These become the obvious banes of his professional existence and the cruxes of his success or failure in court. The issue is laid out neatly, the principal characters are smartly introduced and the surprises as to the nature and behavior of individuals are made to pop impressively.Before you know it, the difficulties of the accused man are pretty well clarified as a jealous and tyrannical superior officer and a spoiled and unreliable wife. The Christies have done a first-rate job of putting together a drama that traverses the courtroom course in capital style, and John Hunter has cleverly turned it into a flexible and bright screen play. And how they accomplish this minor magic is more intriguing than the whole problem reviewed.Let's pay respects, first, to the writing. What they have brought out of their characters is more absorbing than what happens to them. And they have dressed it up with military details that serve both to fascinate and amuse. And, in any case, the worst penalty he can suffer is dismissal from the service he has adorned.Yet the people who made this picture from Dorothy and Campbell Christie's literate play have stretched it out into a courtroom entertainment that has exciting personal tension and suspense. There was a pretty captain of the Women's Royal Army Corps in his room. (It seems he had some back pay coming to him, and there were immediate family bills he had to meet.) He was obviously off post without permission. Furthermore, he is accused of being away from his barracks on a certain Saturday without leave and of violating a standing order against entertaining women in barracks rooms.The question of whether he committed these minor acts is not even critical, since he himself frankly acknowledges that he lifted the funds for reasonable cause. C.," poses a judicial issue of trifling consequence and of no significance whatsoever to the turn of events in the world.A British army officer and gentleman is before a military court on a charge of fraudulently misappropriating £125 of his battalion's funds. Such a feeling came upon us yesterday while watching "Court Martial" unfold in characteristic British fashion at the Trans-Lux Fifty-second Street.This trim little Romulus picture, produced by Teddy Baird and directed by Anthony Asquith from the London stage success "Carrington, V. SOMETIMES we have the feeling that the British, with their manifested skill at suspenseful courtroom drama, could do a respectable job with the problem of a careless motorist getting himself out of a minor traffic charge.
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