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| Kay Gillian, Harvey Solin, Robert Fitzsimmons. |
Originally titled The
Night of January 16th, this 1935 courtroom drama was
unimpressive in its second New York revival. It’s a stunt play in which a case
concerning the facts behind a man’s fatal fall from a penthouse (murder? suicide?) are developed with people from the actual audience playing the jury and
submitting a verdict. The play is written to support alternative conclusions of
“guilty” or “not guilty” for the case against defendant Karen Andre (Kay
Gillian).
The revival lacked dramatic tension and realism, and was
tiresome, “murky,” and poorly acted, thought Clive Barnes. Richard Watts
declared it “amazingly and distressingly tedious.” Douglas Watt said “the whole
affair looks like a high school production,” and Julius Novick noted that” the
staging and the acting are conventional and obvious.”
The script was a revision by the author of her original. Because
of Ayn Rand’s (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) notoriety as an author,
I’m adding here an edited version of my description (from my Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1930-1940) of the original
production, which opened at the Ambassador Theatre on 9/16/35, where it ran
for the considerable sum of 232 performances. Rand was credited under the
penname Ann O’Connell and the play was staged by John Hayden.
Producers A.H. Woods and Lee Shubert employed promotional
gimmicks to increase interest in the work, such as having boxer Jack Dempsey
and other celebrities in the opening-night jury, or having Helen Keller act as
foreman for a jury of blind persons. Those serving were offered three dollars
apiece in return for their services.
The crime on trial was apparently inspired by a real-life
incident involving a Swedish match magnate named Ivar Kreuger. In the drama, Karen
Andre (Doris Nolan) is being tried for the supposed murder of her financier
employer, Faulkner, for whom she served as secretary and mistress. She is
accused by the prosecuting attorney (Edmund Breese) of having shot him in the
heart and thrown him from a penthouse terrace because of jealousy over his marriage
to a banker’s (Clyde Fillmore) daughter, Nancy Whitfield (Verna Hillie). The
defense attorney (Arthur Pierson) claims suicide.
When Karen takes the stand, she declares the entire thing to
be a hoax, that what was sent over the parapet was the body of gangster Lefty O’Toole,
already dead, so that Faulkner could fly off to Buenos Aires undetected with
millions borrowed from his father-in-law. Gangster “Guts” Reagan (Walter Pidgeon,
debuting on Broadway before becoming a screen star), in unrequited love with
Karen, appears to tell a tale that the plane was stolen, crashed, and burned, that
the corpse inside had a bullet in it, and that the banker offered him $5,000 to
keep quiet. The case is then handed to the jury for a decision.
The opening night jury found the defendant not guilty, and
it was reprimanded for its decision by the judge (J. Arthur Young), who had
their names stricken from the jury lists. The critics’ jury, however, came up
with a split verdict. In general, they opined it was a better stunt than a
play.