NOTE: Don't read the cast credit on IMDb or this movie won't even be a mystery for the first 15 minutes.For the first 15 minutes I thought this movie was not bad (not good, but at least a reasonable example of the B mystery movie genre). The problem occurs in minute 16, or thereabout, when the movie starts to telegraph it's punch so clearly that only an idiot wouldn't see who the killer really is, and what the wrap up is going to be. After that you can turn the movie off, except that stopping is like ceasing to watch a bad accident that you know you shouldn't be looking at. Actually, a bad accident is a lot more interesting than this movie.I won't give away the "surprise". Instead I'll let you participate in the contest to see if you can guess what I was able to figure out by the time of the fire in the mental hospital. It was so obvious that you would have be from Mars to not figure it out.I like a good bad movie, but this isn't one of those. Try some other movie with "Juror" in the title - any other movie with "Juror" in the title.

With a largely anonymous cast and a plot that is nothing to write home about, this little film from the 40's is still worth watching mainly for its noirish atmosphere and George MacReady's wonderful over-the-top performance as a wrongfully condemned man gone mad.MacReady plays Harry Wharton, a man who is wrongfully convicted of killing his sweetheart and sentenced to hang. He sits on death row for months while reporter Joe Keats, who senses Wharton is innocent, tries to track down the real killer. Hours before the execution, Keats comes up with the evidence that points to another and Wharton is pardoned. However, no pardon will fix the fact that Wharton's mind has snapped. He is admitted to a mental hospital, but nothing eases his misery and he ultimately sets fire to his room before hanging himself. His body is burned beyond recognition. Now, months later, reporter Joe Keats is refocused on the Wharton case. This time because half a dozen of the Wharton jurors have died mysterious accidental deaths in a short period of time. Keats believes someone is avenging Wharton's wrongful conviction and subsequent suicide, but he can't prove it. Along the way he falls for a beautiful female juror who doesn't care to cooperate with his investigation.If you watch it, you're going to know what's going on immediately. There is really no mystery here. However, it is amazing to watch what Columbia could do in the field of drama/noir/mystery during the 40's and 50's without nearly the resources of the other major studios or the star power. All the stuff you expect in such a film is here - the all night diner where reporters seem to congregate and the proprietor who's always handing out sage advice, the know-it-all reporter 40's style and his antagonistic relationship with a boss that still appreciates the reporter's craft and insight, the classy girl that the reporter sets his sights on and somehow winds up the center of the drama, and the mystery criminal that runs circles around multiple police departments and is only tripped up by one blood-hound of a journalist.Recommended for fans of post-war and almost post-war fare.

**SPOILERS** You get lost watching"The Missing Juror" within the first ten minutes in that we already see that the convicted murderer Harry Warton was exonerated of his crime just minutes before he was supposed to be hung for it! This all came out when the star witness against Wharton private dick George Szabo gave a "death Bed" confession, after he was gunned down by an unknown assailant, that he set poor Wharton up by the person who's really responsible for what he was convicted of!Instead of finding out, and having arrested, just who the actual killer was we instead have the jurors who convicted Wharton of murder being murdered themselves. Wharton who had since gone mad after his release was put into a lunatic asylum where in a short period of time he ended up killing himself by both hanging and arson. Wharton seemed to have flipped out and killed himself because he just couldn't stand the shame of being incarcerated in the asylum as well as the torture he suffered, that drove him insane, of being put on death row for the last six months of his life.In the movie we have hot shot reporter Joe Keats the man who's investigated reporting got Wharton freed trying to find out just who's responsible for murdering those jurors who had unjustly convicted him. Again no one, the police the courts and even Joe Keats, were not at all interested in finding out who was the man who actually murdered the person whom Wharton was convicted of murdering! Even though with his last dying breath George Szabo identified him which resulted in the court, and prosecuting D.A, overturning Wharton's original death sentence!As we watch, mostly off camera, most of the jurors in the Wharton murder trial get knocked off it doesn't take a genius to figure out just who's doing the knocking. The killer is so obvious to everyone, with his flimsy and unconvincing disguise, that by the time he finally reveals himself to juror, and reporter Keats' girlfriend, Alice Hill you felt like screaming at him, on the TV screen, "What the hell took you so long"!Hard to stay awake throughout the entire film because you can see right from the start that it's not at all interested in who the killer who framed Wharton really is. All we get to see is ace crime reported Joe Keats run around in circles making a complete fool of himself and almost getting killed, in an overheated steam room no less, chasing the elusive killer! Who's about as elusive, to everyone but Keats and his girlfriend Alice, as an 800 pound gorilla stuffing himself with stacks of bananas in an outdoor or open air fruit market!

This film, rarely seen on TV, is one of the great over-looked film noirs of the 1940's. Similar in tone to such noirs as the "Stranger On The Third Floor", the movie plays out as a noir-twist on the film "And Then There Was None" with George Macready at his nasty best.