MAN’s Dennis O’Keefe) when he overhears the young man refusing to defend a corporate client who has suborned testimony to weasel out of a malfeasance case. However, Bennett gets mixed up with fatale Marcia (FLIGHT TO MARS’ Marguer- ite Chapman), who is in cahoots with a shady fixer (George Coulouris) and using her to pull the young lawyer’s strings. Before the case is through, Bennett has quit his city job for a spell as a high- priced shyster, but a murder or two and realizing that the girl is no good—though, like a number of part-hardboiled dames, she really loves him and winds up taking the redemptive fall—sets him back on the path of public service. One of the few items in this collection not from the Lippert stable, MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY was still very much a B ef- fort for Columbia, drably directed by Robert B. Sinclair, five years after his last credit (MR. AND MRS. NORTH) and shortly before he went into tele- vision to toil on the likes of JOHNNY STACCATO and LAWMAN. Menjou adds some viperish charm to his dedicated public servant, though O’Keefe is uncharacteristically stiff in the role of the wavering
hero. Sixty years on, this looks like a rough sketch for the sort of impassioned legal drama epitomized by A CIVIL ACTION or MICHAEL CLAYTON. In RINGSIDE, directed by Frank McDonald
(SCARED STIFF), nice guy fighter Joe O’Hara (AD- VENTURES OF SMILIN’ JACK’s Tom Brown) is blinded in the ring, inspiring his concert pianist younger brother Mike (Don Barry) to don gloves under the alias “Kid Cobra” and seek revenge on the vicious champ (John Cason). It has an un- usual climax for a boxing movie, hinging on a fighter’s refusal to try for a knock-out as Mike pro- tracts a bout in order to inflict maximum punish- ment on an opponent—but this is trumped by the expected nonsense in which the brothers cheerily swap love interests (Sheila Ryan, THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT’s Margia Dean). Kid Cobra quits the ring to go back to the concert hall to the delight of his cliché old teacher (William Edmunds), who has chided him for being techni- cally perfect but soulless before he took up box- ing and gained the confidence and heart to make mistakes with genius. Among the odder aspects
Tom Brown is blinded by a boxing bout in the eventful programmer RINGSIDE.
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