Admittedly, as you'd expect from the maestro, it's well made, it looks good and compelling enough to keep you watching until the very end....you will however curse the great man for making you waste your time on this nonsense.
If you can imagine one of Zanuck's campaigning early thirties Warner Brothers movies remade as a Scooby Doo episode you'll have half an idea what this is like. Then to get an even better impression, imagine that Scooby Doo episode made not as a cartoon but by a bunch of precocious theatre school students saying 'Gee that's swell' every couple of minutes in an attempt to sound authentic.
Just as DeMille was one of the greatest directors of the era, Bartlett Cormack was one of the era's great screenwriters. Although they'd work very successfully together in the future their combined efforts here didn't quite click. It all seems too far fetched. Perhaps if the story had been set in Ancient Rome or on a surreal remote island it might have worked but because this was meant to be "now" in the actual real world, it comes across as theatrical, contrived and unrealistic.
Writer, Bartlett Cormack made his name exposing corruption and organised crime and for about ten minutes we're tantalised that we're going to get something special. After the tailor is murdered, we learn that because of 'the system' justice can't always be done, we think we're about to see a hard-hitting "we need to fix our society" picture. You think it's going to be a provocative indictment of a corrupt legal system, something to make your blood boil. Unfortunately what unfolds just makes you cringe.
Cagney's MAYOR OF HELL had a kind of similar simplistic theme but that didn't take itself too seriously so was fun. This tried to be too earnest which was a shame because deMille usually showed quite a sense of humour in most of his pictures.
It's not a bad film, it's actually quite entertaining, it's just that you'd expect more from Mr deMille (and it is of course better than the pompous, sanctimonious sexual frustration-drenched nonsense known as SIGN OF THE CROSS.) Everyone has an off-day - even Led Zeppelin made In Thru The Outdoor!
