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.

blanche-2 Made 73 years ago, "Night Court" is a very good, gritty precode about corruption in high places. In this case, it's a judge, played by Walter Huston.When a young woman, Mary (Anita Page) finds a bankbook left behind by a neighbor, she returns it, and finds herself sentenced to the work house for six months. The money belongs to Judge Moffett (Huston), who, to keep his activities quiet, hangs out in his girlfriend's apartment. The Judge believes that Mary looked at the bankbook and knows where he keeps his money. He sets her up and has her arrested as a prostitute. Her baby is put into care, leaving her poor cab-driver husband (Phillips Holmes) with nothing, and thanks to Moffett's girlfriend, he's even doubting his wife's innocence.However, he knows in his heart that Mary isn't capable of such a thing and sets out to clear her.The original was written by Mark Hellinger, a reporter, and producer of "Naked City" in 1948. The story is loosely based on a real-life character.Though some of the acting is melodramatic, as this was the style of the day, it's still compelling. Walter Huston is terrific, mean as dirt, and Holmes and Page are very sympathetic. Anita Page, about 22 here, worked until she died in 2008! Philips Holmes died in 1942 in a plane crash. For some reason, he reminds me of Tony Goldwyn.Three other cast members of note: Mary Carlisle (who as of this writing is still alive) as an honest judge's daughter, Lewis Stone as the honest judge, and Jean Hersholt as the building janitor.Very good and absorbing, though it's stylistically of the time.

mightymezzo Odd what one sees in these old crime dramas. This one is pretty good, with star Walter Huston in particularly villianous form as a corrupt judge and the long- forgotten Phillips Holmes as the cab driver who brings the hammer of justice down on the jurist. But what sticks in my mind now is the harrowing situation of an innocent young family torn apart by the judge's efforts to elude a special prosecutor, resulting in mom Anita Page framed for prostitution and their baby wailing in an orphanage. Still watchable. We should all look this good at seventy-plus.