Starting with the David Moesinger script (he worked with Altman soon after on a fine TV Movie "Nightmare in Chicago"), this Kraft Suspense Theatre episode directed by Robert Altman is heavy-handed all the way, dooming it to failure. It's all gimmicks, taking some serious subjects (like integrity and corruption by the establishment) and running them into the ground.
An obviously miscast Richard Crenna also sabotages the production, wasting stalwart acting by lead James Whitmore as the most cynical of lawyers having to face up to his failings in the busy final reel. Whitmore behaves as if ethics don't exist, pulling various tricks to get Crenna off from a murder charge (with firing squad looming) during World War II for killing his sergeant.
Most of the show is awkwardly depicted in flashback, which plays like a rejected "Combat!" script, not all that surprisingly since Altman had been fired from that series several months before making this "Kraft" episode. Crenna plays a mixed-up soldier, and his pained facial expressions would be laughed out of any Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg acting class. In a succession of badly written scenes we see him first fail to kill a fleeing German soldier ("freezing up" like so many quasi-cowards depicted in "Combat!" shows), then shoot a German officer who's carrying a white flag to surrender, and then stab his bullying sergeant to death with a bayonet supposedly "by accident".
Whitmore accepts to defend him at court-martial, and several plot twists later, gets the charges against Crenna to be dropped. Yet nearly 20 years later in the present-day story, Crenna storms into Whitmore's law office and threatens to shoot him.
It adds up to a phony type of drama and suspense aimed at the most gullible of viewers, as none of this is believable. Whitmore tries very hard, but the gap between this courtroom drama (and its aftermath) and say, Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men" couldn't be wider. Altman's clunker manipulates, while Sorkin plus director Rob Reiner's movie scintillates.