THE JUDGE STEPS OUT
Lenny Palmer
12/24/07


I love the old black-and-white flicks, and movie stars of great depth and ability, like Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and Kathryn Hepburn, to name just a few of those grand old thespians. I also enjoy the story lines and the complexity of the writing involved in many of the old scripts. Without the benefits of computer animation and advanced motion picture technology, the people who made the movies in those days had to rely on such outdated concepts like human emotion, the complexities of love, life and death, and real relationships between people. Moral imperatives were also clearly understood, a basic secular code that transcended selfish desires and religious dogma; and this in an age of Depression, World War and spiritual uncertainty.  Armed with this basic understanding of the era, and how it relates to ours, I watched a great movie early this morning, “The Judge Steps Out,” released in 1949 and starring the distinguished Alexander Knox and Ann Sothern.

Many remember Ms. Sothern, a beautiful, quick-witted blonde as the headliner of the movies’ “Maisie” series, or as the star of early television’s “Ann Sothern Show.” Alexander Knox may be more difficult to recall, but he, too, had a long and distinguished career, usually playing conservative authority figures of great moral standing.

In “The Judge Steps Out,” Knox plays Judge Thomas Bailey, a respected Boston jurist who faces a moral crisis in his personal and professional life. Through circumstance and an unwitting desire to escape what he sees as his stifling and unsatisfied life, he drifts across America to California (remember that this is the California of 1949, not the rats’ nest of fruits and nuts it is today), and sets up shop as a short-order cook in a roadside diner run by Peggy, a single woman attempting adopt Nan, an 8 year old orphan. The Judge had faced a similar situation in Boston, in which he had erroneously taken a child from his mother because Mom had “worn too much make-up.” A small-town judge makes a like decision, keeping Nan as a ward of the state because Peggy “runs a hash-house and doesn’t have a husband to support her.”

Incredibly (but believably) the middle-aged and proper Bostonian Judge Bailey and the much younger and worldly Peggy fall in love. The Judge makes plans to return to Boston (he’s been gone for a year), divorce his wife and return to a new life with Peggy and Nan. It’s a May-December romance that has no chance for survival in the more realistic world of 1949. The Judge returns home to an incredulous public and media frenzy, and begins to file divorce proceedings against his wife, a prim and proper woman who now realizes her own failings in their crumbling marriage. The Judge returns to the state Supreme Court, argues against his own ruling in the case of the mother desiring custody of her own child and persuades the court to reunite mother and child. After a harsh dressing down by his personal assistant (played by the wonderful Ian Wolfe) and putting away childish dreams and facing up to his responsibilities, Bailey realizes that his life in Boston is his real life, and Peggy, Nan and the roadside diner are a mere pipe dream.

After a meeting with Sothern in the Boston train depot, the Judge and Peggy hug in a too-neat ending that tidies up all the loose ends, the last shot is of the Judge trudging up the snowy steps to his Boston brownstone to face up to his responsibilities and honor his marriage vows.

If the movie were made today it would have course ended much differently: the Judge would have had it out with his wife, who would have been written as an unrepentant shrew (which would have made a decision much easier, of course), and dumped her like so much garbage. He and Peggy would have met in the Boston depot, kissed and slobbered all over each other and perhaps have retreated to a hotel for a quick one-night stand in which we would have treated to a soft-core porn version of what passes as love making in today’s world, and the two of them would have returned to California to connubial bliss in an Eden of their own creation.

That’s the difference a few years can make in the attitudes of a nation: today we would accept the Judge’s decision to forgo his duties in Boston and pursue personal fulfillment; in 1949 it was the exact opposite: duty and honor trumped the ephemera of romance.

But let me ask you: if you had been the Judge, what choice would YOU have made?



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Lenny Palmer can be heard on WLIP 1050AM, Mon-Fri: 8-11am
and WKRS 1220AM, Mon-Fri: 3-6pm


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