Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Lang's most austere film, reducing the characters to pawns arbitrarily shifted in demonstration of a fascinating theorem. Andrews plays a writer who plans, with the cooperation of a newspaper publisher, to discredit the concept of capital punishment: by deliberately implicating himself as a murderer, he will prove the ease with which circumstantial evidence can lead to wrongful conviction. But after he is duly convicted, the publisher (his sole confidant) is accidentally killed and evidence of the plan destroyed. Despite the ingenious/ingenuous twist that ensues, the film is not concerned with innocence or guilt but with demonstrating that justice, finally, lies in the hand of fate. Not a forthcoming film, but one which repays attention.