ranch.⁸⁸ Seaman Ed Randall (Rex Bell) is granted leave to help his widowed aunt (Vane Calvert) defend the ranch's title from land pirate Marvin Black (Bob Kortman), who has built a dam on his own property to deprive her of water. In due course Ed is told by attorney Wilbur Hall (Phil Dunham) that his late uncle bought Rainbow Ranch with perpetual water rights, meaning - at least in this juristic neverneverland - that whatever Ed may do to get the water back is legal. Hall is murdered before he can say more and Ed is jailed for the crime but escapes to blow up the dam and pin both his uncle's murder and the lawyer's on Black.
     In The Last Trail,⁸⁹ Tom Daley (George O'Brien) comes to Arizona to take over his late uncle's valuable ranch. What he doesn't know is that his uncle's lawyer John Ross (J. Carrol Naish) is looking for an impostor to pose as Tom and take over the spread. Tom shows up incognito and winds up being hired by Ross to impersonate himself, with the lawyer's accomplice Patricia Carter (Claire Trevor) passing as Tom's wife. His real identity is exposed just as the will is being settled and the rest of the film plays itself out in standard shoot-em-up fashion with Ross biting the dust and Tom and Pat agreeing to become man and wife for real.

     On July 1, 1934, self-censorship came down on Hollywood like a black cloud. Its prime mover was the Roman Catholic Church and its prime targets were the cynicism and sexual liberation of the 1920s that had permeated and, from the priests' point of view, corrupted talking films since their inception.⁹⁰ The censors did not target the first golden age of juriscinema as such but, in an early instance of collateral damage, killed it anyway, by outlawing the 1920s atmosphere that was such an integral part of the films of the early 1930s.
     The coming of self-censorship and the dawn of juriscinema's second golden age are separated by an interval of roughly a quarter century. Law and lawyers continued to figure in the movies of the late 1930s and 1940s and the early 1950s, but the period produced very few first-rate films on these subjects and, whatever their quality, they lacked the connecting motifs that characterized the first golden age. The source of the motifs that link most of the law-related films of the second golden age was the idealism of the Warren Court and early civil rights era, reflected in 12 Angry Men,⁹¹ Inherit the Wind,⁹² Judgment at Nuremberg,⁹³ To Kill a Mockingbird,⁹⁴ Man in the Middle,⁹⁵ and others. It is not by chance that the same time period witnessed the beginning of the breakdown of Hollywood self-censorship.
     By the time the second golden age had run its course, the Production Code was thing of the past. Without any protracted interval of the sort that had separated juriscinema's first and second golden ages, the radical cynicism of the Vietnam and Watergate era offered newly liberated film-makers the leitmotifs for a third golden age. Most of the key works of this period are marked by a contempt for law, lawyers, lawyering and justice - and for just about everything else in American society to boot - far deeper and darker than the 1920s-style cynicism of the early talkies discussed in this essay. Dirty Harry,⁹⁶ . . . And Justice for All,⁹⁷ Criminal Law,⁹⁸

Presumed Innocent,⁹⁹ Martin Scorsese's version of Cape Fear;¹⁰⁰ the list goes on and on through the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first.
     That in a nutshell is what happened to juriscinema between July 1, 1934 and today. Someday, although I doubt whether anytime soon, there will be a comprehensive history of the form, a book that will cover all three golden ages and at least the more interesting films between them. Perhaps the present essay and my other discussions of the earliest talking films about law, lawyers, lawyering, and justice will serve as a resource for such a book. If so, I shall rest easier in my grave.

* Professor of Law, St. Louis University. 

1 See PAUL BERGMAN & MICHAEL ASIMOW, REEL JUSTICE: THE COURTROOM GOES TO THE MOVIES (1996) (discussing a collection of movies pertaining to the legal process). For commentary on this book, see Francis M. Nevins, Book Review, 20 LEGAL STUD. FORUM 145 (1996). 

2 See sources cited infra notes 39-41. 

3 See THE VINTAGE MENCKEN (Alistair Cooke ed., 1955); Maxwell Geismar, Introduction to THE RING LARDNER READER, at i- xxxiv (Maxwell Geismar ed., 1963) (highlighting Lardner as a savage and merciless satirist and social critic). 

4 JACQUES BARZUN, FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE 734-35 (2000). 

5 This elegant euphemism for an earthier phrase at which most law publishers would look askance comes from EDMUND WILSON, THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS 1947-1969, at 281 (1969). 

6 ALEXANDER WALKER, THE SHATTERED SILENTS: HOW THE TALKIES CAME TO STAY 139 (1979). 

7 ON TRIAL (Warner Bros. 1928). 

8 THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA (6th ed. 2001), available at http://www.bartleby.com/ 65/ri/Rice-Elm.html (last visited Apr. 24, 2004). 

9 COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW (Universal Pictures 1933). 

10 WALKER, supra note 6, at 121 n.19 (quoting Variety, Nov. 21 1928). 

11 THE BELLAMY TRIAL (MGM 1929). 

12 HIS CAPTIVE WOMAN (First Nat'l Pictures, Inc. 1929). 

13 DONN BYRNE, Changeling, in CHANGELING AND OTHER SHORT STORIES 3 (1923). 

14 WALKER, supra note 6, at 139 n.10 (quoting Variety, Apr. 10, 1929). 

15 COQUETTE (Pickford Corp. 1929). 

16 THRU DIFFERENT EYES (Fox Film Corp. 1929). 

17 CITIZEN CANE (RKO 1941). 

18 RASHOMON (RKO 1950). 

19 THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN (MGM 1929). 

20 See HARPER LEE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 177-81, 206, 214, 238-39 (1960). Finch instructed Bob Ewell to sign his name while on the witness stand in an unsuccessful attempt to demonstrate that Ewell was left-handed and that it was Ewell who had committed the rape of his daughter Mayella Ewell, rather than the accused, Tom Robinson. 

21 MADAME X (MGM 1929). 

22 See Francis M. Nevins, When Celluloid Lawyers Started to Speak: Exploring Juriscinema's First Golden Age, in LAW AND POPULAR CULTURE (Michael Freeman ed., 2004). 

23 COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW (Universal Pictures 1933); see supra note 9 and accompanying text. 

24 MANSLAUGHTER (Paramount Pictures 1930) (directed by George Abbott from his own screenplay based on Alice Duer Miller's 1921 novel of the same name). 

25 THE LAWYER'S SECRET (Paramount Publix Corp. 1931) (directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Max Marcin from a screenplay by Lloyd Corrigan and Max Marcin based on an original story by James Hilary Finn). 

26 A FREE SOUL (MGM 1931) (directed by Clarence Brown from a screenplay by John Meehan and Becky Gardiner based on Adela Rogers St. Johns' 1927 novel and Willard Mack's 1928 stage play of the same name). 

27 A hat with Wilfong's initials was found beside the body of the victim, a rival gangster, and around the time of the crime witnesses saw Ace leaving the scene hatless. In the only part of the trial we see, Ashe gives the hat to Wilfong, who grimaces comically for the cackling jury as he tries to jam the all-too-small fedora down on his head. One can almost hear Ashe's closing argument: "If the hat don't fit, you must acquit!" We are never told whether he arranged for a substitution of chapeaus in order to get an acquittal for a client he knew was guilty, but most viewers will have their suspicions. 

28 MADAME X (MGM 1929); see supra note 21 and accompanying text. 

29 TWO AGAINST THE WORLD (Warner Bros. 1932) (directed by Archie Mayo from a screenplay by Sheridan Gibney based on Marion Dix and Jerry Horwin's stage play A Dangerous Set). 

30 THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR (Universal Pictures 1933) (directed by James Whale from a screenplay by William Anthony McGuire based on Ladislas Fodor's 1932 stage play Der Kuss vor dem Spiegel). 

31 BROTHERS (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1930) (directed by Walter Lang from a screenplay by John Thomas Neville and Charles R. Condon, based on Herbert Aston Jr.'s 1928 stage play of the same name). 

32 A FREE SOUL, supra, note 26. 

33 GUILTY HANDS (MGM 1931) (directed by W.S. Van Dyke II from a screenplay by Bayard Veiller). 

34 THE WOMAN ACCUSED (Paramount Pictures 1933) (directed by Paul Sloane from a screenplay by Bayard Veiller based on a magazine serial by ten authors - including Irvin S. Cobb and Zane Grey - that was published in Liberty magazine early in 1933). 

35 THE FURIES (First National Pictures, Inc. 1930) (directed by Alan Crosland from a screenplay by Forrest Halsey based on Zoe Akins' 1928 stage play of the same name). 

36 AS THE DEVIL COMMANDS (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1933) (directed by Roy William Neill from a screenplay by Jo Swerling based on an original story by Keene Thompson). 

37 AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (Paramount Pictures 1931) (directed by Josef von Sternberg from a screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel of the same name). 

38 This language, which is a condensed version of the seventh paragraph in Book Three, Chapter XIX of Dreiser's novel, demonstrates how closely the film-makers followed the novel when and where they could. 2 THEODORE DREISER, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY 223-24 (1925). 

39 The film-makers took this designation from Book Three, Chapter XX of Dreiser's novel. Id. at 233. But where did Dreiser get it from? Most likely from Alexandre Bisson's play Madame X, which, as we have seen earlier, was first staged in New York in 1910, or from the 1920 silent movie based on the play. Of course it's also possible that Dreiser contrived the name independently, without ever having seen the play or the film. Either way, for the adamantly unreligious Dreiser the X had no Christian significance whatever. 

40 For an account of the litigation, see W.A. SWANBERG, DREISER 369-372, 376-378 (1965). 

41 THE WOMAN IN ROOM 13 (Fox Film Corp. 1932) (directed by Henry King from a screenplay by Guy Bolton based on the 1919 stage play of the same name by Samuel Shipman, Max Marcin, and Percival Wilde). 

42 BROADWAY BAD (Fox 1933) (directed by Sidney Lanfield from a screenplay by Arthur Kober and Maude Fulton based on an original story by William R. Lipman and A.W. Pezet). 

43 THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE (Paramount Pictures 1933) (directed by Stephen Roberts from a screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett based on William Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary). 

44 For excerpts from some of the documents pertaining to censorship of this film, see the entry on The Story of Temple Drake, in THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE CATALOG OF MOTION PICTURES PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES: FEATURE FILMS, 1931-1940, at 2063- 64 (1993). 

45 "He attacked me - Trigger did," Temple sobs on the witness stand. "I went to the city with Trigger and stayed with him until this week." Her father the judge interposes a question from the bench: "And stayed there a prisoner, you mean?" Actually she stayed with him voluntarily because - this is the big secret the film-makers couldn't reveal - being raped gave her orgasms. "I killed him!" Temple cries. Then she faints, leaving the question unanswered. See THOMAS DOHERTY, PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD: SEX, IMMORALITY, AND INSURRECTION IN AMERICAN CINEMA, 1930-1934, at 114-118 (1999) (describing Temple's sobs on the witness stand, and suggesting that Temple experienced sexual pleasure during her encounters with Trigger). 

46 MADAME X (MGM 1929); see supra note 21 and accompanying text. 

47 QUEEN HIGH (Paramount Pictures 1930) (directed by Fred Newmeyer from a screenplay by Frank Mandel based on the 1926 stage play of the same name by Laurence Schwab, B.G. DeSylva and Lewis Gensler, and on Edward Henry Peple's 1918 stage play A Pair of Sixes). 

48 WHAT A WIDOW! (Gloria Productions 1930) (directed by Allan Dwan from a screenplay by James Gleason and James Seymour based on an original story by Josephine Lovett). 

49 THE NAUGHTY FLIRT (Warner Bros. 1931) (directed by Edward F. Cline from a screenplay by Richard Weil and Earl Baldwin). 

50 THE GANG BUSTER (Paramount Publix Corp. 1931) (directed by A. Edward Sutherland from a screenplay by Percy Heath and Joseph L. Mankiewicz). 

51 DON'T BET ON WOMEN (Fox Film Corp. 1931) (directed by William K. Howard from a screenplay by Lynn Starling and Leon Gordon based on an original story by William Anthony McGuire). 

52 LONELY WIVES  (Pathe 1931) (directed by Russell Mack from a screenplay by Walter DeLeon based on a 1912 German vaudeville skit adapted for U.S. vaudeville ten years later). 

53 THE GIRL HABIT (Paramount 1931) (directed by Edward F. Cline from a screenplay by Owen Davis, Sr. and Gertrude Purcell based on A.E. Thomas and Clayton Hamilton's 1915 stage play Thirty Days). 

54 PEACH O'RENO (RKO 1931) (directed by William A. Seiter from a screenplay by Ralph Spence, Tim Whelan, and Eddie Welch). 

55 THE HEART OF NEW YORK (Warner Bros. 1932) (directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a screenplay by Arthur Caesar and Houston Branch based on David Freedman's 1929 stage play Mendel, Inc.). 

56 LOVE, HONOR, AND OH BABY! (Universal 1933) (directed by Edward Buzzell from a screenplay by Norman Krasna and Buzzell himself based on Bertrand Robinson and Howard Lindsay's 1930 stage play Oh, Promise Me). 

57 I'M NO ANGEL (Paramount Pictures 1933) (directed by Wesley Ruggles from a screenplay by Mae West). 

58 TILLIE AND GUS (Paramount Pictures 1933) (directed by Francis Martin from a screenplay by himself and Walter DeLeon based on an original story by Rupert Hughes). 

59 HAVANA WIDOWS (Warner Bros. 1933) (directed by Ray Enright from a screenplay by Earl Baldwin). 

60 LITTLE CAESAR (First National Pictures, Inc. 1931). 

61 THE PUBLIC ENEMY (Warner Bros. 1931) (directed by William Wellman from a screenplay by Kubec Glasmou and John Bright). 

62 SCARFACE (United Artists 1932). 

63 BAD COMPANY (RKO 1931) (directed by Tay Garnett from a story by Garnett and Tom Buckingham suggested by Jack Lait's 1930 novel Put on the Spot). 

64 AFRAID TO TALK (Universal Pictures 1932) (directed by Edward L. Cahn from a screenplay by Tom Reed based on the 1932 stage play Merry-Go-Round by Albert Maltz and George Sklar). 

65 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (First National 1932) (directed by Michael Curtiz from a screenplay by Wilson Mizner and Brown Holmes based on an adaptation by Courtney Terrett and Robert Lord of Warden Lewis E. Lawes' 1932 memoir of the same name). 

66 THE MAD GAME (Fox Film Corp. 1933) (directed by Irving Cummings from a screenplay by William Conselman and Henry Johnson based on Conselman's original story). 

67 SLEEPERS EAST (Fox Film Corp. 1934) (directed by Kenneth MacKenna from a screenplay by Lester Cole based on Frederick Nebel's 1933 novel of the same name). 

68 GRUMPY (Paramount Publix Corp. 1930) (directed by George Cukor and Cyril Gardner from a screenplay by Doris Anderson based on the 1920 stage play of the same name by Horace Hodges and Thomas Wigney Percyval). 

69 CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON (Fox Film Corp. 1931) (directed by Hamilton MacFadden from a screenplay by Philip Klein and Barry Conners based on Earl Derr Biggers' 1930 novel of the same name). 

70 THE TRIAL OF VIVIENNE WARE (Fox Film Corp. 1932) (directed by William K. Howard from a screenplay by Philip Klein and Barry Conners based on Kenneth M. Ellis' 1931 novel of the same name). 

71 MISS PINKERTON (First National Pictures, Inc. 1932) (directed by Lloyd Bacon from a screenplay by Niven Busch and Lillie Hayward based on Mary Roberts Rinehart's 1932 novel of the same name). 

72 PENGUIN POOL MURDER (RKO Radio Pictures Pictures, Inc. 1932) (directed by George Archainbaud from a screenplay by Willis Goldbeck based on Stuart Palmer's 1931 novel of the same name). 

73 CHARLIE CHAN'S GREATEST CASE (Fox Film Corp. 1933) (directed by Hamilton MacFadden from a screenplay by Lester Cole and Marion Orth based on Earl Derr Biggers' 1925 novel The House Without a Key). 

74 PENTHOUSE (MGM 1933) (directed by W.S. Van Dyke from a screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett based on Arthur Somers Roche's 1933 novel of the same name). 

75 THE THIN MAN (MGM 1934) (directed by W.S. Van Dyke from a screenplay by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich based on Dashiell Hammett's 1934 novel of the same name). 

76 MURDER IN THE PRIVATE CAR (MGM 1934) (directed by Harry Beaumont from a screenplay by Ralph Spence, Edgar Allan Woolf, and Al Boasberg based on Harvey Thew's adaptation of Edward E. Rose's 1922 stage play The Rear Car). 

77 "They said it couldn't be done," Ford told Peter Bogdanovich in the late 1960s, "and I said, 'Why the hell can't it be done?' They said, 'Well, you can't because -' and they gave me a lot of Master's Degree talk, so I said, 'Well, let's try it.'" Ford contended that his 32-minute short Napoleon's Barber (Fox Film Corp. 1928) was "the first time anyone ever went outside with a sound system." PETER BOGDANOVICH, JOHN FORD 50 (1968). 

78 Walsh lived almost twenty years longer than Ford and, in his late eighties, wrote the engaging, but hopelessly unreliable memoir, Each Man in His Time (1974). By his account, studio head Winfield Sheehan frantically summoned Walsh back from a Mexican vacation and sent him to see his first talking picture. As he was leaving the theater he heard a burst of sound from a Fox Movietone newsreel dealing with a dockworkers' strike, felt a rush of inspiration, and went back to Sheehan's office with the announcement: "I'm going to make the first outdoor sound feature. . . ." Id. at 219. The film he made, or rather started to make as both director and leading man until he lost one eye in a freak accident, was In Old Arizona (Fox Film Corp. 1929), which proved immensely popular and earned Warner Baxter an Academy Award for his performance as the Cisco Kid. But Walsh's memoir is so full of gaps and outright mistakes that it would be foolish on the basis of his book alone to conclude that he was the first to prove that sound could be recorded outdoors. For fuller discussion of the defects in Walsh's account, see FRANCIS M. NEVINS, THE FILMS OF THE CISCO KID 24 (1998). 

79 CIMARRON (RKO 1931) (directed by Wesley Ruggles from a screenplay by Howard Estabrook based on Edna Ferber's 1930 novel of the same name). 

80 SUNDOWN TRAIL (RKO 1931) (directed and written by Robert F. Hill). 

81 ONE MAN LAW (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1932) (directed by Lambert Hillyer from his own screenplay). 

82 For a longer discussion of this film, see Francis M. Nevins, Through the Great Depression on Horseback: Legal Themes in Western Films of the 1930s, in LEGAL REELISM: MOVIES AS LEGAL TEXTS 46-51 (John Denvir ed., 1996). 

83 CORNERED (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1932) (directed by B. Reeves Eason from a screenplay by Ruth Todd based on an original story by William Colt MacDonald). 

84 COWBOY COUNSELLOR  (Allied Pictures Corp. 1932) (directed by George Melford from a screenplay by Jack Natteford). 

85 FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE  (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1932) (directed by Otto Brower from a screenplay by Robert Quigley based on an original story by Gladwell Richardson). 

86 THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER  (Paramount Pictures 1933) (directed by Fred Allen from a screenplay by Harvey Gates and Robert N. Lee based on Zane Grey's 1921 novel of the same name). 

87 SILENT MEN (Columbia Pictures Corp. 1933) (directed by D. Ross Lederman from a screenplay by Stuart Anthony based on an original story by Walt Coburn).