The World Accuses

Vivian Tobin and Paul Fix live at the Waldorf with their baby boy. They would be happy, except he doesn't work, and his money comes from his disagreeable mother, Sarah Edwards, from a trust fund for him left by his father. She dislikes Miss Tobin because she was in show business and wants Fix to divorce his wife, or no more money. When the couple is out on the town, Harold Huber, an old admirer of Miss Tobin, picks a fight and kills Fix. Miss Edwards takes the baby away. Miss Tobin winds up in a day-and-sleeping nursery school. There she is courted by Russell Hopton, the father of one of her students, Cora Sue Collins.

It's an involved set-up and one of those too sentimental plots that make sense if you assume that there are only twenty or thirty people in the world, especially when you see how the baby, grown into Dickie Moore, comes back into Miss Tobin's life without her knowing it. The movie is very cheaply made and shows it. Charles Lamont, usually an expert at stretching a budget, can't do much here, where the actors seem to declaim rather than speak their lines. Besides the cast already named, seasoned actors such as Mary Carr, Bryant Washburn and Lloyd Ingraham seem awfully anxious to speak their lines, collect their checks, and go home.

This movie has a bit of the quality of the many movies adapted from Saturday Evening Post or Collier's magazine short stores. It is tidy, neat, and well paced, with a satisfying resolution in a manner that makes such films (and stories) pleasing but not amazing.

Vivian Tobin did not make a lot of films, but she is quite charming here as Lola, a spunky Broadway actress who marries a wealthy but spineless socialite (Paul Fix). Unfortunately for Lola, her husband is under the complete domination of his wealthy and narcissistic mother (Sarah Edwards). The couple has a child, but then tragedy intervenes in the person of a psychopathic book-maker (Harold Huber) and a not-so-kindly judge (Lloyd Ingraham).

Suffice it to say that Lola's next five years are rough, but she manages to make a go of it, thanks to the help of a gentle older woman (Mary Carr) and her helper (the extremely tall Jane Keckley), a gregarious suitor (Russell Hopton), and a passel of young kids, including the boisterous pair played by Cora Sue Collins and Dickie Moore. And then, just when you thought this would become a tear-jerker of a "woman's movie," danger strikes, and it turns out that everybody has a gun, even poor downtrodden Lola! This is not the usual last reel wrap-up to the semi-Stella-Dallas set-up we've been watching up to that point.

To say any more would be essentially to spoil the film, for in a plot as economical and precise as this one, each scene leads to the next in a way that cannot be teased apart for examination without deconstructing the entire edifice.

I'm pretty sure that at 62 minutes, the print i saw had been chopped for television, and the cuts seem to have come at all the predictable character-building spots, but still, it's better to have seen it in this form than to have missed it altogether. It's a nice little first feature for a double-bill home-showing of old-time movies.