TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 a.m. ET is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) with Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer, Philip Bourneuf and Arthur Franz.

By David in TN
Friday, April 10, 2020 at 8:28:00 PM EDT

TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 a.m. ET is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) with Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer, Philip Bourneuf and Arthur Franz.

Film Noir Guide: "A successful novelist (Andrews) and an anti-capital punishment editor (Blackmer) concoct a hare-brained, downright illegal scheme to prove that an innocent man can be convicted of murder and sent to the chair, especially when a top-notch lawyer (Bourneuf) with political aspirations is the prosecutor. After a stripper is murdered, the conspirators plant circumstantial evidence implicating Andrews in the crime. For Andrews protection, they carefully document each piece of phony evidence with photographs and notes and lock everything in Blackmer's office safe. After Andrews is convicted and sentenced to death, fate intervenes, causing the plan to backfire. Andrews fiance (Fontaine) must now prove his innocence. Despite the presence of noir icons Andrews and Fontaine, Lang's last American film is disappointing. Even he is said to have hated it. The good acting and the enjoyable ending compensate for the hard-to-swallow plot."

David in TN: Always good to watch Dana Andrews in a Noir but the plot has too many twists. Andrews' biographer said the actor embodied "steely impassivity."

N.S.: Most of Lang's work in America was mediocre, because he was only half a man, without his Nazi screenwriting partner and wife, Thea von Harbou.