Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) on Netflix
Austin Spencer, a publisher opposed to the death penalty, talks Tom Garrett into planting clues to a nightclub dancer's murder, so Tom is convicted. Spencer is to expose the hoax.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.9/106,654 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes68%
Trailer
Plot summary
Austin Spencer runs a newspaper and campaigns against capital punishment. To show how far circumstantial evidence can go wrong, he asks Tom Garrett, a novelist engaged to Spencer's daughter Susan, to plant clues pointing to himself in the killing of Patty Gray, a nightclub dancer, and let the police arrest him. Spencer will hold back the receipts and photographs that prove the clues were staged and produce them once Tom is convicted, exposing district attorney Roy Thompson and striking a blow at the death penalty. Tom agrees and, to learn how Patty died, romances one of her fellow dancers.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Douglas Morrow, also a law student at Columbia University, planned to develop his story into a screenplay with Ida Lupino, with Joseph Cotten in mind to star as Tom Garrett. When that plan fell through, producer Bert Friedlob bought the rights and both Lupino and Cotten were dropped from the project.
- Fritz Lang and producer Bert E. Friedlob, who had also worked together on While the City Sleeps, had a contentious relationship and argued over Beyond a Reasonable Doubt's ending; Lang got the ending he wanted, though he was personally unsatisfied with the film.
- Darragh O'Donoghue credits the film with inspiring Alfred Hitchcock, who adapted its stripped-down style in The Wrong Man (1957) and its suppressive narrative in Vertigo (1958), plus Cahiers du cinéma critics François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, and Krzysztof Kieślowski's A Short Film About Killing (1988).
