There is very much here that you recognise from other movies, but they all came afterwards, especially the French "Port of Shadows" a few years later, that really opened wide the stage for noirs. Here is a great play to form into a film, and the transmutation is successful, retaining all the theatrical and dramatic values and points, and also made fascinating as a film, mostly because of the settings - you can never make it rain so much and constantly on a theatre show. The acting is also superb, especially by Burgess Meredith, and as his father you see the young John Carradine, and Misha Auer also has a small part as an efficient radical. The main point of interest though is the argument, about the dilemma of justice gone wrong - a wrongly pronounced sentence, here to the electric chair in 1920, will have consequences as long as no correction has been made, and here, 16 years after the execution, an entire school of young law students all unanimously arrive at the conclusion that justice had been miscarried. The judge himself will suffer for this for the rest of his life, clinging to the illusion that he just followed the law, but constantly tortured by John Carradine's lasting and undying curse. There are also minor delightful details enhancing the quality of the film, like the halfwit coming to seek protection against the rain and the cold and even he ultimately although unconsciously acting as a major link in the chain of irrevocable universal justice. It's a great film that should be worth restoring to perfect quality, saving it from the gutter of worn down discarded videos of the 30.s.
