Guilty Hands (1931)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) High melodrama and overacting make Guilty Hands an evergreen not-that-guilty pleasure. Lionel Barrymore stars as a lawyer who uses his knowledge of crime to build the perfect murder against a womanizing friend who plans on marrying his daughter. If that feels a bit over-the-top, you haven’t seen the film’s conclusion yet. But I have already said too much. Still, this film moves quickly at less than 70 minutes, features the wonderful Kay Francis, and gets some fun out of classic mystery movie clichés. There is plenty of irony in having a trusted lawyer investigate a murder he himself committed, and Barrymore runs with that idea. The Pre-Code nature of the film means that it’s a bit wild in the corners of the dialogue, and it’s willing to entertain at least some moral ambiguity for its characters. It’s not particularly stylish (although director W. S. Van Dyke moves his camera more often than you’d think for an early-1930s film), but that’s not a problem considering the emphasis on plot and characters. Movie mysteries had a great decade in the 1930s, not so much for the best films of the subgenre, but because there were a lot of them, and many now-obscure films of the era such as Guilty Hands played the game very well.