MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

edwagreen Fredric march is the stern judge here forced to deal with his wife's terminal illness. Interesting to note that at no time in the film does the term inoperable brain tumor spoken despite the fact that this is the problem facing Florence Eldridge, the judge's wife and real life wife of March.Our judge is forced to reexamine his attitude and ethics in this excellent moral dilemma. Eldridge is in fine form as the doomed wife and Geraldine Brooks is perky but on spot as the daughter.The ending may be viewed by some as a cop out once it is revealed how the wife really died. Yet this solution may also cause an ethical dilemma.

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** One of if not the first film out of Hollywood that tackles the subject of mercy killings that has honorable and straight laced, in going by the book, Judge Calvin Cooker, Fredic March,come to realize that there are extenuating circumstances in cases that he presides on that is not explained in the law that he's sworn to upholds. This comes crashing down on his head when his wife Catherine, Florence Eldridge, is diagnosed with a fatal brain disease that will slowly end her life, with her brain turning into mush, in excoriating pain. It's later in the movie when the Judge can't take it, his wife's suffering, anymore that in a fit of madness drives his car with his wife Catherine in it off the road where she ends up dead and him suffering severe head shoulder & leg injuries!Even though exonerated in Catherine's dead Judge Cook feels that he in fact murdered her and wants to pay for his crime even if it meant life imprisonment or worse. Having attorney David "Double D" Douglas, Edmond O'Brien, given the job to defend Judge Cook , who refused to defend himself, it's decided the only defense for his action is an insanity defense in that he wasn't in his right mind at the time of the crime that he's not only accused of but admitted to! It takes a lot of work on "Bouble D's" part to not only convince the judge & jury but himself as well to Judge Cook's innocence. In that the man, Judge Cook, was out of his mind at the time of his wife's death but it wasn't him that killed her! It turned out that Catherine herself was the one who did herself in before her husband Judge Cook had the chance to do it!***SPOILERS*** It was Catherine who found out the truth of her fatal illness in going through her husbands papers and knowing what she's in store for, a slow and painful death, that she decided to put herself, in taking a bottle of powerful pain killers, out of her misery. In an autopsy preformed on her on the insistence of Judge Cook's attorney David "Double D" Douglas reviled that Catherine was in fact dead before the car that her husband drove off the road hit the bottom of the gully that it landed in! The ending of the film was a bit of a cop-out in having Judge Cook not going through with his planned mercy killing of his terminally ill wife. But with the movie released in 1948 him really going through with it and being found innocent was totally unthinkable at the time by the movie going public.In fact there was an even more poignant moment in the film a bit earlier when a man's best friend, his dog, was hit by a car and was, as his owner was in tears, mercifully shot and killed by a policeman at the scene. It was that tragic incident that gave Judge Cook the idea to do the same thing, in a car crash, to his wife to keep her from going through the same kind of suffering that the fatally injured canine was going through!

adamshl The concept of tempering legality with compassion is a daring, slippery slope. It is today as it was in 1948 when this challenging film was released.Fortunately, this drama has the great acting team Florence Eldridge and Fredric March in the lead roles, lending both power and sensitivity to their characterizations. While conceding that the law must by its nature be clear and committed, one can also empathize with the human challenges faced in the case of a terminally ill loved one who is in great pain and suffering.Where does one draw the line in such cases, especially when a spouse accused of murder emphatically pleads guilty? It's a tough situation created here, and one that must either tread the path of legal justice or find extenuating circumstances to help relieve the inevitable sentence."An Act of Murder" manages to walk this tightrope with considerable balance, thanks to an outstanding cast and some petty talented writers. The film also may be considered a "lost work," despite the pairing of Mr. and Mrs. March in the lead roles.It's also interesting to see only a single bona fide professional review in the IMDb, as though this subject may have been (and still may be) too tough to handle. The most complete review (by Bosley Crowther of the NY Times) expresses the critic's general reaction without declaring a firm stance on the controversial subject of euthanasia. And perhaps this is the best we can ever get, for the topic may be too challenging for us mortals to ever definitively solve.

JohnHowardReid Opens most promisingly with sweeping tracking shots through courtroom corridors, but all too soon this courtroom drama inventiveness makes way for a more conventional weepie with mercy killing overtones. Nevertheless, it is superbly photographed by Hal Mohr, and brilliantly acted by the entire cast from the star roles so convincingly characterized by Fredric March and his real-life wife, Florence Eldridge, down to support players like Stanley Ridges and John McIntyre. As the daughter, Geraldine Brooks, gives such a warmly realistic performance, I wondered what happened to her. It seems this was her fourth film. She made her debut in Cry Wolf (1947) in which she was billed third. In Possessed, she was fourth; for Embraceable You (1948), only the number one star, Dane Clark, was billed above her. After Act of Murder, she achieved fourth billing in The Younger Brothers (1949), co-starred with James Mason and Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment, and then played the female lead in Challenge to Lassie. Geraldine Brooks then made a far-reaching decision by accepting the lead role on TV in a Ford Theatre episode, The Farmer Takes a Wife (1949). Second-billed Dane Clark played the farmer. After making two Italian movies, including Volcano (1950), she returned to Hollywood and spent the rest of her life in TV roles – except for The Green Glove (1952), Street of Sinners (1957) and Mr Ricco (1975) – finishing with three episodes of Executive Suite (1976). She died at the young age of 51 on June 19, 1977. Anyway, getting back to Act of Murder, the various title changes aptly convey the desperate attempts of the film's producers to sell it to an indifferent box-office. The theme is controversial enough, but hardly the right formula for postwar escapist entertainment. Of course, there was a fledgling art house circuit, but any chance it might have had with ethically committed moviegoers is somewhat negated by the way the plot neatly side-steps many of the moral, legal, ethical and medical questions it raises. Yet, despite this narrative slickness, the atmosphere of Act.../Case.../Live.../I Stand... remains uncompromisingly bleak.