An Act of Murder (1948)

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

just watch it!

Just so...so bad

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

I watched "An Act of Murder" because I love the actors Frederic March and Edmund O'Brien. Both were Oscar-winning actors who were not exactly handsome (especially as they aged) and managed to give one impressive performance after another over the decades. Sadly, however, despite having two excellent stars, the film lost its momentum towards the end.When the film begins, March plays a tough-as-nails judge and O'Brien a bleeding-heart defense attorney. The two don't like each other all that much--and late in the film, O'Brien's character comes to the judge's defense when he's on trial for a mercy killing. In between is the part of the film I loved most--and which is totally obscured by the ending which is filled with speechifying and some bizarre behavior by March's character. It's a shame, as the idea of mercy killing and medical ethics are really interesting topics and it's pretty amazing to see them talked about in the 1940s, as usually films deliberately avoided this back in the day.

Fredric march is the stern judge here forced to deal with his wife's terminal illness. Interesting to note that at no time in the film does the term inoperable brain tumor spoken despite the fact that this is the problem facing Florence Eldridge, the judge's wife and real life wife of March.Our judge is forced to reexamine his attitude and ethics in this excellent moral dilemma. Eldridge is in fine form as the doomed wife and Geraldine Brooks is perky but on spot as the daughter.The ending may be viewed by some as a cop out once it is revealed how the wife really died. Yet this solution may also cause an ethical dilemma.

***SPOILERS*** One of if not the first film out of Hollywood that tackles the subject of mercy killings that has honorable and straight laced, in going by the book, Judge Calvin Cooker, Fredic March,come to realize that there are extenuating circumstances in cases that he presides on that is not explained in the law that he's sworn to upholds. This comes crashing down on his head when his wife Catherine, Florence Eldridge, is diagnosed with a fatal brain disease that will slowly end her life, with her brain turning into mush, in excoriating pain. It's later in the movie when the Judge can't take it, his wife's suffering, anymore that in a fit of madness drives his car with his wife Catherine in it off the road where she ends up dead and him suffering severe head shoulder & leg injuries!Even though exonerated in Catherine's dead Judge Cook feels that he in fact murdered her and wants to pay for his crime even if it meant life imprisonment or worse. Having attorney David "Double D" Douglas, Edmond O'Brien, given the job to defend Judge Cook , who refused to defend himself, it's decided the only defense for his action is an insanity defense in that he wasn't in his right mind at the time of the crime that he's not only accused of but admitted to! It takes a lot of work on "Bouble D's" part to not only convince the judge & jury but himself as well to Judge Cook's innocence. In that the man, Judge Cook, was out of his mind at the time of his wife's death but it wasn't him that killed her! It turned out that Catherine herself was the one who did herself in before her husband Judge Cook had the chance to do it!***SPOILERS*** It was Catherine who found out the truth of her fatal illness in going through her husbands papers and knowing what she's in store for, a slow and painful death, that she decided to put herself, in taking a bottle of powerful pain killers, out of her misery. In an autopsy preformed on her on the insistence of Judge Cook's attorney David "Double D" Douglas reviled that Catherine was in fact dead before the car that her husband drove off the road hit the bottom of the gully that it landed in! The ending of the film was a bit of a cop-out in having Judge Cook not going through with his planned mercy killing of his terminally ill wife. But with the movie released in 1948 him really going through with it and being found innocent was totally unthinkable at the time by the movie going public.In fact there was an even more poignant moment in the film a bit earlier when a man's best friend, his dog, was hit by a car and was, as his owner was in tears, mercifully shot and killed by a policeman at the scene. It was that tragic incident that gave Judge Cook the idea to do the same thing, in a car crash, to his wife to keep her from going through the same kind of suffering that the fatally injured canine was going through!

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.