by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The World
Accuses, a 1934 Chesterfield
production (which usually meant a superior product to your average independent
film of the time, with a better cast, a stronger story and more advanced
direction) which judging from the title and the synopsis on archive.org (from
whence we downloaded it) I had expected to be a gangster movie. Instead it’s a
soap opera, though a refreshingly unsentimental one for the time: it begins in
1929, when former nightclub entertainer Lola Allen is living in a lavish
apartment with her well-to-do husband John Weymouth (Paul Fix). Unfortunately,
all the couple’s bills are being paid by Weymouth’s bitchy mother Lucille
(Sarah Edwards, who judging from her performance here would have been excellent
casting as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz), who never lets a moment pass in Lola’s presence
without telling her how much she hates her, how she resents her for marrying
her son, and how she’s going to present her son with an ultimatum: divorce Lola
or be cut off from his entire inheritance. Lola gives her husband an ultimatum
of her own — either cut off relations with his mother or divorce her — and she
and John go out to a nightclub, where Lola runs into some of her former friends
and for the first time in months feels truly alive. Unfortunately, one of the
old friends she runs into is bookie “Checkers” Fraley (Harold Huber), who was
obviously one of Lola’s exes and is hoping to get her on the rebound after John
dumps her for his mother’s money. “Checkers” and John have one of those absurd
movie fights in which John is accidentally killed, and “Checkers” is arrested
and ultimately convicted (presumably of manslaughter) — but the trial we see
next is one in family court, masterminded by Lucille Weymouth, in which she
manages to get Lola declared an unfit parent and win custody of John’s and
Lola’s son Tommy.
Five years pass, long enough for Tommy to grow up from being
a baby to being played by Dickie Moore, and he’s clearly miserable in Lucille’s
huge house but Lucille has managed to succeed in one particular: she’s got him
to forget about his mother. Meanwhile, Lola has settled into a job at a nursery
— the kind that takes care of children, not the kind that raises plants — after
she collapsed at the sight of so many children (the direction by Charles
Lamont, relatively straightforward through the rest of the film, gives us a
stirring montage sequence here that made Charles joke, “They’ve gone all Soviet
Union on us!”), and not surprisingly writer Charles Belden can’t help but milk
the irony that Lola, who was earlier declared unfit by a court to raise her own
child, here is proving such a “natural” at taking care of a whole bunch of
other people’s children that the nursery’s owner, Mrs. Warren (Mary Carr),
appoints Lola to head it when she leaves town to visit her own (grown) children
preparatory to retirement. While running the nursery Lola finds herself
attracted to Hugh Collins (Russell Hopton), a radio announcer and commentator
Lola meets because he’s keeping his own daughter Pat (Cora Sue Collins, who has
curls in her hair but a refreshingly straightforward and un-Shirley Temple-like manner, a real surprise for a
girl actress in the 1930’s!) at the nursery, but the attraction ends up on hold
because on one of Hugh’s shows, right after he’s promoted Lola’s nursery as a
great place to trust with your kids, he rehashes the Weymouth case and says
that Lola “got what she deserved.” Then who should turn up at the nursery but
“Checkers,” having just broken out of prison; he blackmails Lola into letting
him stay in the nursery’s attic by saying if she doesn’t let him, he’ll reveal
who she really is. Meanwhile, Lucille Weymouth (ya remember Lucille Weymouth?) has lost her fortune, not to the Depression (as
one might have suspected) but through embezzlement by her crooked attorney; the
shock sends her into a sanitarium and leaves her near death, and Barney Barrett
(Bryant Washburn), her new (and presumably honest) lawyer, offers to take her
grandson Tommy into his own home — only before that can happen he needs a place
to park the kid, and you’ll never guess where … oh yes, you will, at least if
you’ve seen more than about 12 movies in your life.
Tommy and Pat become what
would now be called BFF’s (indeed, they seem to be headed towards one of those
weird sorts of psychologically, though not biologically, incestuous
relationships like the one between Victor and Elizabeth in Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein), and the mutual
attraction between the kids seems to be bringing the parents together even
though Lola has no idea Tommy is actually her son (remember the last time she
saw the kid, he was just a baby!). The crisis occurs when Tommy and Pat decide
to explore the attic and come across “Checkers,” who holds them hostage at gunpoint;
the kids manage to flee but their lives are imperiled because they’re hanging
on to the nursery’s deeply sloping roof for dear life. Lola thinks she has
talked “Checkers” into surrendering when “Checkers” hears a police siren and
thinks he’s been tricked; eventually he goes out onto the roof to chase Tommy
and Pat, but a police sniper manages to pick him off without hurting the kids.
Lola learns at last that Tommy is her son, and Barrett says he’ll release Tommy
to her custody. Needless to say, Hugh changes his mind about Lola and her
morals, and there’s a charming ending scene with Tommy and Pat in twin beds in
the children’s room sagely commenting on the union of their parents. The
World Accuses is a rather ballsy title
for so obviously a “women’s picture,” but within the limits of the form it’s a good story, effectively directed and acted and with
surprisingly little sentimentality for a 1934 film in which two of the key
protagonists are children — but perhaps it was still early enough in Shirley Temple’s
run as the number one star of the 1930’s for her example to shape how all movie children were depicted.
