ChikPapa Very disappointed :(

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

JohnHowardReid Producer: Hal B. Wallis. Copyright 14 January 1949 by Paramount Pictures Inc. New York release at the Paramount: 12 January 1949. U.S. release: 14 January 1949. U.K. release: March 1949. Australian release: 16 June 1949. Sydney release at the Victory: 27 May 1949. 9,243 feet. 103 minutes.COMMENT: No producer in 1940's Hollywood guided such a formidable collection of permanent classics as Hal B. Wallis: All This and Heaven Too, The Sea Hawk, The Letter, The Sea Wolf, Sergeant York, The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, The Strawberry Blonde, King's Row, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Now, Voyager, Casablanca, Watch on the Rhine, Saratoga Trunk, Sorry Wrong Number…One of Wallis's talents was the ability to select the right director for the script — and then to get the most out of him! "The Accused", while it is not one of his major films, is an excellent example of this technique.Ketti Frings at this stage was a writer with primarily a radio and stage background (though she had written the 1940 novel, "Hold Back the Dawn"). This training shows in her screenplay for "The Accused". If you close your eyes you can follow the story perfectly well, for it's written like a radio serial — very skillfully written with essential facts put over with power and subtlety, but it's purely verbal. The script has been wholly conceived in aural terms rather than visual.With such a scenario on his hands, what does a producer do? 99% would call in another writer — but not Hal Wallis. He assigns the script to a director with a noted visual flair — William Dieterle — who has given the film such a wonderful sheen and style (aided by atmospheric photography and deft film editing). Notice how deep focus framings are inventively utilized for maximum dramatic impact, how the lighting appropriately changes from the chilling murky gray of the flashback sequences to the contrasting brightness of the campus episodes, how long takes are adroitly inter-cut with reaction shots. The director builds up what is essentially a synthetic Loretta Young vehicle into a psychological thriller of considerable suspense and class. Admittedly, too much footage is still taken up with the familiar Young heart-burnings and hysteria (she even has a pervading off- camera commentary as well), but many of the sequences (particularly those with Sam Jaffe and Wendell Corey) deliver a taut, tense, powerful impact.While the conclusion is somewhat abrupt and predictable, it's a movie that moves all the way thanks to Dieterle's frequent changes of set, scene and camera set-ups, and his skilled use of tracking shots and similar fluid camera movements.For all its aural orientation, the dialogue has a realistic edge to it which fine actors like Wendell Corey know how to deliver with the right amount of intensity. Corey has a tailor-made part, and receives excellent support from character players like Sam Jaffe, Sara Allgood, Bill Mauch (one of the Mauch twins from "The Prince and the Pauper"), Francis Pierlot, Al Ferguson, Charles Williams and Henry Travers (yes, Henry Travers making a surprise unbilled appearance as Jaffe's assistant).Wallis has dressed "The Accused" in great production values, including sets, locations, and a vast crowd of extra players, among whom Bess Flowers can be spotted as a wardress at court. She even has one word of dialogue — "Sure.""I wasn't very happy with Wallis," Dieterle told Tom Flinn. "He used me to try to make something out of very second-rate material." This movie is an intriguing example of that fascinating and entertaining "something".

clanciai This is actually a love story and, as is usually the case with noirs of the 40s, a very well written one, especially since it deals with some rather tricky psychological matters, of which guilt complex resulting in fear approaching the borders of possible schizophrenia is just one. What makes this film more than average of classy noirs of the 40s with a romantic and seriously psychological intrigue is the interesting peripatetic moment of the boxing match, when Loretta Young unintentionally gives herself away, and how very interestingly Robert Cummings as her lawyer and lover reacts to that. The acting is superb throughout, the story is credible and convincing, the dilemma of unintentionally having killed someone and the natural urge to avoid the consequences and take responsibility for what was not intended, anyone can understand and relate to. To all this comes Victor Young's endearing score fashioning the experience with a golden frame, the beauty of which increases all the time. In brief, this is a much underrated, unjustly forgotten and deeply human and interesting film, that deserves some intention after having been more or less buried alive since 50 years.

telegonus 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.

bux 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.