Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #6: "The People Against O'Hara," directed by John Sturges

Last week’s install­ment, #5, here. Follow the links at that post to access the oth­er pri­or films in the series.

Farber: “An adroit, schol­arly example of sound storytelling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example of how good you can get when you neither slant nor over­sim­pli­fy. Also highly enjoy­able for its con­cern about a ‘stat­ic” subject—the leg­al pro­fes­sion as such—and the com­plete author­ity with which it handles soft-pedaled insights into things like the struc­ture and routine of law offices; the polit­ics of con­vi­vi­al­ity between cops, DA’s, judges, attor­neys; the influ­ence of bar asso­ci­ations; the sol­emn man­ner of memori­al­iz­ing the wrench caused by the death of a col­league; the pain­ful ‘home­work’ of com­mit­ting to memory the end­less rami­fic­a­tions of your case, as well as the words you are going to feed the jury in the morning.”

Yes; this pic­ture works quite nicely as what you might call a “pro­cess film,” a kind of sub-genre that achieved its apex with 2007’s Zodiac (and I won­der, did Farber see that pic­ture, and if so, what did he and his wife and crit­ic­al part­ner Patricia Patterson think of it?). Beyond that, it’s also a first-rate char­ac­ter study. Spencer Tracy plays James Curtayne, a vet­er­an law­yer who’s kicked both booze and crim­in­al cases in the hopes of set­ting up a cozy dot­age with civil work. His daugh­ter Virginia (Diana Lynn) is liv­ing with him and keep­ing him in line, put­ting off a prom­ising mar­riage to look after the pat­ri­arch. Curtayne’s plans for a pla­cid life get scrambled when cli­ents from the old hard­scrabble days appeal for help. The old O’Hara’s (Arthur Shields and Louise Lorimer), a working-class couple of a par­tic­u­lar Manhattan vin­tage, prac­tic­ally beg Curtayne to defend their son Johnny (James Arness, who appears in anoth­er Farber 1951 fave, The Thing From Another World, here play­ing an all-too-human dumb lug rather than a hulk­ing inter­plan­et­ary veget­able), who’s been in and out of trouble all his life, from a charge that could well end his life: murder.

Curtayne does­n’t want to do it, because, among oth­er things, he tends to get too inves­ted in such cases. They wear him down. They put him in a place of self-doubt that makes the bottle look like a mighty good for­ti­fi­er. And sure enough, at a cru­cial point in the case, he opens up the liquor cab­in­et. It’s a pretty stag­ger­ing moment that I sup­pose car­ries extra res­on­ance with those who know about Tracy’s own real-life struggles with alcoholism.

Tracy plays the moment beau­ti­fully, neither soft-soaping nor over­do­ing it. Eventually Curtayne re-embraces the bottle fully, and the pic­ture presents a very pithy example of how booze can be the fath­er of all bad ideas, as when Curtayne gets the bright notion to try to bribe a venal wit­ness (the usu­ally reli­able Jay C. Flippen, here forced to put on a rather ridicu­lous “Scandanavian” accent). After this—and after he blows the case as a result—the death of a col­league forces Curtayne to redis­cov­er his pur­pose and his skill. But the pic­ture does­n’t turn into a sappy redemp­tion tale as a res­ult. Rather, it digs in its heels and becomes an ace detect­ive story, filled with ever-more con­vin­cing detail. Here’s Curtayne eying a bit of evid­ence he’s gonna need a court order to get his hands on.

Later, Curtayne con­fronts a mob­ster who once expressed a par­tic­u­lar interest in the case; although he’s straightened out his act by this point, Curtayne has a drink with “Knuckles” Lanzetta (Eduardo Cianelli) to give the hood the impres­sion that Curtayne is, yup, just a washed-up sot mouth­piece. There’s a frank­ness in their wash­room banter that’s pretty raw and hon­est by stu­dio stand­ards of the time. (The pic­ture was an MGM production.)

Screenwriter John Monks, Jr. adap­ted the pic­ture from a nov­el by Eleazer Lipsky, who also wrote the source mater­i­al for the 1947 clas­sic Kiss of Death. It’s no acci­dent that what goes on in this pic­ture feels almost as authen­t­ic as what you’d get in a George V. Higgins nov­el; like Higgins, Lipsky was a long­time prac­ti­tion­er of the law, an assist­ant dis­trict attor­ney in Manhattan in the 1940s. Director Sturges was one of the most reli­able jour­ney­men of the day. Cinematographer John Alton does­n’t walk on the same high-wire here that he did for his noirs with Anthony Mann, but he gives the pic­ture a look of decept­ively plain real­ism. And Tracy deliv­ers one of his very best per­form­ances. The com­bin­a­tion of these tal­ents yields a film of remark­able solid­ity and briskness, and the end­ing is one of the most com­pel­lingly bleak of any film from any era. The People Against O’Hara isn’t yet avail­able on DVD, but it does tend to turn up on TCM with some reg­u­lar­ity. Catch it when you can; it’s a really spe­cial piece of work.