“Illegal”

Quiet around here. I’ll try to amuse you.

I love Daniel Pinkwater. I feel there is something lost in all this playlisted, Netflixed, on-demand hoo-ha you call Modernity. There needs to be an element of randomized, cinematic, B-listiness. So I bought all these sketchy multi-DVD sets and, every couple weeks, Belle and I ‘snark out’, picking a disc literally at random. (First a random cartoon.) Mostly it’s worked out, until we actually drew Wild Women of Wongo from the deck. We’re too old for that stuff. Now, mostly, we go for SnarkPlatinum or SnarkSelect options (but I won’t bore you with my elaborate randomization system.)

Last week’s pick was "Illegal" (1955), starring Edward G. Robinson, plus bonus DeForest Kelley, Jayne Mansfield, and Henry Kulky action. The tag is simply false: " He was a guy who marked 100 men for death – until a blonde called ‘Angel’ O’Hara marked him for life!" Nothing of the sort happens.

I like the way they used to use quotation marks in the title itself.

But wait. If the title is "Illegal", shouldn’t I have to refer to it as "’Illegal’"?

OK. We’re off to a good start.

Do you really need for me to explain to you what’s going on here?

Dr. McCoy is accused of the crime.

"I’m a doctor, not a murderer!"

It turns out he was wrongly convicted, but not before he was walking Spanish down the hall, if you know what I mean.

The D.A., Victor Scott (Edward G. Robinson – perhaps you have seen his face before) is remorseful and falls perilously into the bottle, only to emerge and win the most spectacular case of his career. He defends some guy who is accused, by Stroogo, from The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T …

… of having hit some other guy with a lead pipe. Stoogo is in turn accused by Scott of having been previously rendered unconscious himself, in the brawl in question, by the defendant. So how can he know the defendant hit the victim with aforementioned pipe? Stroogo says there’s no way a ‘little guy’ like the defendant, who is no bigger than Scott himself, could knock out a guy like Stroogo

Because he’s got an iron jaw. While the witness is leaving the stand, the defense attorney employs an inconventional cross-examination technique:

OBJECTION!

Scott was employing the legal eagle’s best friend: a fist full of nickels. OBJECTION SUSTAINED! (Do they teach this stuff over at the Volokh Conspiracy? I should hope so.)

Over the unconscious body of the victim, Scott moves that the case be dismissed ‘in the interests of justice’. Naturally, the judge agrees.

For his next act, our hero defends a poisoner … by drinking Exhibit A – enough poison to kill 12 men! – in front of the astonished prosecutors!

He predicts they will call for a recess. Luckily they do, and he takes the opportunity to run across the street and get his stomach pumped. (He has researched the poison in question and learned it takes 45 minutes to take effect.)

There’s a gangster moll, of course. She gets called to the stand. Interestingly, Scott has to cross-examine her after he has sustained a life-threatening, medically untreated gunshot wound. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it’s sort of funny the way, after he collapses, everyone – even the judge – is telling him things like ‘I hope to see you in my courtroom again soon, Mr. Scott, under less dramatic circumstances’. And the prosecutors are happily chirping away about how they’ve sent some officers to apprehend so-and-so. But no one thinks to call a doctor. So probably he dies at the end, or something.

It”s a pretty good film.