The Verdict (1946)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

The Verdict (1946) – D. Siegel

Don Siegel’s first directorial outing is a re-teaming of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (from The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca). Greenstreet plays a police superintendent who accidentally supplies evidence which sends an innocent man to the gallows. Lorre is one of his friends, a decadent artist, who becomes one of the suspects (at least for viewers) when the brother of the woman killed earlier is also murdered.  Intriguingly, this turns out to be a classic “locked room” mystery, because the body is found in a room with the door and windows locked from the inside.  Siegel, who we probably know best for his partnership with Clint Eastwood in the ‘60s and ‘70s (resulting in Dirty Harry, 1971), does an adequate job here with the Gothic Victorian period piece (same era as Sherlock Holmes, and also featuring some character actors from the Rathbone/Bruce series filming contemporaneously). I’ll admit that my attention wavered a bit, as not all of the red herring characters were interesting enough, but the twist at the end is deliciously surprising and satisfying.