What did you watch? The 1947 crime drama Mr. District Attorney 

Is there a MRS District Attorney? No, and that becomes part of the problem. 

Wait, there’s also a movie by the same title from 1941. Well this one stars Dennis O’Keefe. 

He’s also in the 1941 version. What? Really? 

I had to look this up, these movies are related in title and based on a long running radio show, and both movies star Dennis O’Keefe. It’s like when there’s another reboot and they get someone from the previous incarnation involved in some manner. It was followed by a tv series or two (if Wikipedia is correct, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was one of the TV writers). I wonder what that conversation was like, “Dennis, we’ve got another film for you…MISTER District Attorney! No, it’s not a sequel to the movie you were in. Well it is related. Look, it’s a paycheck, just wear a suit and prepare to speak legalese.” 

This film opens up with a salacious murder and a newspaper prints a picture of someone other than the victim. The lady whose picture it is, Marcia, goes to the district attorney, Craig Warren, to ask that the police be more careful in sharing the wrong picture with the press. Warren is like “why does this dame have her pictures in our files?” so he has one of his toadies do some research on her, totally legit. Turns out, she claims, she had killed a man in self-defense, though Warren is suspicious that perhaps she had talked her way out of it because she’s 1940s hot. 

Anyway, in a courtroom somewhere, Steve Bennett is fed up with protecting some awful industrialist so he quits. Warren happens to be walking up, and grabs Bennett and takes him up to the DA office. From there, he quick talks Bennett into joining his legal team to take down racketeering gangsters. “You’ll have no personal life and will work non stop, and eventually you’ll have my job, and also you’ll have my assistant Harrington who just cracks jokes. We’ll even go on stings to catch these gangsters, because we always join the police in gun battles.” Or something. 

The lead racketeering gangster operates like a regular businessman who uses his high rise office to see various other gangsters who operate like regular businessmen. And his secretary is Marcia, and she and the lead gangster also seem to have a thing, as most secretary/bosses might’ve in post-war America, ask your grandparents. And Bennett’s first stop is into this office and a meet cute with Marcia. Marcia is ordered to distract Bennett with her ladyness and she accepts this offer.  

Bennett and Marcia go on dates while DA Warren and Harrington do stakeouts to see how the racketeering businessmen use their trucks and cars to block traffic on two way streets in order to rob businesses that don’t agree to the gangster shakedown. They even have one store owner, and elderly immigrant whose son died in WW2, serve as an informant to catch the mobsters in the act. A gun battle ensues here and the elderly man is killed. This is an odd choice in the film; where the old man is like “I do this for America!” and the police just help shoot up the business and he dies in the gunfire (he does pull out a gun to join in?). 

Anyway, Warren doesn’t like how Bennett is distracted with Marcia and having a personal life, so he sends Bennett to Europe for an undetermined time for a fact finding investigation. I have more questions, but why ask if Warren’s office has jurisdiction to do something like that or if that’s not the job of the FBI or Interpol. Whatever, the plan works because Marcia marries the main gangster while Bennett is gone. Bennett comes back from Europe and is pissed, so he does two TOTALLY logial things: 

This is great because it’s NOT a ploy to get closer to the syndicate and learn their secrets. Instead it’s to sit there alone at elaborate dinner parties while you watch a guy you hate and detest make out with your love interest, and you work for him.  

-he quits the DA office 

-he gets a job as a lawyer on retainer for the lead gangster. 

Anyway, stuff happens. The DA office still seems to get closer and so members of the crime syndicate start getting bumped off. Warren confronts Bennett and both men are knocked out, while another mobster is killed, and so when Warren comes to he both accuses Bennett of murder but also takes him under his wing again because he things Bennett is being set up and that’s when I, the viewer, am thinking “geez these guys are all really dumb.” 

She might not be the mastermind but Marcia ends up having a lot of blood on her hands. She’s basically a serial killer, just not in the “has no conscious and must kill constantly” variety we’d think of. She’s find herself in a figurative room with corners and decides she has to start killing someone before she even chooses a corner to get backed into. People die pretty gruesomely in this movie, even if it’s hinted at, and often right in front of our heroes, and instead of trauma the characters just kind of move onto the next scene.  

Was it good? There’s an ending and it’s over and sometimes the movie hits hard, such as with the old immigrant store owner, or with Marcia’s fate. But with the callous “moving on!” attitude like immediately after a couple deaths, it’s not exactly a comic moment for a couple of the characters we’re supposed to root for as they deal with the roller coaster they’ve been put on. Marcia’s a nice misdirect, she never actually feels conniving, it’s casual business for her (maybe a little too casual) to play around with Bennett. Does she really love him? How long would they be together if they run out of people for her to throw off balconies? It’s a passable drama – not a mystery, not exactly noir considering Bennett still has job prospects. It’s got a couple shootouts, a weird love triangle, and an interesting femme fatal. I spent too much time just now thinking if the balancing act between Bennett and Marcia’s narratives makes the movie interesting or is just too much for the movie, but it’s otherwise pretty good even with its abrupt ending. 

I bought a bunch of noir DVDs in San Francisco and this one was one of them. However the film is readily available on youtube (currently) or other archived places. Hope