The Movie: This is the classic courtroom drama starring Jimmy Stewart. Its the type of courtroom movie with a defendant of questionable moral fiber... who you don't know if you should trust or not -- is he really telling the truth? James Stewart is representing a guy who murdered the man who raped his wife... but the twist is that there was a considerable length of time between the two events... but the question arises -- did the rape even happen in the first place? Or did the defendant murder a man out of a jealous rage because his wife was seeing another man?

Although the courtroom antics sometimes flew way over-the-top, there was just enough... intrigue to keep me interested to the end. One thing I did notice though was that the lighting in this movie was kind of harsh... there were a lot of crisp shadows where I feel they probably shouldn't have been, but hey, what do I know? Finally, the music which was done by Duke Ellington was fantastic!

The DVD: This movie is black and white, and presented in a full-frame format. Full frame, of course, being a relative term to the shape of your TV :). The transfer however, was remarkably clean, although I did notice that there was quite a bit more visible dirt in the beginning, and also some noticeable compression artifacting in the way of stepped gradients in the opening sequence. But overall it was quite a good transfer and I'm surprised that a movie of this era would look so good.

But, I am disappointed. You see, I thought that this movie was originally presented in a 4:3 format, but further research has revealed to me that it was originally presented in a 1.85:1 widescreen format, and as far as I can tell, there is no widescreen version of this DVD. Hrmph. Of course, that probably doesn't make much difference to a lot of people, but it does to me, as I'm sure you've noticed by now.

Like the quality of the video, the audio also surprised me in that I didn't think a movie from this era would sound so good. Special features consisted of a theatrical trailer, filmographies, vintage print advertising, and a photo montage featuring the music of Duke Ellington. Another "special feature" was the inclusion of trailers from A Few Good Men and Philadelphia, courtroom dramas that I'm sure if I looked it up, would reveal themselves to have been released by Columbia.