Rent An Act of Murder (1948)

Issues Drama. - An Act of Murder review by Steve

Contrived but still absorbing social commentary about the nature of justice, which more interestingly touches on euthanasia. This now gets marketed as film noir, but it's an issues drama which eventually plunges into melodrama. And ultimately gets tangled up in the demands of the Production Code.

It's well performed by an auspicious cast and efficiently directed by Michael Gordon. Fredric March plays an honest small town judge not much interested in the quality of mercy, who is pugnaciously challenged by the ambitious, progressive defence lawyer (Edmond O'Brien)... who wants to marry his daughter (Geraldine Brooks)!

But when the judge's wife is found to be terminally ill, his settled world is overturned. The spouse is intriguing played by March's actual spouse, Florence Eldridge. When he impulsively ends her life, he turns his rigid moral code on himself and confesses to murder. Naturally, he is represented at his trial... by his daughter's fiancé!

This would have been better done as social realism. But the Hays Office was never going to allow a fair hearing for mercy killing. Inevitably, the moral case gets mangled by the remorseless gears of censorship. What we get is slight and schematic. Still, it's an unusual and absorbing treatment of a subject not much explored in studio era Hollywood.