Frau in Notwehr

The twist on what we now call sexual harassment lingers as the most interesting aspect of The Accused, an innocuous suspense story with some effective moments. Another lingering aftertaste is the midcentury stereotype of the female academic that's foisted on star Loretta Young -- and the viewer.

Psychology professor Young (!), guarded and old-maidish (she's even saddled with the glamourproof name Wilma Tuttle), becomes the object of the unhealthy attentions of one of her students (Douglas Dick). On the pretext of diving for abalone shells off Malibu, he spirits her off to a secluded lover's lane one night and forces himself on her. She bashes in his skull and fakes his death to look accidental.

Then she begins to attract more attention -- from Robert Cummings, a lawyer friend of the dead boy's family (he falls for her), and Wendell Corey, a dogged homicide cop. In the acting department, there's no contest; Cummings stays his usual namby-pamby self, while Corey delivers a strong, unsentimental performance, among his best.

Much of William Dieterle's direction shows a practiced hand. Especially well handled are the opening sequence of Young fleeing the crime scene, a boxing match where she suffers a flashback, and the ghoulish reconstructions of the murder by forensic pathologist Sam Jaffe.

But a glaring structural flaw keeps The Accused lukewarm. We know from the outset that Young acted in self-defense, which pretty well leeches all the suspense out of Corey's implacable pursuit; the tightening case against her packs no impact because it's safe to assume she won't be spending any time with those harpies from Caged. Consequently the film focuses more on her emergence from a cocoon of droopy skirts, a bun in her hair, sleeping pills and swooning spells into a seductive butterfly flitting into Cummings' net.

Dick, as the young narcissist, calls to mind such amoral charmers as Robert Walker in Strangers On A Train and John Dall in Rope (a film in which Dick also appeared). It's he -- not young nor Cummings -- who supplies what faint erotic spark this movie, about a sexually-based murder, dares to kindle.

The Accused This is one of those popular story lines in which the killing is shown early on and then the film deals with the police trying to piece things together while the killer tries to look innocent.

In this case, the "accused" is a woman, played by Loretta Young. She plays a college teacher who defends herself against an obnoxious student but then makes the big mistake of trying to cover up the incident, even though it was self- defense, thinking it would look bad if she was discovered being with this student in the first place. (Today, we read true-life stories of worse, sad to say.)

Bob Cummings and Wendell Corey are detectives who know some foul play is involved but then Cummings, who gets increasingly annoying in here, falls in love with Young. He then winds up defending her in the short courtroom finale. Cummings gives a good example how "love is blind."

Corey, meanwhile, plays the determined cop who doesn't care what people think of him so long as he solves the crime. He is by far the most interesting of the characters in this film. Sam Jaffe also entertains in a supporting role as a crime doctor.

It's hard deglamorize Loretta Young, and in fact, even the tailored outfits and the upswept hair don't do it in "The Accused" from 1949, also starring Robert Cummings and Wendell Corey. She's still considered quite a dish by anyone who meets her, including an amorous student (Douglas Dick).

Young plays a psychology professor who, about to be assaulted by a student, kills him and attempts to cover it up. At first it looks like a drowning, but later, it's discovered to be homicide. The young man's guardian (Cummings) arrives as the detective in charge of the case (Corey) zeroes in on Young.

Good movie with effective performances. Douglas Dick is appropriately smarmy.

My only objection would be, looking at it in light of today, the Young character made a bunch of mistakes with this guy that only a really foolish teacher would make today - or possibly back then. He is so obviously sexually aggressive, it's hard to believe she would have allowed herself to be alone with him.

Young and Cummings for me are always watchable, so I liked it.

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.

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.