Introduction

This is a post that is a repurposing of an old Poverty Row April post. As stated here I am essentially done with running multi-film review posts. Each film deserves its own review. Therefore I will repost, and at times add to, old reviews periodically depending on the theme. Enjoy!

The World Accuses (1934)

Prior to this screening the selections that I had made for this theme were threatening to make a liar out of me. Save for Short Film Saturday, I did not feel the need to link to any of these titles on the Internet Archive. Aside from the debut screening in the series there wasn’t even another title to which I awarded a passing grade, though others had close calls and good qualities.

Are there melodramatic building blocks to this tale? Yes. Are they necessarily used as such? Not especially. There are some narrative shorthands to cram this story into an hour, but the inciting incident is big, quick and out there. There is a strong villainess and a desperation-forced substitute for that role. The story takes some great twists along the way and is always engaging. As with any story of its kind, it requires you exercise suspension of disbelief, but it never lost my interested either intellectually or emotionally.

In his book Pitts describes much of the acting he watched as high school play caliber. I thought he jested too much, but through some of these I’ve chucklingly agreed. The entire ensemble in this film is capable here, even if a bit stock at times. Surely it’d take talented kids to have a Poverty Row studio like Chesterfield to build a tale around by Dickie Moore (maybe best known as the voice of Pinocchio) and Cora Sue Collins. The production values, particularly the set design, was a bit higher here than standard Poverty Row fare.

8/10