A vow is a real thing. The film knows it, then spends too long in the underworld's party.
The review
Victor's trouble starts because he treats the words of a marriage as a rehearsal he can mutter in a wood. The dead hear him. That is the right metaphysics for a comedy: a vow is not a draft. Emily is pitiable and she is also wrong to hold a living man to a mistake. The film lets her release him. That release is the decent ending.
The land of the dead is more fun than the land of the living, and the living wedding is a transaction between anxious parents. Count that. A marriage in this story is saved by mercy, not by the party downstairs. Watch it with older children. Do not let the skeletons outvote the vow.
Adults. The courtroom is the work. What happened and what can be proved are not the same fact.
The review
A soldier shoots a bar owner and says the man raped his wife. A former prosecutor who now fishes more than he practices takes the defense. I am not going to describe the testimony. In 1959 the testimony itself was the scandal, because a courtroom in an American film was asked to say out loud what a trial of this kind has to say. The lawyer is good at the saying. He is also having a good time, and the film lets you see the good time, which is the correction inside the craft.
Adults. A house does not need this as a primer. A house that wants one picture of how a verdict is made, rather than how a villain confesses, can use it. Ask, at the end, what the jury was allowed to know and what the rooms already knew. Those are different piles. The decade's more famous courtroom hours snap the case shut with a witness who breaks. This one is more honest about the gap, and less honest about whether the lawyer is a man to admire. Admire the proceeding. Decline the grin.
