As always, love the way Lang plays with sound. In at least two sequences, he lets a line of dialogue flow into another time and location, and then again into another, similar to what Welles would do five years later in Citizen Kane (e.g. Kane's growing gubernatorial campaign over the course of three shots).
Mob scenes, crowd shots, all done with brilliance.
The ending is one of the worst re-shoots I've ever seen from this era.
SpoilerShow
Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) walks into the courtroom, surprising everyone. He goes up to the judge and tells him how the attempted lynching killed his faith in justice, in people and in this country - worded in a way that evokes a comparison to the Nazis without mentioning their name. Immediately after he says this, the editing falls into a pattern of a close-up of Katherine (Sylvia Sidney), back to him, back even closer to Katherine, etc. However, after the first close-up of Katherine, when it comes back to Tracy, he's no longer on the set. Instead, he's standing in front of a rear-view projection of that courtroom scene. And he's not quite lit the same. Even his hair and clothes are a tiny bit off, the way that would be if days, maybe weeks, had passed and they were trying to match the way he looked before. And of course, his dialogue completely changes, talking about him and Katherine and nothing else, much less anything social or political.
