everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Captivating movie !

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I enjoyed this tale of a writer, Dana Andrews, who arranges an indictment of "circumstantial evidence" by picking an unimportant murder case out of the newspaper and, with the aid of the newspaper's editor, plants clues that point to him as the murderer. The editor, however, is busily taking photos with a "self-developing camera" of Andrews cheerfully planting the fake evidence.But -- the best laid plans. Andrews is convicted of the murder, but the editor dies in a car accident and burns up, along with all the evidence of fakery. That leaves Andrews pacing nervously back and forth on Death Row facing two eggs of hydrogen cyanide.His girl friend, Joan Fontaine, does everything she can to help him. When he explains the scheme, she enlists the aid of a detective Arthur Franz, to find any exculpatory evidence. Everyone is nervous.I can't say it's Fritz Lang's best American movie. I saw it in the El Camino Theater in San Bruno, California, and enjoyed it. It's still enjoyable but for a more experience and critical viewer, certain holes in the plot may be apparent.Also, Joan Fontaine, enchanting in her youth, here seems stiff and perfunctory, and wrapped up in the ugliest women's clothes imaginable. My God, the styles were terrible. And make up didn't help. They've tied her blond hair back into a severe bun or whatever it's called.Dana Andrews is his grim and solemn self, but he's older too, and he was in the grip of alcohol and looks puffy.For whatever its weaknesses may be, it's worth catching. It would have made a perfect episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

I'm always pleased to catch a Fritz Lang thriller on the TV schedules and was surprised to learn from IMDb that this was in fact his last Hollywood feature. To be honest, it doesn't really compare to his best work, being quite plot-heavy and not perhaps offering him much inspiration for his customary flourishes. That said it does start very sombrely with a near-silent depiction of an electric-chair execution, before the main, convoluted plot-line kicks in with a too blatant anti-capital punishment message. There's little else for the old maestro to do but try to follow the ins and outs of the story, which is too unbelievable and predicated on coincidence to really convince with even the twist at the end just too far-fetched and under-powered to finish the film on any kind of high, plus the complete absence throughout of any other suspect makes the final denouement obvious in the extreme. It is possible to detect Lang pushing the boundaries a little a la Preminger with occasionally risqué dialogue and Dana Andrews interaction with the strippers but "Anatomy Of A Murder" this isn't. The acting is solid enough with Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine only occasionally looking befuddled by the over-intricacies of the narrative but in the end this isn't one of the great director's finest hours and not a film he'll be best remembered for.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Frustrating film about a journalist (Dana Andrews) who decides to show that the current court system has a lot of holes in it by framing himself for the murder of a dancer. The plan is to be convicted by a jury and sent to death row where he, along with the help of his girlfriend's father (Sidney Blackmer), will admit that they were just trying to bring down the system. Lang's final American film has a terrific idea but none of it really comes together and when the end credits come up you can't help but be very, very disappointed. All of the elements for a great film are right here but I guess Lang was in a hurry to get back home because his direction is way too laid back and he really never brings any life or energy to the film. The biggest problem is the first hour where the investigation and trial take place because we know what's going to happen and we know to expect a twist in the story. When this twist does happen it comes as no surprise because it's the exact same twist anyone would be expecting to happen. When this twist finally appears it actually kick starts the movie a bit but by this time it's way too late. The final twenty-minutes of the film finally gets some drama going and we get yet another twist that I certainly didn't see coming. Lang appears to have snapped out of his sleep-walking and it's a shame more detail and thought wasn't given to the first portion. The performances are a mixed bag as the usually reliable Andrews pretty much goes through the motions here. Not once did I see any real emotion coming from him as he appears bored and just walking through the bit. Joan Fonataine turns in a fine performance as the girlfriend and Blackmer is good as her father. Philip Bourneuf is also good in the role of the prosecutor. There are many good things in this film but sadly there are some bad ones that keep this movie from being a masterpiece. It's hard to believe that the first part of this movie could be so flat but perhaps the filmmakers should have had the first hour trimmed down to twenty-minutes and then make the final moments stretched out and centered the majority of the movie on them. This is still a noir worth seeing but I really wish I could have called this a masterpiece.

"Beyond A Reasonable Doubt" is the last film that "M" director Fritz Lang made in Hollywood, and the theme of this intriguing but far-fetched law and order thriller concerns the morality of capital punishment. Capital punishment, crime, and murder obsessed Lang throughout his lengthy career, and this RKO release provided Lang with another opportunity to deal with an innocent man who through a fluke in the justice system may die for a crime that he didn't commit.Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews of "The Ox-Bow Incident") is a former newspaper journalist turned novelist who agrees to test the strength of the justice system when his former boss, newspaper publisher Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer of "Duel in the Sun"), thinks that the local district attorney is too good at his trade. Spencer loathes the idea that an ambitious District Attorney Roy Thompson (Philip Bourneuf of "The Molly Maguires") will exploit his ability to send men to the electric chair as a means to becoming the next governor. When a burlesque queen is murdered, Tom and Austin proceed with their plan to implicate Tom for the homicide.Meanwhile, Austin's daughter Susan (Joan Fontaine of "Suspicion") does not understand this secret scheme that her father and Tom are concocting until she sees a picture of her fiancée in the newspaper with another woman Dolly Moore (Barbara Nichols), who stripped at the same club with the victim. Anyway, Tom buys a grey top-coat which a witness, who could not discern the facial features of the man, said he was wearing. Tom takes a lighter that Susan gave him and throws it in a ravine near where the girl died. Eventually, Thompson takes Tom into custody and charges him with the death of the stripper. The morning of the sentencing, Austin puts all the pictures in an envelop and backs out of his garage. No sooner has he backed out than a truck collides with him, knocks his car over, and a fire erupts. Austin dies in the car and the evidence goes up in smoke. Tom reacts with shock at the death of Austin. He goes into court and explains what happened, but the jury finds him guilty and he is sentenced to die in the electric chair.The two sizzling surprises that cap this nifty 80-minute melodrama will leave you reeling. The chief difference between this version and the new Michael Douglas version is that Lang did not have the elaborate technology the director Peter Hyams takes advantage of in his remake. Furthermore, the protagonists in the Lang version were targeting the death penalty and the ease with which Thompson won convictions on circumstantial evidence. In the Hyams version, the district attorney is crooked from the get-go. Unfortunately, this threadbare, black & white production will strike contemporary attention-deficit audiences that crave explosive action-fests as boring.