Lawbolisted Powerful

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

ksf-2 Wow... all that going on. This couldn't have been made after the film code started being enforced. Judge tries to hide his girlfriend in another part of town so she can't testify against him. All hell breaks loose. Walter Huston is shady Judge Moffat, and thinks he has all the answers. Lewis Stone (Grand Hotel) is another judge trying to right the wrongs. Phillips Holmes and Anita Page get caught up in the illegal drama, as the neighbors next door, Mike and Mary. The plot kind of runs all over the place, but it's all done pretty well. This turns into a story of cleaning up the dirty judges running the court system. Good restoration job. Sound and picture quality are excellent. Huston had only been in Hollywood a couple years, but gives a fine performance. Directed by Woody van Dyke. He and Holmes both died quite young, van Dyke from suicide and Holmes in a plane crash. Anita Page had an interesting career... she had started in the silents, moved into the talkies, took a LONG break, and made a few more in the 2000s... in her 90s! Catch this one on Turner Classics -- an opportunity to see Huston near the beginning of his career.

marcslope Nicely pre-Code but rather hack-written MGM programmer, wherein nice blue-collar cabby Phillips Holmes and nice wifey Anita Page come under the heavy thumb of Judge Walter Huston, who's incredibly corrupt. Huston, with a dashing mustache, relishes his bad-guy histrionics, and it's fun to see Metro toiling in the lower-class provenance of Warners. But the social consciousness is awkward: Huston's so all-bad and enemy Lewis Stone so all-good that these good actors can't do much to make their roles interesting, while the always-too-pretty Holmes is given to some theatrical, unconvincing soliloquizing. We're also asked to sympathize with and root for him when he kidnaps Huston, gags him, ties him to a chair, and beats him up. Virtue does triumph; we know because there's a shot of a newspaper headline saying something like "Vice Banished Forever from City, D.A. Says." There's also an annoyingly cute baby. W.S. Van Dyke directs at about half the pace Mervyn LeRoy or Howard Hawks would have employed at Warners, and Page is given to scene after scene of screaming and wailing. It's fun as a time capsule, but other studios, notably Warners, were handling material like this with much more finesse.

GManfred Disregard the mundane title, this is a good movie. The website classifies its genre as a crime/ thriller picture, and it is exactly that. It stars Walter Huston, arguably America's best actor, as a terminally corrupt judge who is interested in self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. Rotten to the core, he victimizes a young couple with a baby he suspects knows something about his lurid after-hours affairs. Huston has never been better when at his worst and runs up against a good guy (in this case, a good judge), who, as they used to say in the 30's, wants to 'get the goods' on him. Good Guy Judge is played by Lewis Stone (Judge Hardy, of Andy Hardy fame).Things get worse before they get better, and the scenes with Anita Page, as the young wife arrested on a phony charge, are hard to watch. Phillips Holmes plays her husband in one of the best roles of his short career (he was the cowardly weasel in "An American Tragedy").The movie, made so long ago, is outdated particularly in the resolution of the cases that come before Judge Moffett. Defendants are held and tried at breakneck speed, often with out benefit of counsel. As we know, the wheels of justice grind very slowly nowadays. And everybody has at least one lawyer.Do yourself a favor and get past the unimaginative title - this film is proof that you can't judge a book by its cover, or a movie by its title.

gerrytwo When MGM released "Night Court" in 1932, its story of crooked judges and a corrupt system of justice in New York City was pulled from the newspaper headlines of the previous year. When, in the movie, cabbie Mike Thomas's wife is set up, arrested and jailed for prostitution, that part of the story didn't surprise New Yorkers, who had read for months of the activities of Chico Accatuna (the spelling of his last name varies), nicknamed the "human spitoona." Just as in the movie, this unsavory character would set women up for an arrest by the vice squad. Once the woman lost her job and reputation as the result of the arrest, criminals such as Lucky Luciano would then force these women into prostitution.In this movie, Mary Thomas is sent to jail to discredit her, since she accidentally saw the bank book of the crooked Judge Moffett, played by Walter Huston. He had given it to his girlfriend when he told her to hide out while Lewis Stone's judicial commission was investigating Moffett and others for corruption. She moved in next door to the Thomases,in a rundown walk-up rowhouse, and managed to drop the bank book (which showed tens of thousands of dollars in the judge's secret account) into the crib of Mary's son when she dropped by.At one point, this picture is as grim as any you will see. Mary is in jail. Her little boy is in a city foster care facility, crying his heart out. Mike, trying to spring her, goes to a lawyer who is a crony of Judge Moffet and informs the judge of Mike's plans. Moffet, lying on a sofa, tells an associate to "get me bad boys, very bad" to take care of the troublemaker cabbie. These "bad boys" beat the cabbie to a pulp, then put him on a slow boat to South America.In a great scene, Mike later tells Moffett, now a prisoner in Mike's apartment, about all the questions Moffett's henchmen had asked him. Mike closes by saying they didn't him the most important question: "Could I swim?" Audiences in 1932 must have cheered when they heard that line, delivered just right by actor Phillips Holmes.Now, "Night Court" is like a time capsule, a reflection of a world long gone. Mark Hellinger, the co-writer of the play the movie is based on, was a reporter who had first hand knowledge of the real life events he borrowed for the story. The hero in this movie is a cabbie, not a cop, a district attorney or any other government official. In this movie, except for Lewis Stone's character, who is murdered, all the public officials you see are on the take. The movie makers didn't identify the cop who arrested Mary Thomas as a member of the police Vice Squad. If they had, that would have dated the movie. As a result of the tremendous scandal involving Chico Accatuna and the compulsory prostition racket, the NYPD Vice Squad had a new name, the Public Morals Squad. This scandal helped get La Guardia elected Mayor and is the basis for this pre-code crime classic from MGM.