Counsellor at Law (1933, William Wyler) (Patreon)

91/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997. Gotta say I'm drawing perilously close to what would be a fantastically unorthodox position for any self-respecting cinephile to hold, viz. that William Wyler is the greatest film director who has ever lived. Every time I revisit a Wyler joint, its formal sophistication takes me by surprise, though I should be used to that by now. Here, for example, we have what's in theory a very typical '30s stage adaptation—one that frequently rivals His Girl Friday for insanely high-speed dialogue—and I spent the first 10 minutes or so mostly marveling at how gorgeously fluid it is, at the skill with which Wyler establishes/navigates Simon & Tedesco's spatial geography and the various interrelationships of those who work there. Counsellor at Law is talky as hell but has been edited in such a way that I actually have trouble imagining how it would have worked onstage; the camera—orders of magnitude more mobile than was common in 1933, though we travel primarily via cuts—keeps zipping around different parts of the office, and not by following anyone in particular. Hollywood movies from the early sound era just don't move like this one does, with such confident precision and so much manifest care in how shots are composed and (especially) in how they'll cut together, rhythmically. What we might call, I dunno, "filmmaking." Trouble in Paradise can be found among my 20 favorites of all time, but it looks inert by comparison, frankly, and so do most other classics from this decade. And that's without addressing some of Wyler's other distinctive visual touches, like his highly uncharacteristic (for this period) comfort with leaving actors who aren't in the foreground out of focus, even as they remain a secondary focal point. We even get some remarkable proto-noir shadows at the very end, after Simon turns off the lights. If there are any other single-location gabfests with this degree of cinematic verve, made while the industry was still firmly stuck in proscenium mode, I haven't yet seen 'em.

Was Elmer Rice's play similarly singular? I'm not familiar enough with early-20th-century Broadway to make that claim, but its kaleidoscopic near-plotlessness has precious few onscreen analogues, and I'm skeptical that such analogues as do exist are remotely as richly detailed. Barrymore's the star, obviously (getting a star's late entrance, prior to which his character gets mentioned with fear and reverence multiple times), and eventually the possibility of his being disbarred over shenanigans in a past case becomes Counsellor's dramatic engine. But not at the expense of everything else the film's juggling, which includes (a) Simon's wife's heavily implied affair with a family friend played by Melvyn Douglas; (b) said wife's two children from a former marriage, who maintain a fanatical loyalty to their birth father and spurn Simon's attempts at paternal affection; (c) Simon's secretary, Regina aka Rexy, who's plainly in unrequited love with her boss but must (d) constantly fend off advances from the firm's dorkiest junior attorney; (e) Isabel Jewell constantly stealing the movie as the funniest stock '30s receptionist and switchboard operator in cinema history (a comic performance so deft that I want to conduct Skandies 1933 just to see if she might win Supporting Actress); (f) two visits from Simon's doting mother, on hand to remind us that he comes from a lower-class neighborhood (which would otherwise be easy to forget, given Barrymore's regal bearing); (g) a woman from said old neighborhood pleading with Simon to defend her radical-agitator son, who wants no defense and considers Simon a class traitor; and (h) sundry other matters, including some casual insider trading that has no bearing on anything.

With one exception, each of these elements sings, and collectively they achieve the quietly symphonic. Harry, the communist kid, is overwritten and overacted (the latter by future hack director Vincent Sherman; I've seen and not much cared for his Saturday's Children and Old Acquaintance), coming across like One, Two, Three's Otto (Horst Buchholz's character) played totally straight. He's the sole bum note, though, and appears only in one scene. The film's otherwise continuously magnificent, with a range that extends all the way from Jewell's nasal brashness to Bebe Daniels' bevy of pained and concerned micro-expressions. (My favorite of these occurs when Simon dictates a letter withdrawing from a case, at his wife's request/insistence; Rexy was out of the room when the decision was made, and doesn't know what happened, but lifts her eyes briefly from the pad of paper when Simon says "impossible for me to represent you." And that's all we need to know exactly what she's thinking.) Micro-expressions are of course beyond Barrymore, who gets a little hammy when Simon hits his emotional nadir; up to that point, though, this role ideally suits his practiced bombast. I confess that I might love Counsellor even more if it ended a minute or two earlier than it does, with Simon's hard-to-cheer triumph immediately counteracted by discovery of his wife's betrayal; Rice and Wyler could have just left him in the darkness, without cranking his despair up to 11 (and without paying off Bessie's earlier mild freakout after witnessing a suicide, which I preferred as another random detail). Still, the actual ending, complete with excited smooch and mad dash, can't help but warm one's heart. At this point, I'm maybe one more Wyler masterpiece away from procuring a soapbox and a spot in Hyde Park every Sunday.