I love this movie so much

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Captivating movie !

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Excellent 82 minute story which plots justice, morality and law against a small community's mayor whose "accounting methods" (during a very distressed economically period) become questioned by a mock Grand Jury proceeding held by studying local Law Students.Particular note was a very enjoyable ending which ultimately leaves the viewers to decide where their boundaries of law, justice and morality would reside if tasked with leading a community through a period of economically induced suffrage.For this viewer "Handle with Care" was an elegant (Thomas Mitchell) depiction of a conundrum.

"Handle with Care" from 1958 is a low-budget second feature that starts Dean Jones and Thomas Mitchell. Jones plays a Zachary Mitchell, a law student who is to be the DA in a mock trial. He argues for trying a real case and finding one in the town. After going through town records and rejecting several ideas, he finds one that is very interesting: it seems the mayor, who in those days the tax collector, embezzled tax money in the early '30s. What he took in and what he deposited are two different things, as he deposited less than he wrote out receipts for.The other students, who are from the area unlike Zachary and admire the mayor, are against this being tried as a case, and the townspeople basically turn against him. He loses his drugstore job. Nevertheless, stubborn, intelligent, and somewhat angry, he perseveres. The "trial" doesn't go as planned.Thomas Mitchell does a beautiful job as the mayor, and there are other excellent character actors in the film: Anne Seymour, Walter Abel, and Burt Douglas. John Smith, who starred in TV western Laramie, plays Zachary's good friend.This is a good movie, with an earnest performance by Jones, who went on to do films for Disney, starred in the TV series Hennessy, later starred as the original Bobby in the musical Company on Broadway, and then became born-again and dedicated his life to mostly performances in Christian-based productions, including a one-man show, St. John in Exile.Well worth seeing, and the footage of '30s farms and people affected by drought is sobering, to say the least.

I saw this old film while I was lying in bed recovering from a leg injury, and it was a surprising treat. Dean Jones, in one of his earliest movie roles before he became a Disney stock player, is an earnest young student pursuing the popular mayor of a small town for his apparent embezzlement of tax funds. He earns the open hostility of the townspeople, his fellow students, and his girlfriend as he continues his quest for truth and justice. So the ending I was expecting was that he'd uncover the popular old mayor's crime, and the entire town would be apologetic and grateful, and his girlfriend would return to him, right? Well, NO! Not at all! Nice plot twist at the end, and the short dialogue between the mayor and Dean Jones when they inadvertently meet at very end of the movie, involving the morality of the mayor's actions, provides a very nice little additional mini-twist at the end. If this movie is shown on your local station, and you've got some time, check this one out.

'Handle With Care' is not a great film but certainly an interesting one, at least in terms of its subliminal politics. A young, brash law student (Dean Jones, later a Disney regular) investigates city hall and uncovers a skeleton in the mayor's past. It seems that, back in '32 and '33, when the mayor (Thomas Mitchell) was county tax collector, he signed receipts for a lot more money in tax payments than was actually deposited, which suggests embezzlement. Come to find out, the good mayor signed phony receipts so that destitute farmers could keep their land during the worst years of the Great Depression. The crusading young lawyer, who happens to be an outsider to this close-knit community, is a stand-in for all leftist muckrakers and outside agitators who wish to discover the worst about "The American Way." The mayor, a kind of proto-FDR figure, bends the rules but still works within the system to assure the common welfare. Naysayers get their comeuppance and the system, though flawed, is vindicated in this classic repudiation of Thirties radicalism that came out at the tail end of the Fifties "Red Scare."