The father learning to die without panic is the good. The romance with Death is the confusion. Adults.
The review
Bill Parrish is a man of business and daughters, and the film's long patience is mostly for him: a birthday, a succession, a chance to say the true thing before he is collected. That patience is a gift in a culture that will not sit at a bedside. The love story between his daughter and the guest is a category mistake the movie is too fond of. Death is not a suitor. A borrowed face is not a boyfriend.
It is three hours. Give them to the father, not to the courtship. If the room swoons at the wrong pair, say so. Then talk about the birthday, which is the scene that knows what a house is.
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.
