Justice Is Done

1950 [FRENCH]

Action / Drama / Mystery

2
IMDb Rating 7.1/10 10 508 508

jurors bias jury mistress courtroom courtroom drama

Plot summary

Elsa Lundenstein is accused of having murdered her lover. The jury discusses the case vividly. All members are somehow prejudiced because of personal life experience and subsequently each member reads something different into the presented facts.

Director

André Cayatte Photo
André Cayatte

Top cast

Léonce Corne Photo
Léonce Corne as L'huissier du tribunal
Paul Faivre Photo
Paul Faivre as Monsieur Michaud - le patron du Roi Soleil
Maurice Marceau Photo
Maurice Marceau as (uncredited)
Marcel Rouzé Photo
Marcel Rouzé as Le gendarme de faction
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
985.43 MB
988*720
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds 1
1.79 GB
1472*1072
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 47 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by dbdumonteil

A milestone in the French cinema.

André Cayatte ,who was trained as a lawyer began his career with Balzac,Zola or Maupassant adaptations.However ,even in those works ,he already displayed his concerns: social justice in "Au Bonheur des Dames" ,and "les Amants de Verone" his towering achievement featured some kind of trial.But "Justice Est Faite" marked the birth of the director/lawyer who would continue his fight through the fifties ,sixties and seventies ,with few exceptions.Truffaut often laughed at him but who was he to criticize him?Cayatte's films have a bad and -for the best of them-totally unfair reputation."Justice est faite" is part of Cayatte's best.The subject was very risqué for 1950 (still is today in 2006): euthanasia.A woman killed her lover : was it to put an end to her lover's sufferings? But there was another man... and a lot of dough at the end of it.Cayatte will not conclude,his ending remaining completely open.Even more interesting than the trial itself is the way Cayatte shows how the jurors are summoned (the farmer's lines are revealing:"they want us to be soldiers...and now they want us to judge our fellow men").The last lines -voice over provided by Pierre Fresnay- are downright disturbing.More in the same vein was to come.
Reviewed by Davalon-Davalon 4 / 10

Unique, but long, rambling and dated

The best thing about this film is getting a glimpse of what life might have been like somewhere in France in the late 1940s, after the war. It was another world. Very few people, farms, animals, everyone was French, no foreigners in sight. It looked like everyone had come from the same one or two families.The woman who is convicted of murdering her lover has a face reminiscent of a young Meryl Streep. She conveys a lot of emotion with her eyes.Because this is a story of the jurors who decide the woman's fate, there are multiple threads and way too many people to focus on. There must have been a healthy budget for this film because there was one brief ballroom scene that required a small orchestra, men and women dressed in their finery, and a huge flower arrangement. But the scene itself couldn't have lasted more than 90 seconds.Lots of talking and talking. The sound quality was poor, especially the voiceover at the end, which suddenly jumped up in volume.The most interesting thing about this film is seeing humanity in a window of time after the war. There was not the threat of Hitler anymore and people were living their lives. The particular story of euthanasia at the heart of this film must have been definitely shocking at the time. There are points of interest, if one can wade through the ocean of dialogue from multiple characters.
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