Howland Chamberlain

In Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948), an unscrupulous lawyer (John Garfield, The Postman Always Rings Twice) scents a personal fortune when he concocts a plan to merge New York City's numbers rackets into a single powerful and unbreakable operation, but reckons without his brother, who'd rather stay independent.

A dimwitted lieutenant is labeled a lunatic when he insists a talking mule helped him on his military ventures.