Peter Sellers is a lawyer who has waited years for his first case. He gets it in the form of Richard Attenborough, who admits that he killed his wife, Beryl Reid because she wouldn't run away with the boarder. In Attenborough's cell, they brainstorm trial strategies in fantasy. Then they go up to the actual trial.
It's an absolute trifle of a movie, little more than a two-man show about the inanity of the law. That's hardly surprising, given that it's derived from a play by John Mortimer, best remembered for his many judicial mysteries, and the TV series RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY, based on them. Sellers and Attenborough attempt to evoke the sort of movie that might have been made were Laurel & Hardy to make one, although one without anything in the way of physical slapstick.
It's an absolute trifle of a movie, little more than a two-man show about the inanity of the law. That's hardly surprising, given that it's derived from a play by John Mortimer, best remembered for his many judicial mysteries, and the TV series RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY, based on them. Sellers and Attenborough attempt to evoke the sort of movie that might have been made were Laurel & Hardy to make one, although one without anything in the way of physical slapstick.