The badge starts as a lie on a wanted man and only later becomes the job.
The review
A wanted man is hired to clean up a town that does not know his name. Then his past walks in. William S. Hart, 1916. The badge is a lie at the start and a job by the end. The family can watch. I care more about that order than about another gunman story.
The town hands a public job to a stranger. That is a real duty, and it is also false until the old name shows up. When the past walks in, the lie gets charged. If the badge is a job by the end, say so, and say it did not start honest. I'd make the kids repeat that before bed. Cleaning a town under the wrong name is not the same as being the man they thought they hired.
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.
