Mr. District Attorney

This is one of three movies bundled on a DVD entitled "Forgotten Noir", though I really wouldn't consider it an example of film noir. It's more a kooky movie where one of the characters just happens to work for the District Attorney. Dennis O'Keefe plays a recent Harvard Law graduate and from the start he irritates his boss to no end. So, to punish him, he's given a dead case--one no one else wants. However, when the missing witness suddenly shows up, this becomes a very hot case and O'Keefe and his spunky female reporter friend (what a cliché!!) do what any assistant DA would do--investigate the crime and get caught up in the middle of it.

The bottom line is that none of this is the least bit believable and the idea of these two kooky characters solving a crime is silly. But, the characters are likable and if you only look at it as a kooky B-mystery, you'll not be disappointed. Not bad, but clearly a low-budget B-film.

Someone decided that the radio series, Mr. District Attorney, was too serious and the film version should be crammed with comic relief. Thus you have Dennis O'Keefe as a Harvard law school graduate (summa cum laude no less) who's a nutcase in the courtroom and equally muddle-headed when he's assigned to find a master criminal named Hyde. From time to time, he literally bumps into Florence Rice as a newspaperwoman who's out to outwit the competition by solving the Hyde mystery. When O'Keefe isn't accidentally plunking her on her prat, she goes all out to get a scoop, hiding in the trunk of a car she suspects is en route to pick up Hyde. Fortunately, no key is required to open the trunk from the outside or the inside. Meanwhile, Peter Lorre -- as Hyde -- obviously thinks he's in a totally different movie, playing it psychotically straight, projecting the kind of sibilant menace of which he's the acknowledged master. As usual, he's terrific. Too bad the movie isn't, as well.

Mr. District Attorney (1941) is a particularly well-produced Republic Picture, coming as it does from a studio better known for its quickie Westerns and B-picture programmers. It is extremely well-staged and paced by British-born director William Morgan, who had begun his film career as a film editor. His previous experience shows. The script was co-written by Karl Brown, one of the few cinematographers ever to leave the camera behind to become a successful screenwriter; Karl had begun as a teen-age camera operator working for D. W. Griffith in the silent days. This film is a typical screwball comedy with an improbable crime plot, a genre popular back then, and features Dennis O'Keefe as the uptight Harvard lawyer, and Florence Rice as the wise-cracking girl reporter. They are not quite up to the dazzle of a Cary Grant and a Roz Russell, but they are both attractive and perfectly acceptable. Republic must have spent a good deal of money surrounding them with some of the ablest character actors in town, faces all of us recognize even if we can't name them-- among them, Minor Watson, Stanley Ridges, Charles Halton, Vince Barnett, and, for a flash, Dave Wilcox. Peter Lorre, who must have cost Republic a pretty penny to borrow from Warner Bros, is his usual evil self. Of all the fine cast, the ever-dependable Charles Arnt is the most memorable as the little sucker who falls for the no-good dame. As was so often the case, director Morgan went on from picture to picture, and as an editor, from TV series to series, rarely ever getting a chance to show his comic talents as a director again. Too bad.

Dennis O'Keefe has the dubious distinction of starring in two films with the same exact title. But whereas the second Mr. District Attorey is quite serious, this one at times crosses over into screwball comedy.

As in the second film O'Keefe is a bright young newly minted Assistant who is top in his class which was Harvard and he's got nice blue blood connections. District Attorney Stanley Ridges almost is hammerlocked into hiring him and in his first court appearance, so fastidious is O'Keefe about ethics that he wins an acquittal for gangster Ben Welden. That actually pays off for him later in the film in a very curious way.

O'Keefe is then assigned the toughest case in the office, one of a man who embezzled money which sad to say was marked and then he disappeared. Later on however a couple of those bills show up as being bet by Joan Blair who on a big longshot who comes in. Later on she's killed and so is Charles Arnt who gave her the money.

The real thief is Peter Lorre who is at his creepy best. He has disappeared and can't get at the money anyway which is recorded and hot. But Lorre has something on a lot of the bigshots in town who coincidentally enough are political opponents of Ridges.

Along for the ride is reporter Florence Rice who first hangs around O'Keefe because news seems to break wherever he is, but then they kind of like each other though her help is as dubious as Myrna Loy's for William Powell in The Thin Man.

The first Mr. District Attorney is nicely paced with a lot of laughs from O'Keefe and Rice who almost fall into the solution of all the crime. Mr. District Attorney on radio was a pretty serious program so no wonder they might have felt the need to make a more serious film with this title later.

Dennis O'Keefe is straight out of law school. He comes to LA to wangle a job on District Attorney Stanley Ridges' staff, and promptly annoys newspaperwoman Florence Rice and gets a crook a mistrial, Then he gets assigned to a case that has gone nowhere for years, involving Peter Lorre, the missing cash from an old bank robbery, and Minor Watson, who is running for Ridges' job and looks to be a shoo-in.

It's the first movie version of the popular radio show, and a pretty lively one. It has lots of gags in the relationship between O'Keefe and Miss Rice, both of them excellent farceurs, gradually moving into a crime and action sequence, with an exciting chase. It's directed by William Morgan, one of those directors who had been editors, and thus could 'cut in the camera' for an economical shoot. His career was never particularly distinguished, but he does a good job here, with a good script. Definitely worth your time.