The Accused (1949)

THE ACCUSED - 1949 Loretta Young, Bob Cummings, Wendell Corey and Sam Jaffe headline this rather dated noir.Psychology professor Young has a student who is a bit on the forward side. He is always pushing his attentions on Miss Young. Young finds this a bit on the awkward side and suggests he cool it.The young man, Douglas Dick, agrees to behave himself. After class, he offers Young a ride home after seeing she missed her bus. Young accepts but the ride goes nowhere near her place. They end up out on a secluded seaside lover's lane. There Dick becomes rather forceful with his advances. While fighting him off, Young bashes in his head with a handy iron bar. She then makes it look like an accidental death by dumping Dick off a cliff.Soon everyone seems to be knocking on her door, starting with Bob Cummings. Cumming is a lawyer who works for the dead man's family. Cummings is just checking about Dick's grades etc with his instructors. Several days later the body is fished out of the water and a coroner's inquest held.The death is ruled an accident which off course makes Young happy. Police Detective Wendell Corey is not quite so sure and decides to look deeper into the death. Young spends the rest of the picture trying to make sure she covered her tracks, as well as falling for Cummings. Cummings likewise takes a shine to Miss Young.Hanging around being a pest is Detective Corey. He slowly puts together a collection of clues that start to point at Young. Nothing solid, but lots of little clues that keep the cop digging. Helping him in this is forensic expert Sam Jaffe.To cut to the quick, Cummings also tumbles to Young being the killer. But he could care less as he is head over heels for her. Corey charges her and presents his case but knows it is going nowhere with a jury.The film is good looking, but somewhat lacking in the suspense area. The basic story has worn rather thin since 1949. Young as the bookish teacher etc. is old hat now. We know she was only defending herself which eliminates the femme fatale angle.Director William Dieterle did better work on his other film noir, ROPE OF SAND, DARK CITY and THE TURNING POINT. The film is still worth a look, but one is not likely to give it second viewing.

This movie starts in an unusually interesting place. A woman is fleeing some deed, under cover of noir night. It continues to another interesting place. The woman is a psychology instructor, who in 1949 is allowed to speak intelligently & authoritatively on the topic. Then we flashback to the crime. The crime is passable. But unfortunately after that, the movie which started so interesting descends into bland convention and melodrama. Seeking the quickest route to audience identification, the movie selects "romance" as our pathway through things. It makes the movie less engaging by the minute, and really shrinks the possibilities of what it can be. The noose tightens for way too long, forcing the writers to draw out the tension and run it against the romance all the while. The weak frisson just doesn't create much engagement in a viewer. Cummings is not terribly interesting and Wendell Corey plays yet another irksome investigator.

In The Accused, Loretta Young plays a psychology professor who kills an amorous male student in self-defense, then spends the rest of the movie covering up her crime. William Dieterle does an excellent job with the familiar material, and Miss Young gives a sympathetic performance. This is one of several crime pictures that Hal Walls produced in the late forties and early fifties, many of which fall into the noir category. Most of these films concern people with conflicted or tortured sexual urges, dysfunctional families, inadequate or just barely adequate men, with the women often hysterical or scheming. At the time this must have seemed daringly modern and contemporary. Now it just seems quaint, a waystation in the breakdown of small-town American values, with the action taking place in a netherworld between Andy Hardy and Tennessee Williams. The movie is surprisingly sympathetic toward Miss Young, who, though on the cusp of middle age, still looks pretty damn beautiful. Robert Cummings is stronger than usual as her "suitor", while Wendell Corey is his inscrutably poker-faced self, as always, hinting between the lines, that had his character been better written he'd be more than up to the task. If this was so, I believe him. In a smaller role, Sam Jaffe is positively mephistopholean, delivering his lines as tartly as Corey, and in his lab scenes photographed to resemble a Dwight Frye hunchback from the thirties. A nice touch. The Accused is filled with nice touches, as Dieterle and most of his cast are much better than the script, breathing real life into it at times, which makes watching the movie a pleasure. There are no real surprises here, but lots of good scenes.

Good film noir concerning a prudish, but attractive, college prof that kills a student, during what today would be considered 'date rape.' Cummings and Corey are capable co-stars, and the lovely Young as always, is easy on the eyes.