Grand Jury (1936)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
When a gangster (Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams) gets away with murder, a reporter (Owen Davis, Jr.) and a commodore (Fred Stone) decide to track down evidence, which will prove he killed a man in cold blood. GRAND JURY is a pretty bad movie that doesn't have much working for it. It's also a rather bizarre movie because it tries to mix comedy and crime drama but the end results just don't work. What really hurts this movie is the screenplay, which seems to run out of gas around the twenty-minute mark and everything else that follows just seems lazy and underwritten. The final forty-or-so minutes of the film just have the two leads walking around, talking and asking questions but nothing they say is very interesting. Even dumber are some strange comedy sequences that are added for no apparent reason. It almost seems as if someone was directing a drama, got fired and the replacement director didn't realize they were doing drama so just started adding in comedy. Both Stone and Davis are less than entertaining to say the least. Both of them are playing pretty annoying characters and the screenplay just never gives them anything interesting to do. The best scene in the film comes from actor Harry Beresford who addresses the grand jury after they've let the gangster off for killing his son. The actor does a very good job in the sequence and it's highly memorable for its emotional punch.
* 1/2 (out of 4)
When a gangster (Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams) gets away with murder, a reporter (Owen Davis, Jr.) and a commodore (Fred Stone) decide to track down evidence, which will prove he killed a man in cold blood. GRAND JURY is a pretty bad movie that doesn't have much working for it. It's also a rather bizarre movie because it tries to mix comedy and crime drama but the end results just don't work. What really hurts this movie is the screenplay, which seems to run out of gas around the twenty-minute mark and everything else that follows just seems lazy and underwritten. The final forty-or-so minutes of the film just have the two leads walking around, talking and asking questions but nothing they say is very interesting. Even dumber are some strange comedy sequences that are added for no apparent reason. It almost seems as if someone was directing a drama, got fired and the replacement director didn't realize they were doing drama so just started adding in comedy. Both Stone and Davis are less than entertaining to say the least. Both of them are playing pretty annoying characters and the screenplay just never gives them anything interesting to do. The best scene in the film comes from actor Harry Beresford who addresses the grand jury after they've let the gangster off for killing his son. The actor does a very good job in the sequence and it's highly memorable for its emotional punch.