Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Crappy film

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

There's something quite remarkable at the heart of this honest and direct portrayal of a very human crisis. The leads here - Frederic March and Florence Eldridge, real-life husband and wife - are completely and thoroughly a middle-aged couple and depicted as such, in all their wrinkles and folds and reflections on lives that have been lived. It's a reminder that the two kinds of people we see in movies are the very young and beautiful and the very old. The Cookes here are seemingly fully filled in, a husband and wife with grown children, in the midst of real lives, inhabiting their marriage with the deep love that is far beyond the romantic love that's the staple of motion pictures. This isn't the dashing Frederic March of the 1930s but a mature, restrained father and husband. It's a bit melodramatic at times - director Michael Gordon is a journeyman professional and not William Wyler, director of the great film of that era starring March, The Best Years of Our LIves. But watch for the details, such as the sharp, discordant strings stabbing along as windshield wipers swipe across the screen. I think I saw that in another movie made a few years later.

As Stanley Ridges says in An Act Of Murder what is hopeless today, might be curable on Wednesday such are the advances of medicine. And certainly we can treat and even cure more brain tumors today, even the type that Florence Eldridge has in this film.But in 1948 cancer on the brain was a certain death sentence. At this time young Johnny Gunther was going through the same kind of struggle which his father would chronicle in Death Be Not Proud. Also the public remembered the premature death of George Gershwin from such an illness. Certainly Fredric March's character would also have been aware of these things, most definitely about Gershwin.An Act Of Murder casts March and Eldrige as a small town Pennsylvania judge and his wife with Geraldine Brooks as their daughter. March is a rigid by the book judge known as Old Maximum because of the harsh sentences imposed. March has cross swords with defense attorney Edmond O'Brien in court so he's not real thrilled with Brooks going out with him, but Eldridge supports her daughter.But when after having some dizzy spells, Eldridge goes to see their doctor Stanley Ridges, he finds out that she's got a terminal brain tumor and her suffering will increase exponentially. He's got a real crisis on his hands. Mercy killing is an option he considers and true to his rigid code, March confesses to killing her to relieve her suffering and is put on trial for it. Guess who gets to defend him?Even with the Code parameters strictly enforced at this time, euthanasia was a daring subject to tackle in 1948. The ending which I won't reveal is a cop out, but they could have done little else at the time given the censorship restrictions.March, Eldridge, and the rest of the cast are brilliant. An Act Of Murder raises questions still hotly contested today.

This is like the forgotten good film in Fredric March's career. People talk about ANTHONY ADVERSE, DR. JECKYLL AND MR. HYDE, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, INHERIT THE WIND, or THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN, but AN ACT OF MURDER is rarely recalled because of it's odd story. At a time when American film audiences wanted to forget World War II and the death and destruction it entailed, March and his wife Florence Eldrich appeared in the only film where their roles were equally important where the subject was euthanasia. It was well told, with March as Judge Cooke, a fiercely strict jurist who rarely showed a drop of mercy towards a convicted defendant. He finds his beloved wife is dying of an incurable, and slowly debilitating disease. While she slowly declines (and very visibly shows her own suffering) the Judge grimly determines to kill her by a convenient car accident. But after the accident the Judge confesses, and faces conviction in his own courthouse. Only at the last moment is he saved from the unforgiving penal code he is always upholding.It is well acted (Edmond O'Brien giving good support as a liberal-minded attorney who is romancing March and Eldrich's daughter). But the best part is watching the chemistry between March and Eldrich. Only their joint appearances in ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST and INHERIT THE WIND come close to this, but Eldrich's parts in those films is not as essential as her role in this one. And the subject matter is rarely tackled (certainly not in the 1930s or 1940s). If the end is a bit of a cop-out (the trial reveals that March is not guilty) it still is a brave subject to have tackled at all.

This film's relentless plotline marches straight-ahead forward as you squirm, fascinated, in your chair. The story is the familiar one about the onset of terminal illness within a solid American family of the 1940s. Never mind that it delves into MGM-style sermonizing; the great real-life husband/wife team of Fredric March and Florence Eldridge portray the couple whose once-comfortable lives are now being separated by an unstoppable and fast-advancing disease. The helpless husband, the uncomplaining wife, and their final attempt to recapture happier days with a doomed weekend outing is the stuff of deep film drama indeed. The sense of onrushing darkness is tangible through the film-noir camera shadings of Hal Mohr (Captain Blood, Phantom of the Opera [1943], The Climax), and Daniele Amfitheatrof's rich musical score. "An Act of Murder" makes a profound statement on the value, and the fragility, of life.