Cross-Examination 1932
Such were the ways of Hollywood that the dignified H.B. Warner, who played Jesus in 1927’s King of Kings, found himself in such low-budget fare as Cross-Examination a scant five years later. Warner makes the best of the situation in the role of Gerald Waring, defense attorney in a sensational murder trial. Depsite the badgering of prosecutor Dwight Simpson (Edmund Breese), Waring is determined to clear his client David Wells (Donald Dillaway) of the charge that David murdered his millionaire father. The case comes to a head when the Wells family’s housekeeper makes a startling statement from her deathbed. Cross-Examination would seem to have been inspired by the 1925 legal drama The Goose Woman, itself based on the notorious Hall-Mills murder case.
