Judging BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (’56) Today By Kim Luperi

When I first saw Fritz Lang’s BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (’56), I remember being engrossed by its calculated, improbable plot and twist ending. In re-visiting it recently, however, I found myself struck more so by some modern-day parallels I recognized in the story. While fundamentally a genre exercise that ultimately trivializes the hot button topic it broaches, the film nonetheless raises issues regarding media and criminal justice that continue to resonate.

In BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, novelist Tom (Dana Andrews) joins forces with his future father-in-law, newspaper publisher Austin (Sidney Blackmer), for an experiment: to prove the fallibility of circumstantial evidence by exposing how an innocent man could be sentenced to death. To do so, they frame Tom for a murder they’ll later prove he didn’t commit. Tom’s fiancée Susan (Joan Fontaine) isn’t in on the scheme; only Austin knows the truth. Sure enough, their carefully laid plan results in the death penalty for Tom, but when Austin dies in a freak accident, destroying the exonerating evidence with him, Tom has to scramble to prove his innocence. The film ends with a twist that I’ll discuss in a moment, so if you dislike spoilers, I suggest you stop reading, watch it and come back!

Heavy on plot and light on character, the film spends most of its 80 minutes mounting Tom as the fall guy. He and Austin deposit pieces of evidence, such as Tom’s personalized cigarette lighter at the murder scene, and photograph each action to corroborate their story. The methodical way they record their every move is analogous to the modern-day practice of digitally capturing evidence to substantiate controversial events. As we’d say today, Tom and Austin were ready to bring the receipts – until the inadvertent destruction of their tangible proof almost derails their experiment.

Austin is a fierce advocate against capital punishment, yet he doesn’t want his paper showing bias. Following his death, though, Susan pressures her father’s associates to “use the newspaper in every way you can” to swing support in Tom’s favor. Many present-day news outlets are charged with similar partiality. When it comes to high-profile trials today, clips and photos, especially those shared on social media (the new court of public opinion), play a huge role in the accused’s perceived innocence or guilt.   

Near the end of BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, evidence finally verifies Tom and Austin’s story. With a pardon within his reach, Tom unwittingly mentions the victim’s real name to Susan, proving he knew her and actually did it, ingeniously taking advantage of Austin’s offer so he could off an estranged wife. Susan turns him in, and we are to assume he will be executed as the film fades to black.

So, what does this say about the experiment? In a way, it could prove Austin’s point, because Tom’s sentence resulted solely from evidence he and Austin planted. We’re to believe that any actual innocent man could have participated in Austin’s ploy and received the same condemnation. Though the guilty party ultimately pays for his crime, the system shouldn’t get credit. In fact, an exhaustive investigation found nothing to link Tom with the victim – if it weren’t for him indicting himself, he’d get off. How’s that for justice?

“My argument against capital punishment is that the law forces some other man to commit murder,” Fritz Lang remarked in a 1969 interview. From the start, Lang disagreed with the script’s convoluted direction and the fact that the audience roots for Tom the whole time, only to reveal – out of nowhere – that he’s despicable at the end. Lang butted heads with producer Bert E. Friedlob, especially over the opening execution scene, which Friedlob wanted to make convincing. Lang agreed that a realistic portrayal was a powerful argument against capital punishment, but he did too good a job; when Friedlob saw the result, he denied his initial directive and rebuked Lang for being so cruel. So contentious was their partnership that the director coldly recalled shooting the movie “under duress” and left Hollywood for good after he helmed his final scene.

The topic of capital punishment has long been contended. Writer Douglas Morrow, who held a master’s degree in law, penned the film’s original story after reading a 1955 Gallup poll that revealed an even divide on the death penalty among Americans. That division may well have stemmed from protests in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to a decline in executions. In the movie, Austin remarks that six states did not have the death penalty in 1956; today, it’s illegal in 23 states. 

That progress aside, Austin’s fear that the system could mistakenly put an innocent man to death is genuine. Since 1972, at least 185 death row prisoners have been wrongly convicted and set free, per DealthPenaltyInfo.org. Even more tragically, it’s been concluded that some executed inmates were most likely innocent. While the death penalty may be utilized less today, it’s as clear as it was then that miscarriages of justice persist, something BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT chillingly reminds me of, even if the film is less a statement on capital punishment than Lang perhaps wanted.

Revisiting Oscar-Nominated and Winning Pictures By Susan King

We all have our favorite Oscar winners that we love to watch over and over again. But there are numerous Oscar winners and nominees that have gained new life thanks to TCM, HBO Max and DVD that are definitely worth revisiting. Here are some of my favorites:

RANDOM HARVEST

I interviewed the legendary funny man Carl Reiner a few months before his death and the conversation drifted to RANDOM HARVEST (’42) and how much he loved the romance. Robert Redford is also a fan. In the 1990s, he was planning on doing a remake, and in 2014, it was announced that Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) was hired to pen a remake. The handsome MGM production based on James Hilton’s bestseller starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson was a huge hit that year and was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Film, Actor for Colman, Actress in a Supporting Role for Susan Peters and Director Mervyn LeRoy. 

Both Colman and Garson had great success in other Hilton adaptations – Colman starred in LOST HORIZON (’37) and Garson made her U.S. film debut and earned her first Best Actress Oscar nomination in GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS (’39). RANDOM HARVEST is often overlooked by the other big MGM film released in 1942, William Wyler’s MRS. MINIVER. Not only was the stirring drama about a British family attempting to survive the years of World War II a blockbuster at the box office, but it also won a striking eight Oscars.

But I think RANDOM HARVEST is the more engaging film. It’s hard not to fall in love with this romantic tale with Colman at his most dreamy as a shell-shocked amnesiac veteran of World War I (Colman was wounded in the global conflict) named Smith who falls in love and marries a loving young entertainer (Garson). But Smithy, as Garson’s Paula calls him, is hit by a car on his way to a job interview and wakes up with no memory of the past three years but does remember who he really is – an aristocrat by the name of Charles Rainier.

Will true love reunite these two? The sigh level is very high with RANDOM HARVEST and this love story has a very strong place in my heart.

NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART

I’ve had more than a few people ask me why I like NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART (’44) so much. It’s depressing, they say. It’s downbeat, they say. But I think it’s a chance to see Cary Grant in a rare break out of his “Cary Grant” suave, sophisticated image. Adapted and directed by Clifford Odets from the novel by Richard Llewellyn (How Green Was My Valley), NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART casts Grant as Ernie Mott, a Cockney drifter who returns home to his Ma (Ethel Barrymore).  When he learns that she’s dying of cancer, Ernie stays to help run her second-hand shop. But Ernie can’t stay out of trouble, joining forces with a gangster stealing cars and pursuing the mobster’s wife (June Duprez). 

Meanwhile, his neighbor Aggie (Jane Wyatt) is madly in love with him and tries to save Ernie from a life of crime. The film was generally warmly received, earning four Oscar nominations and winning supporting actress for Barrymore. She shot her scenes during her two-week vacation from her Broadway triumph The Corn Is Green, and the Academy Award transformed the Broadway star into a much-in-demand film actress. She would go on to earn three more Oscar nominations.

Grant, who had earned his first Oscar nomination three years earlier for PENNY SERENADE (‘41), didn’t attend the Academy Awards where Bing Crosby won best actor for GOING MY WAY. Grant never earned another Oscar nomination, but received an Oscar honorary in 1970.

NIGHT MUST FALL

Handsome and charismatic Robert Montgomery was one of MGM’s top leading men in the 1930s, best known for his work in comedies including PRIVATE LIVES (’31) and FORSAKING ALL OTHERS (’34). Though he did an occasional dramatic part, nothing really stretched him as an actor until NIGHT MUST FALL (’37). Montgomery had long been bugging MGM head Louis B. Mayer for better roles. He supposedly allowed Montgomery to do NIGHT MUST FALL because the studio head thought the actor would be embarrassed when the movie failed. Montgomery later said, “they okayed me playing in it because they thought the fan reaction in such a role would humiliate me.” He went so far as to help subsidize the film’s production budget.

Based on the play by Emlyn Williams which ran on Broadway in 1936, NIGHT MUST FALL finds Montgomery playing Danny, a serial killer who just happens to have a trophy from his latest victim—her head—in a hatbox. Danny charms his way into the heart and home of a wealthy elderly woman (Dame May Whitty, reprising her London stage role). Rosalind Russell, who made five films with Montgomery, plays the elderly woman’s niece who has her suspicions about Danny but can’t convince her aunt that she’s in danger. Both Montgomery and Whitty earned Oscar nominations.

Though Montgomery returned to the comedy genre after NIGHT MUST FALL, he began directing films such as LADY IN THE LAKE (’46) and found great success in TV in the 1950s with the anthology series Robert Montgomery Presents, which often featured his daughter Elizabeth.

THE NAKED SPUR

Jimmy Stewart’s image took a 180 degree turn in the 1950s thanks to Alfred Hitchcock with REAR WINDOW (’54) and VERTIGO (’58), but most notably in the five Westerns he made with Anthony Mann. Far from the boy-next-door character he played pre-World War II, Stewart was transformed into conflicted, troubled men – anti-heroes who often could be as villainous as the bad guys who peppered these sagebrush sagas. (Mann also directed Stewart in three non-Westerns).

THE NAKED SPUR (’53), which earned a screenplay Oscar nomination for Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom, is my favorite of their collaborations. Stewart really digs deep into the character of Civil War veteran turned bounty hunter, Howard Kemp. He’s angry and bitter having lost his land during his conflict. Kemp hopes he can get his land back by working as a bounty hunter. And he’s doggedly determined to get outlaw Ben Vandergroat (a fabulously vile Robert Ryan). Along the way, he encounters two men (Millard Mitchell and Ralph Meeker) who join him on his journey. And when he finds Vandergroat, he also discovers he has a young woman (Janet Leigh) with him. Intelligent, often disturbing and brilliantly acted, THE NAKED SPUR is an exceptional exploration of the dark side of humanity.

The Fallen Star of Tony Curtis By Susan King

Tony Curtis was one of Hollywood’s top stars of the 1950s and ‘60s. After starring in such mindless fodder as NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM (‘52), he proved he was far more than just an uber-handsome face by delivering dramatic performances of complexity and nuance in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (‘57) and THE DEFIANT ONES (‘58), earning an Oscar nomination for best actor for the latter. And he was also a first-rate farceur in such comedy classics as Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT (‘59).

Curtis and his frequent co-star Janet Leigh, his first wife from 1951 to 1962, were La La Land’s golden couple. And it was big news when Leigh gave birth to her daughters Kelly and Jamie Lee, who went on to become a major film star. But the ‘70s weren’t as fruitful. By 1979, he had separated from his third wife, Leslie, and had a raging drug problem. He was very frank during a 1999 TCM Private Screenings interview with Robert Osborne. “Drugs were very important to me,” he confessed. “I used to freebase, smoke cocaine, a lot of alcohol. I did some heroin. I couldn’t work. I didn’t lose jobs. I just didn’t get them.“

He did get a big job during this time, however. Curtis was hired to star at the Mark Taper Forum in late 1979 in Neil Simon’s new play I Ought to Be in Pictures, which would open on Broadway the following spring. The actor left the production before the run ended in Los Angeles. Curtis was equally frank with me in a 2009 Los Angeles Times interview about the experience.

“I hated it,” he said. “I had no place to live. I wasn’t living at home. The marriage was over. I was living in the back of my Trans Am. I was really strung out, and you would think [director] Herb Ross and Neil Simon would have compassion enough to take this coward’s hand if they wanted to. That was really a very difficult time for me.”

Still, it would be four years after the stage experience before he sought help at the Betty Ford Center. But once he got clean, “one thing I found was I was still the same kid I was in New York City who used to run around and mimic people. All of a sudden, I got back to my roots.” The reason why Curtis was so good at playing hard-scrabble characters is that he, too, had a hard knock early life.

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in 1925 in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His father operated a tailor shop. His mother suffered from schizophrenia and beat Bernie and his two brothers. Finances were so bad at one point, his parents put him and his beloved brother Julius in a state institution. When they returned home, Julius was hit by a car and died in 1938. Young Bernie also had to deal with gangs and anti-Semitism. He got out of the neighborhood during World War II, serving in the Navy on the submarine U.S.S. Proteus.

After the war, he enrolled in acting classes at the New School for Social Research. Curtis captured the attention of casting agent Joyce Selznick, and in 1948, he was signed to a contract at Universal, making his debut in the film noir CRISS CROSS (‘48) as a rumba dancer who makes Burt Lancaster jealous when he cuts a rug with Burt’s girlfriend, played by Yvonne De Carlo. “What a time that was,” he told me in our 2009 interview, a year before his death at 75. “I had never been to California except for when I was in the Navy, and here I was coming out with a movie contract.”

He had noted that coming to Hollywood was an overwhelming experience. “I was a handsome boy. It helped. I didn’t have to kiss anything. I didn’t have to kiss anybody. I was 22 years old. I started doing good, and suddenly I was King Kong at Universal for seven or eight years.” But he had to endure not only such films as NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM but also such lame costume dramas as THE PRINCE WHO WAS A THIEF (‘51), which marked his first starring role.

The studio kept casting him in these lightweight vehicles because, “they cost absolutely nothing. Those pictures cost about $200,000, and we shot them in 18 days. They went out and grossed $2.5 million, and that was on a .30 cent movie ticket. There was nobody in town who was grossing that kind of money. I never thought that I didn’t deserve it. I just loved being in movies, you know. I loved the acting lessons and going on set.”

Paramount’s bio-pic HOUDINI (‘53), his first film with Leigh, gave him his first role of heft. Curtis was more than up to the task. He began to get frustrated with the roles at Universal. “I didn’t have guys looking after me,” he said. His agent Lew Wasserman, Curtis noted, “was not on my horizon yet. But as soon I got connected with Wasserman, then the quality of my pictures changed with TRAPEZE, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, THE DEFIANT ONES (‘58) and SOME LIKE IT HOT. I never ended up with an important player until Burt Lancaster in TRAPEZE (‘56).

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is an extraordinary piece of work, way ahead of its time. The drama, directed by Alexander McKendrick, was not a hit when released but has grown in reputation over the decades. It’s not a comfortable watch, but some of the most brilliant films aren’t. Curtis is remarkable as Sidney Falco, an ambitious, fast-talking Broadway press agent trying to get in good with vile Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster).

After that, both Curtis and Sidney Poitier earned Oscar nominations for Stanley Kramer’s THE DEFIANT ONES, a landmark racial drama in which they played escapees from a chain gang. Curtis honed his comedic chops in such Blake Edwards comedies as THE PERFECT FURLOUGH (‘58) with Leigh and OPERATION PETTICOAT (‘59) with Cary Grant before making his mark in the iconic SOME LIKE IT HOT.

Though Lemmon earned an Oscar nomination for his iconic performance, Curtis is equally funny – and downright gorgeous – in this gender-bending farce about two musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre and disguises themselves as women in order to hide out in an all-girl dance band. Curtis does a spot-on impression of Grant in SOME LIKE IT HOT when he pretends to be rich oil heir in order to seduce the band singer played by Marilyn Monroe. Over 30 years later, he toured in a theatrical version of the classic comedy, taking the role as the much-married wealthy mama’s boy played by Joe E. Brown in the movie. He ended up leaving the production after a near-fatal bought of pneumonia.

In the 1960s, he appeared in epics like SPARTACUS (‘60) and TARAS BULBA (‘62) and in such dramas as the underrated THE RAT RACE (‘60) with Debbie Reynolds and THE OUTSIDER (‘61), in which he earned strong notices as Native American Ira Hayes, one of the Marines who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima. Edwards and Curtis reunited in 1965 for the extravagant comedy THE GREAT RACE, probably his best comedy of that decade. And the hit marked a reunion with his SOME LIKE IT HOT co-star Jack Lemmon.

Curtis lost fans when he had an affair with his 17-year-old TARAS BULBA costar Christine Kaufmann. Curtis divorced Leigh in 1962 and married Kaufmann the following year. Their only other film together was the dreadful WILD AND WONDERFUL (‘64), which was neither. In fact, most of his comedies during the decade wasted his talents, including BOEING BOEING (‘65), a boring sex romp with Jerry Lewis, and ON THE WAY TO THE CRUSADES, I MET A GIRL WHO…(‘67).

I do remember he hit the talk show circuit really hard in 1968 to promote THE BOSTON STRANGLER, his return to dramatic fare. He gives a scary, brave performance as infamous serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Though an Oscar nomination was not in the cards, he did earn a Golden Globe nomination. But the film let him down, and its stereotypical depictions of the LGBQT community are difficult to watch in 2020.

When I interviewed him in at his Brentwood house in 1999, Curtis seemed happy. He had married his sixth wife, horse trainer Jill Vandenberg, and was surrounded by his paintings (he was a well-respected artist) and many cats. The couple would eventually move to Las Vegas, where they operated a horse refuge.

Curtis noted he didn’t have any film projects in the offing. “I don’t like the quality,” he said. “I don’t want to play old men because I ain’t no old man. I’m 73 ½ and that’s what I am. There is nothing in me that equates to what they call age. The most perfect romantic movie I would love to make would be me with a 23-year-old girl. It’s her first time and it’s his last time. Two people who just met at the right time in their lives. Time is not a dilemma. They both need each other. That is what I call a great movie.”

Harry Belafonte’s Production of THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Raquel Stecher

By 1957, Harry Belafonte was ready to take on a new venture. Frustrated with the quality of film roles he was being offered, Belafonte started HarBel Productions, a film producing unit, the first ever to be started by an African-American working directly with Hollywood. Its purpose was to make bold movies that provided better representation for his community while offering stories that could be enjoyed beyond color barriers. Belafonte knew the power that movies had to reach a wide audience, and this was a great opportunity for him to take his activism to the next level.

Almost immediately, Belafonte’s fledgling company got an offer from Sol C. Siegel, a producer at MGM, to make THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (’59). Loosely inspired by M.P. Shiel’s novel The Purple Cloud, this post-apocalyptic story follows Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte), a miner who surfaces days after being trapped underground to discover that the world has been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. He eventually meets two survivors above ground, Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens) and Ben Thacker (Mel Ferrer). Belafonte called the script “an eerily apt setting and story for a time of peak Cold War paranoia.” The rights to Shiel’s novel had bounced around from studio to studio but had yet to be adapted. Siegel saw an opportunity to take Shiel’s last-man tale and add a layer of racial tension to make the story relevant to contemporary audiences. Screenwriter turned director Ranald MacDougall was hired to direct and to adapt the script alongside Ferdinand Reyher.

THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL would be HarBel’s first production and joining forces with a major studio seemed like a prodigious start. Belafonte had the entrepreneurial spirit but lacked the business know-how, and while his contract with Siegel gave him a percentage of profits, it did not provide an exit clause nor did it give Belafonte any say in the script which would prove problematic later on.

Production began in New York City where the story takes place. Siegel coordinated with the Department of Transportation to film in the early morning hours. Traffic lights were turned off and city blocks were cleared of cars and people. Belafonte noted in his memoir, “what was always a mystery to me was the deal he cut with the pigeons. Not one bird ever flew past our lens.” Cinematographer Harold J. Marzorati and his crew filmed breathtaking shots of a seemingly abandoned New York City. The ever eloquent Belafonte wrote, “long before the coming of technical special effects, the movie did a great job of evoking a post-nuclear New York in an almost poetic fashion, not by what it put into the picture but what it left out; all signs of life.”

Interior shots were filmed on the MGM lot and for the most part the production went on swimmingly. Then everything came to a grinding halt. Shooting was suspended for what was referred to as “a few minor script changes,” but really Siegel and the powers that be at MGM got nervous. Belafonte had been filming with his co-star Inger Stevens and their characters Ralph and Sarah develop a romance. Miscegenation was still outlawed in some states and Hollywood wasn’t quite ready yet to show a black man being intimate with a white woman. Belafonte experienced something similar with the film ISLAND IN THE SUN (‘57) in which his character has a romance with Joan Fontaine. Siegel and his team contemplated the outcome of three possible endings and decided that there was a financial risk angering certain segments of the population, whether they be pro-segregationists or African-American activists. Mel Ferrer’s character Ben becomes the third in an odd love triangle and the film leaves it up to the audience to imagine who Inger Stevens’ character Sarah will end up with.

Belafonte was furious and rightly so. He proclaimed that “they’d taken out the truth that would have made the film really admirable.” He stormed off set and threatened to leave the picture. His agent Jay Kantor and his friend, fellow actor Marlon Brando, convinced him that breaking his contract with MGM would be bad for business and his career. Begrudgingly, Belafonte returned to set and the shoot wrapped up in August 1958. THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL premiered in May 1959 to mixed reviews and a modest box-office return. Critics noted the drastic shift in the plot with the third character, the disappearance of all other life forms (where were the bodies?!) and the open ending.

THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL was a victim of its time and lacked the audacity Belafonte wanted in a HarBel production. He went on to make one other film for his production company, the gripping film noir ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (‘59). Directed by Robert Wise, the film stars Belafonte and Robert Ryan as two bank robbers who must team together for a heist despite their racial differences. It would be the last film for the short lived HarBel Productions and Belafonte decided to take a break from the silver screen for several years before returning in the 1970s.

Regarding THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, film historian Donald Bogle in his TCM and Running Press book Hollywood Black wrote, “[it] promised to deal frankly and provocatively with the theme of interracial love. But in the end, the filmmakers lost their nerve. In the Eisenhower era, interracial love was a topic the movies were both fascinated by and frightened of.”