Review of The Lawyer's Secret

A 1931 movie with a title like The Lawyer's Secret would seem to promise film noir excitement, and that's certainly what it delivers before the first quarter-hour is up when not-so-innocent Richard Arlen finds himself charged with a murder he had nothing to do with. The real perpetrators are Francis McDonald and Charles "Buddy" Rogers. I'm not giving away any secrets here, because we actually see this pair "at work" in Arthur L. Todd's velvety black, low-key, immaculately noirish photography. But after this typical noir episode which climaxes with a fair spurt of action in which Arlen steals a car, is arrested, is set free, and is then re-arrested, the movie takes a different turn altogether by suddenly raising the curtain on Act One and introducing the lawyer of the title in the person of stiff-as-a-board Clive Brook (or maybe he's just simply as bored as we are with the hokey plot and is not afraid to communicate his opinion of the script to the cinema audience. Interestingly the dialogue director who made no impression on Mr Brook was Max Marcin, who co-wrote the dialogue-bound script with Lloyd Corrigan). The lovely Fay Wray (beautifully gowned in a Travis Banton costume originally designed for another star, but modified here by Edith Head) struggles to rescue the movie from the dead lips of Mr Brook, and, assisted by Jean Arthur's perky girl-friend plus a couple of atmospheric penned-in-the-pen scenes with hero Arlen, almost succeeds.