District Attorney Review: An Absolutely Bonkers 1930s Soap Opera

If you are into dusty 1930s courtroom dramas that suddenly veer into insane, black-market human trafficking plots, District Attorney is totally worth your evening. But if you need characters to make rational decisions, or if you hate scratchy audio, you will probably hate this very much.

The setup is just wild. Jan Winkler needs a thousand zlotys, so he goes to this creepy professor who basically says, "Sure, here is a check, now go fetch me some young girls for my science experiments." 🔬

Like, what? And Jan just goes, "Okay, sounds like a plan," and opens a nightclub to recruit them.

It is hilarious how casually this movie treats what is essentially a supervillain origin story. Jan is just trying to get his bag, I guess.

Then Jan falls for Alicja, the prosecutor, who is easily the most interesting person in the whole film. Jadwiga Smosarska plays her with this constant, heavy-lidded intensity that makes everyone else look like they are acting in a school play.

Seriously, her face when she realized he was cheating on her with her own pupil, Julka, was just devastating. It reminded me a bit of the sheer dramatic chaos in Love, Honor and --?, where everyone is just constantly making the worst possible choices for their own hearts.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of District Attorney (1933) through its definitive frames.

There is a scene in the middle where a character wanders past a background poster that looks suspiciously like a prop from Going Wild. Or maybe I just imagined it because the film print I watched was so dark and grainy.

The courtroom climax is where things get really silly. Alicja is literally demanding the death penalty for the guy she loves because she thinks he did a murder.

She is so angry and hurt, and the camera just stares at her face for what feels like three minutes too long. You can see the exact moment she decides to burn her own life down out of pure spite.

Then the creepy professor just strolls into the courtroom at the last second to clear everything up. It is such a cheap cop-out, honestly. But the movie does not care about being fair; it just wants to make you gasp.

The ending is incredibly abrupt, leaving you with this weird, empty feeling in your stomach. I kind of loved how messy it was.

Didja notice?

• The professor’s laboratory looks like a regular kitchen cupboard with two glass bottles on it.
• The weirdly loud footsteps during the quiet courtroom scene that sound like giant wooden shoes.
• Jan's mustache seems to change thickness between scenes.