The Man Who Talked Too Much (1940)

Directed by

Vincent Sherman

Genre

drama film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 15m

Rating

6.4 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A former prosecutor becomes a defense attorney for criminals after sending an innocent man to his death. He uses his legal skills to walk a fine line between justice and corruption.

melancholicgrittythoughtfultensemorally conflictedintrospectivebittersweetdramatic

What happens

The Man Who Talked Too Much is a 1940 American drama film starring George Brent and Virginia Bruce, with Brenda Marshall, Richard Barthelmess, and William Lundigan in support. Directed by Vincent Sherman, the film was written by Walter DeLeon and Earl Baldwin, and released by Warner Bros. Pictures. The Man Who Talked Too Much is the second of three films adapted from the 1929 play The Mouthpiece by Frank J. Collins, in which a former prosecutor, disillusioned by sending an innocent man to the electric chair, takes the saying "Better that a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer the death penalty" one step further by becoming a defense attorney for gangsters and adroitly tightrope walking legal ethics. Collins based his protagonist on Manhattan defense attorney William Joseph Fallon, dubbed "The Great Mouthpiece" in the New York press, who had a short but spectacularly successful career before succumbing to the effects of his own dissoluteness at the age of 41. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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