Young and Innocent?

Loretta Young stars in THE ACCUSED, as a repressed psychology professor who beats a student to death with a steel half-spring when he tries to rape her. William Dieterle directs, Ketti Frings scripted. Frings (great name) supplied the story for HOLD BACK THE DAWN, a favourite of mine, and also wrote on THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN, DARK CITY, GUEST IN THE HOUSE… noir with a strong female side.

Young’s job allows her to psycho-analyze herself, her assailant/victim, and even the cop (Wendell Corey) who’s trying to prove her guilty. Meanwhile she’s in fallen love with her victim’s guardian, Robert Cummings (from here on known by his REIGN OF TERROR alias, the Butcher of Strasburg). This results in some dollar-book Freud, ably delivered by Loretta, who has acquired some gravitas since her days of pre-code flouncing. Although the nonsense about a doppelganger syndrome would be a stretch to put over on an audience, even for Lew Ayres or Herbert Lom.

At times, the desire to find symbols or pop-psych explanations for everything can be a bit much, as is the Victor Young (no relation) score. A mouse running into a cage summarises Loretta’s situation nicely, but a good composition does better. When she imagines detective Corey and forensics boffin Sam Jaffe as ghoulish persecutors, Dieterle puts the concept over with heavy hands — but it’s still fun.

What’s fascinating about this movie, besides Dieterle’s superb blocking and framing, is how it’s hard to know sometimes if Frings is trashing the patriarchy, or so enmeshed in it herself that she’s uncritically reproducing its sexism. I figure that when Loretta jettisons her prim look in order to less closely resemble the description the police have, and the Butcher of S reacts to her new glamour by panting, “Your brains don’t show a bit,” we have to take this as satire. But who really knows?

The one really jarring note is the assault itself, where everybody seems to have become really confused. The assailant is a psychotically grinning kid, and everything about the story would seem to indicate that Loretta is repulsed and lashes out in self-defense, her emotions causing her to rather overdo things. But for a moment before that, Dieterle and Young seem to have decided that she’s starting to enjoy his attentions, and it’s her own sexual repression which causes her to strike him down. This seems a lot more unpleasant and reactionary, and makes one wonder how exactly a woman is supposed to qualify as “healthy” in a Hollywood film. If she’d yielded, the movie would have condemned her. By resisting, and successfully, she gets tarred as frigid. The best solution is to simply ignore that eggy moment and follow the script’s suggestion, which has it that Young overcomes her modesty only later, under the gentle guidance of the Butcher of Strasburg.

Oh, and did I mention that Wendell Corey is very nearly the best thing in this movie? He falls for Young himself, and is even hitting on her as he attempts to get her prosecuted for murder, and his self-loathing as he nearly succeeds is skillfully portrayed, the most subtle emotion in the movie.

Amusingly, Douglas Dick, the psychopathic psychology student bludgeoned by Loretta (and isn’t it reassuring that it only takes the death of one trust fund brat to unleash her latent sexuality: a price worth paying, says I) retired from acting and became a psychologist himself. Did I say “amusingly”? Maybe “unnervingly” would be better.