Trial is an odd, Mark Robson-directed film, starting out as a hard-hitting social drama in which a Mexican teenager, accused of murdering a white girl, is threatened by his bigoted community, first with a lynching and later in the courtroom with a jury hand-picked by racist cops operating independently of the District Attorney. (Just how they accomplish this is never made clear.)

Up to this point, Trial seems way ahead of its time, tackling directly racial issues long before it was fashionable (it predates even Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine), but then the film makes a sharp turn to the right, becoming a dominantly, virulently anticommunist piece. The protagonist has been duped and so, in a sense, has the audience.

Warner Archive's widescreen presentation of Trial is just okay. I saw an excellent 35mm print of the film around 1994; the DVD, by comparison, is notably grainy, dirty and showing signs of minor damage around the heads and tails of some of the reels. A full-frame trailer is tossed in as an extra feature.

In a small, working class California town at a "whites-only" beach, Mexican-American teenager Angel Chavez (Raphael Campos), is accused of murdering a white teenage girl from his high school, allegedly in a violent assault that triggered a fatal heart attack, no matter that she was diagnosed with likely terminal rheumatic heart fever some months before.

Meanwhile, David Blake (Glenn Ford) is an esteemed university law professor but with no actual courtroom experience. University politics compel him to get some, quickly, over the summer, and so he finds work at a small law firm where attorney Barney Castle (Arthur Kennedy) presses Blake to take on the Chavez case.

Castle heads to New York to raise money for the boy's defense, leaving Blake in the care of his law clerk, Abbe Nyle (Dorothy McGuire). Soon after, a mob threatens to lynch the youth with the implicit help of the local sheriff (Robert Middleton). Later, as mentioned above, Blake learns that law officers with ties to hate groups have tampered with the jury, while Blake himself distrusts the trial's African-American judge (Juano Hernández), whom he regards as an "Uncle Tom" predisposed to side with his white "benefactors."

At this point, however, the movie abruptly shifts nearly its entire focus when Blake is called by Castle to appear at a New York fund-raising event, an event that turns out to be an indirect American Communist Party rally. (Officially, it's for the fictional "American All People's Party.") Castle is revealed as a shameless, Newt Gingrich-type opportunist using the notoriety and (in this case) liberal outrage over the Chavez case to cynically line his own pockets, brazenly raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from gullible union workers and disgruntled Blacklist victims, funneling precious little of these funds toward Chavez's defense. "Law's a business, like any other," he tells Blake.

Arthur Kennedy, nominated for an Oscar for his performance, is very good, but Trial itself perpetuates Red Scare-era negative stereotypes and outright falsehoods about American communists, equating it and them with Soviet-style totalitarianism determined to overthrow the government, populated at the top only by zealots and shysters, personified by greedy, immoral crooks like Castle. In Trial, the hysteria extends even to love- and sexual relations, with Fellow Traveller Abbe telling Blake that, according to the party line, sex is of no more importance than a drop of water coming from the tap (a double-entendre that somehow made it past the censors). Cheap shots abound:

David Blake: Look, it's not only the way you are raising the money, it's the people that are raising it. The All Peoples Party. Barney, half of them are a bunch of Communists, you know that!

Barney Castle: I'd say sixty percent, and some of the others are cheating the Party out if its dues.

In short, the movie and its advertising hooks viewers in suggesting one type of left-leaning, socially conscious story while simultaneously delivering something as politically reactionary as Big Jim McLain.

Ford was 36 at the time but dialogue constantly refers to him as a "young man," or "boy" in way over his head, as if he were supposed to be some sort of callow youth. Nonetheless Ford, for all his fidgety, halting style, is quite good, and makes an interesting contrast to the more naturally confident Kennedy. The supporting cast is especially strong, with John Hodiak as the prosecuting attorney, Katy Jurado as the boy's mother, with John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Frank Cady, Richard Gaines, Mort Mills, and others in neat little supporting parts.

Juano Hernández, a Puerto Rican of African descent and one of the pioneers of African American film, is a welcome presence, and his ambiguous, subtle characterization almost single-handedly salvages the picture's otherwise unbelievable, preachy climax. A personal observation of no importance whatsoever: to me Hernández and Buster Keaton were, in terms of their facial features, practically twins. They could have played siblings, certainly. Now back to our review.

Video & Audio

The black-and-white film is presented in its 1.78:1 enhanced widescreen, approximating its original screen shape, probably 1.75:1. As mentioned above the image strikes me as overly grainy and dirty compared to the 35mm print I saw about 20 years ago. It's okay but a notch below Warner Archive's typically higher standard. The mono audio fares better. No subtitle or alternate audio options but the disc is region-free. The lone Extra Feature is a full-frame trailer, with a snippet or two of behind-the-scenes footage.

Parting Thoughts

Initially impressive for its way-ahead-of-its-time look at racism in America just prior to the Civil Rights Movement, Trial unfortunately changes gears midway through to become a mostly soft-peddled but, in its final scene, ultimately hysterical anticommunist propaganda piece. Worth a look, however, and mildly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.