The Lawyer’s Secret

Fay Wray is engaged to Clive Brook. She asks him to speak with her brother, Charles ‘Buddy Rogers.’ He’s been hanging out with the wrong people. When Brook braces him, Rogers resists, but Brook points out that as a lawyer, he’s bound to absolute confidentiality as to a client’s private communications; Rogers admits that he’s done with the crowd he’s been hanging around with. He’s just taken part in a robbery with a gambling den owner who has been cheating him, and some one else killed the gambler. Brook urges him to confess, but Rogers refuses. He refuses when an innocent sailor, Richard Arlen, is convicted of the murder, he refuses when Arlen is sentenced to be hanged, he refuses to help when Arlen’s fiancee, Jean Arthur comes to ask him to appeal the verdict, and even when Miss Wray asks him.I’m uncertain of how far lawyerly confidentiality stretches nowadays, but it’s a pretty good story, and Brook is fine in the role. In fact, everyone is pretty good, even Miss Arthur in a small, underplayed part. this causes me to wonder about the direction. Louis Gasnier co-directs with Max Marcin, who was better known as a writer. He entered films because he wrote plays, but is best remembered as — eventually — the creator of the Crime Doctor radio show. Did he, in effect, serve as a dialogue director here, while Gasnier handled the visuals?