A clean little quota quickie which has some affinities to post war film noir. The femme fatale in this one is a bit more dreary than her noir sisters. The greatest affinity however that this film, and most of the other better quota quickies, is that they had straight ahead, no nonsense scripts, and a throw away sense of economics - no one really cared what the final product was as long as it was done for a price- and therefore no interference from producers and executives (who didn't exist at the time). The finished films were simply effective stories told in no nonsense fashion. Compared to today's films with their interminable lists of co-producers, executive producers and just plain producers, all of whom have massive insecurity and ego problems as well as overwhelming inferiority complexes, causing them all to have to put in various proprietary bits of business to show that they played an important part in the production of the film, the good quota quickie, like the film noir, works like a palate refresher.
Despite the somewhat misleading title of Crown VS Stevens (it's not a courtroom drama) the picture gets into the story from the start and marches off in a direct line to the denouement in a very satisfying way. Another similarity with the noir is the absence of star ego. Stories have not been manipulated because some big ego wants all of the good lines to do or have the double do acts of daring do etc. In fact in Crown VS. Stevens, a British Warner production, the lead actor Patric Knowles would be whisked off to Hollywood to appear as Errol Flynn's brother in Charge of the Light Brigade and begin a long career. In Crown Vs. Stevens what you see is what you get.
There are no twists or turns to the story, but there are various forking paths open to moral interpretation. Taken on this level there are layers upon layers of moral ambiguity, not the least of which is the identification with the crimes of Crime and Punishment, except in this film there is absolutely no guilt creeping into the consciousness of the femme fatale, the sociopathic element that was the hallmark of the noir. But that's getting a little too carried away and heaping too much significance on this amusing little film.
