First I read through all the 43 previous reviews to see if anyone saw the same things I saw in this movie. I should say that I had the privilege of seeing the film in all its big-screen glory at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, with a live audience who laughed heartily. It was a hard film to watch for someone who has spent too much time in too many courtrooms watching too much injustice, but two things shocked me, though, and the second made sense of the first. Two reviewers did mention what's on my mind, but only part of it. The first shocking thing was that I had to agree with reviewer "Joey the Brit" when he wrote about actor Rex Ingram's "disproportionate, prominent" grieving when his employer, played by Ronald Colman, shaved off his beard. Colman, a law professor, performed this act because, after he had admitted to his landlady and housekeeper Jean Arthur that he had grown the beard to hide his youth while an underage student in law school, she accused him of hiding behind it. Ingram's reaction is truly "disproportionate." The camera focuses on Ingram's face for perhaps a full minute. The black man's face fills the screen as he grieves, and finally a tear runs down his face. It was so out of place, so prolonged, this scene! Why? As soon as Ingram arrives he is full of deference with dignity. His character has been with his employer for 15 years, during all of which time the boss has had the beard. But to grieve for a beard! I forgot my dumbfounded reaction as the plot moved forward, but I watched "Tilney," Ingram's character as the professor's "man," more carefully. The second shock has to do with what reviewer "mitchmcc" wrote, that he/she "would bet that the script was written by a 'progressive,' and that 'social justice' was the real goal here." Given that one of the screenplay writers was blacklisted in the 1950s, that's probably not far from the mark. It wasn't until the last courtroom scene, when the lynch mob bashes their way into the Hall of Justice, that I suddenly understood the significance of Ingram's reaction. It wasn't trivial. I had just been reading about how, in 1936, yet another attempt had been made to pass anti-lynching legislation. It was the best hope of passage there had been since this type of legislation had first been introduced following the Civil War, but many experts blame its failure to pass on President Roosevelt's failure to support the bill. Although it isn't clear to me that Roosevelt's support at that time would have helped to pass it or could have kept it from being repealed by a hostile Supreme Court, it is clear to me that no anti-lynching legislation had been passed by 1942, when this film was released. No such legislation was ever passed. And when I saw that rope in the hands of the lynch mob I knew why Ingram had been weeping. It wasn't for any beard. It was for the one black man or more lynched every month around that time. It may be only a subtext, but Ingram's screen-filling, weeping face made it a powerful one.