picture which portrays current, standard legal practices when the impression made, though prettier than actual, is ugly enough to make a lover of legal principles. vomit?

The motion picture Trial* has made its way across the screens. of our land, entertaining and enlightening audiences everywhere. With frightening plausibility it shows our standard (or better) court procedure bring about a verdict of guilty upon a boy who, by the very premise of the story, is innocent. This major point even becomes obscured amid numberless unethical and unjust propositions which overcome any possibility of justice as they are presented one after another in a well written, documentary type story.

Some of the points revealed are (1) that even an unusually ethical attorney (which the story requires in order to provide an interesting contrast with the customary trial personnel!) could and would glibly barter a defendant's rights away by making a pre-trial deal based on assumed "odds," as if legal process could be replaced or embellished by a bettor's methods, (2) that public hostility toward either the race of a defendant or a charge of sexual offense could be so influential that a fair judge and a hard working defender could not outweigh the inclinations of the most unprejudiced jury available, (3) that a sexual offense can be tried in terms of sugges-

*Trial, AN MGM PICTURE WRITTEN BY DON MANKIEWICZ, PRODUCED BY CHARLES SCHNEE, STARRING GLENN FORD. DOROTHY MCGUIRE, JUANO HER. NANDEZ, AND ARTHUR KENNEDY.

tions and "character considerations" rather than in terms of evidence. These and many more. such points are presented in succession until the viewer can only dread the thought of ever having to place an issue of his own innocence or guilt in the hands of such as our present day legal practitioners and courts.

If it could be claimed that film writers and producers were less moral than their audiences, or that they are such men as would stop at nothing for a story, all these points could be shrugged away by the time it takes to walk, out of the theater and a parent could say to the trembling young ones, "It's only a movie, dear," but such is not the case and it must be admitted that the writers and producers have done their part well. The very fact that such a film could be made and shown to an audience that manages not to cry out in painful recognition of each atrocity only indicates that we are presently enduring with callousness a kind of world which the founders of our laws and procedures could not endure. It would be ridiculous to attempt to picture even a later lawyer such as Lincoln moving about comfortably in today's courts.

This article deals only briefly with a prettier-than-average impression of our courts as presented in a Hollywood film. What would be the reaction, and action, of men of high ideals who undertook a thorough scrutiny of the actual courts with every practice laid bare?

MGM, Charles Schnee, and Don Mankiewicz, in putting Trial upon their audience, have also put their audience on trial.

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