I do like the odd legal story and even the odd legal comedy but this movie, the Dock Brief really intrigued me when I saw it. It is extremely well written, as it ought to be, by John Mortimer, the creator of ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ and has some very good dramatic twists.

The plot concerns an indigent, morose, bird-fancier, appropriately named Mr Fowle (played by Richard Attenborough) who has made a very bad marriage match. He ended up wedded to a woman Doris (played by Beryl Reid), who is gregarious, always laughing, flirtatious and shallow, the very opposite in personality to Mr Fowle her husband. In the end this poor man, in both senses of the word, who feels tormented by his wife’s constant laughter, longs to be free of her, but cannot get rid of her, not even to another man. Unfortunately, no matter what happens, this lady is sticking by her marriage vows and the man she unwittingly and wittingly tortures with her excessive hilarity.

One day the Fowle snaps and ends up at the Old Bailey accused of the murder of Doris. Fowle is unable to afford a decent Queens Counsel to put up a defence to this murder charge, a charge that we must remember at the time when the film was made, 1962, carried a mandatory death sentence upon conviction. Because of Fowle’s impecunious circumstances he is forced to choose a barrister from the much less successful offerings from the legal profession who are paid a small amount by the public purse for taking on a ‘Dock Brief’. These barristers would sit on a special bench and be picked, almost at random, by poverty stricken defendants so that they may not face a trial on serious offences without any representation at all. One of these dock brief barristers is a Mr Morgenhall (played by Peter Sellers), a lawyer who a sensible or less desperate defendant would not trust to sit the right way around in a toilet let alone defend on a murder charge.

The movies plot revolves mostly around Morgenhall’s attempts to sell various different ‘fantasy defence’ tactics to Fowle, who appears in any event to be reconciled with his fate and his meeting with the hangman. However, the time comes for the real trial as opposed to Morgenhall’s fantasy ones and this is where the film gets interesting and begins to set the scene for the final scenes which are both funny and filled with pathos.

I hope that you enjoy this movie as much as I have.