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Is that your interest in the lady?
It is not my style to recommend a novel by saying that it healed my heart, or a television show that it emotionally destroyed me, or a movie that it beat me up and stole my lunch money, but when I am watching the last few minutes of a picture which has already given me plenty to chew on in terms of its cast, its social commentary, and its psychoanalytic structure which makes it impossible to ignore as much of the mid-century jargon as it deserves and then its honest-to-God-damned last line crystallizes a class of female-focused noir whose taxonomy has previously escaped me, all right, look, The Accused (1949) owes me an apology and a buck twenty-five.
On the bare-bones level of plot, it is not a complicated film, although it flourishes its noir credentials by opening with the aftershock of the events it will allow its heroine to recall at the most dramatically propulsive moments, surfacing through fevers and triggers like a body rolled inconveniently to shore. A convertible coupe stands abandoned by the overlook of a white-lined sea, a dark-haired woman bundled to anonymity in a tight-belted trenchcoat and a soft hat pulled low hugs a briefcase to her chest as she hides from the passing flare of headlights on the rain-slicked 101. In her own front hall, she recoils from her reflection as if she doesn't see a sheltered, tweed-skirted associate professor of psychology with a deskful of blue books to grade, but the stranger inside her skin who knew what to do with a steel half-spring and a bucket of seawater, seventy feet of cliff-drop and the turn of the tide—the shape-shifting, irreversible moment from which all the rest of the psychomachia will proceed, intertwining the personal and the procedural as closely as figure and ground. Dr. Wilma Tuttle (Loretta Young) is far from the first woman in noir to kill a man in self-defense, but her split-second decision to restage it as an accident recoils on her with gender-pointed irony, as her professional expertise obliges her to assist like one of her male colleagues in the investigation of her own crime while her consciously feminine efforts to distance herself from the vestal profile of the killer encourage the attentions of the two men she can least afford to let down her guard around, Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), the criminal lawyer from San Francisco who happens to be the next of kin, and Lieutenant Ted Dorgan of the LAPD (Wendell Corey), the homicide detective on the case. Just to underscore the death-drive, pleasure-principle nature of the whole business, the killing was committed in the course of an attempted rape. Dr. Tuttle may as well have been stating the thesis of the film when she addressed her class before the morning's midterm: "Think of your needs, your hungers, your fears—for these are the things, I'm afraid, which rule most of us."
In a score for women behind the camera of noir as well as in front of it, The Accused was adapted for the screen by Ketti Frings from June Truesdell's 1947 novel Be Still, My Love and while its heroine's fragility can sometimes feel retrograde to her transgressive genre, its observations of the deep-dyed sexism of her world are not at all shy. From the aggressive, invasive flirtatiousness of his introduction, Bill Perry (Douglas Dick) seems at first like the outlier of an obvious predator. An oblique version, perhaps, of the ambivalent figure of the returned veteran, he's older than his female classmates who didn't spend their undergraduate years in uniform, closer to the age of the teacher he pursues with California-golden entitlement even as he may have knocked up the distraught foreign student whom he spurns as blatantly in class as he baits his discomfited professor, the power differential of the student-teacher relationship complicated by the inequalities of the male-female—in 1948, would a male professor harassed by a female student request the same kind of intervention from the Dean, or feel the need to disprove the sense of intimidation by accepting a ride home from the student even when the red flags are fluttering thick and fast? Describing his favorite sport of free-diving for abalone, Bill's bright-eyed enthusiasm leaves little to the metaphor of something secret and fleshy that must be opened by force to be enjoyed: "It's the fight they give you that's important." He's just as eagerly relentless when he tackles Wilma on the cliffs above Malibu, laughing like rape culture personified as he pulls her off the car's horn, wrestles her into the back seat as if he doesn't have to pin her painfully by the arms to keep her there: "Stop that! Nobody's going to hear you but me . . . You won't tell anybody about this, either, will you? You shouldn't have been out here with me." Within seconds he's permanently silenced, but it is not merely Wilma's anxieties that set the dead man's words echoing all around her in the days to come. The truck driver who offers her a lift when she stumbles by the side of the highway doesn't molest her, but his sensitive response to his passenger's disheveled, taciturn state is to speculate in jaded detail on the sexual frailties of women that get them caught in "wrestling matches," dropping her off with the cheerfully victim-blaming parting shot, "After this, be more choosy, huh?" A working-class, regular Joe, deliberately counterpoised to Bill when he reappears as a witness in the investigation, he seems to speak for the censure of the entire male world that Wilma imagines when she thinks to herself, "And even if they did believe me, the scandal would ruin my whole life—everything I've worked for and lived for would be gone—" A woman with a doctorate is not just a rarity on the campus of California College (UCLA). Especially unmarried, she had better be Caesar's wife. Professor Wilma Tuttle is already something of a contradiction in terms in a post-war America reassuring itself with the hard sell of domesticity, a professional, intellectual woman. On being introduced to her as a member of the faculty, Lieutenant Dorgan drawls world-wearily, "Does that make her any less gabby than most women?" Arriving to take her out for the dinner she has accepted in perhaps the first serious date of her adult life, the highest compliment Warren can pay her newly bobbed, softly styled and floral incarnation is the wolf-whistling "It's remarkable—your brains don't show a bit!" As if flattered by this complete dismissal of the career she is obstructing justice nineteen to the dozen to preserve, Wilma responds demurely, "If I can help it, they never do when I'm stepping out." The script puts a double edge on this transformation, otherwise as conventional as every other Hollywood equation of the beautiful and the good. Because it restores the dressed-down professor to the familiar screen image of the glamorous star who plays her, Wilma's newfound femininity may be interpreted as a long-suppressed natural state, but at the same time it is explicitly noted as a disguise, a point-by-point rebuttal of the long-haired, dove-dull, sexually naive woman so provocatively described in her dead student's exam book. Neither Warren nor Dorgan hesitated to express their initial interest pre-glow-up, when her severe tailoring and the massy braid of her hair just made her look like a hot librarian. The crucial eyewitness of Jack Hunter (Mickey Knox), however, takes one look at the beautiful distraction of her freshly powdered, lilac-wreathed face and scoffs, "Are you kidding?"
The film runs more than superficially with this idea of the polarized self. The most telltale clue in the blue book that Wilma withholds as long as she can from the police is Bill's identification of the object of his fantasies as a "cyclothymiac cutie." Like much of the psychiatric language of The Accused, it's an unnecessarily clinical justification of a device that needs none—not only does film noir draw from the literature of the fantastic and the grotesque where doppelgängers are a dime a dozen without a DSM code, at no point in the story does Wilma evince any of the symptoms of a bipolar disorder. For viewers who can roll with the diagnostic sloppiness, however, the phrase serves as a creative template for exploring the duality of a woman who is both victim and perpetrator, her consciousness of guilt and her simulation of innocence radiating visually and narratively until the motif of doubling and division can be felt through the entire film. "Under pressure," Dorgan's researches inform him, "these cyclothymiacs swing violently between two poles," like a literalization of his self-disgusted wish for "two of me . . . the idea being one could be mean and the other one nice." Wilma's professional evaluation of Bill as "charming and poised one minute, then erratic and poorly controlled the next" transfers so aptly to her post-traumatic self that it is effectively reprised by a combined description of her as "so nice, so intelligent . . . so tense, so emotional . . ." Her face is buried in her hands, one black-gloved, one bare and pale; then it ghosts in the darkened screen of a one-way mirror, double-exposed over the suspect for her crime. We can see for ourselves how easily she could scapegoat or stand in for the dark-haired, high-strung Susan Duval (Suzanne Dalbert) whose possible pregnancy by Bill reduces her sight unseen to a "so-called nice girl," the plausible murderer of her lover. With his mind on the date waiting for him, Hunter has to be reminded of the less playful consequences of a pick-up: "Think it couldn't happen to you?" Warren almost seems to acknowledge the interreflection of the characters around him when he proposes that "there is a very thin veil between what we cause to happen and what happens to us." After Wilma with her guilt-flushed narration and her coolly luminous face, he and Dorgan as her parallel suitors form the film's most obvious split. They have practical reasons for turning up as they do—they even have a prior acquaintance, working opposite sides of the criminal justice system—but all the same there's something dreamlike in their near-simultaneous appearance, as if Wilma herself has conjured them from the same subterranean stream of fears and fantasies. Equally enamored of the same woman, they elicit diametrically opposed responses from her. Charming as one of his actor's light comedy leads, ardent without aggression and even considerate of her career when he reminds her that San Francisco has universities, too, the lawyer piques her interest at once; after one business luncheon, he's sending her orchids while she recovers from a case of pneumonia and accompanies her to his ward's funeral where he identifies the lanky, preoccupied stranger at the service as a homicide officer. Quick-witted and disillusioned, curiously more wistful in his overtures, the detective repels her well beyond the deserts of his skeptically sexist introduction; the investigative progress with which he hopes to impress the reserved professor frightens her instead to the point of incautiously accusing him of falsifying evidence, denouncing him as "cruel and callous and smug." The men are puzzled, the audience doesn't need a PhD. In his capacity as an officer of the law, Dorgan has the power not just to expose and ruin Wilma, but to punish her potentially as far as the gas chamber—Thanatos to Warren's Eros, if you want to run with the Freudian theory which the writers undoubtedly did, making it an enjoyably perverse choice on the part of The Accused to devote far more emotional attention to its threat than to its romantic hero.
It's a hell of a testament to the shadow side. Warren provides all the romantic interest an awakening heroine could wish for and yet Dorgan with his wry loser's smile is the one the film keeps checking in on until he may appeal to the audience regardless of Wilma's feelings. His cat-angled face can quirk sensitively as well as with cynicism; most of his best lines are edged against himself, as when he reluctantly pulls himself out of a conversation with a sigh of "Too bad I'm married." He isn't, of course, rendering the line a weird sad joke or an attempt to give himself a graceful out after his transparently unsuccessful pass at Wilma. His flirtations with her are elliptical, almost contrafactual, bouncing his torch off his rival more often than he approaches the woman herself, even when she's standing right there in the same room. "What do you do with her when she's like this, Warren? Flowers? Candy? A mink coat? What I am saying? Champagne with dinner and bill me." Of the two men, however, he's the first to compliment her intelligence rather than her appearance when she punctures his demonstration of a rather deft bit of deduction with an ingenuously astute question; Dorgan catches himself looking around the rest of the crime lab for help and concedes with solemn chagrin, "Caught with our experiments down," then adds with real appreciation, "Smart girl." If he shadows Warren, then he's also a reflection of Wilma, his doggedly hard-boiled front as undermined by his misgivings about the case and his emotional entanglement in it as her increasingly brittle calm by the stress of everything it has to conceal. Notably, Dorgan is the only character into whose perspective the film cuts entirely away from Wilma's; after hours in his shadow-boxed office, he gets a monkey's paw of the split he wished for in the form of Dr. Romley (Sam Jaffe), a merrily feral forensic scientist with no filters on his gallows humor and no qualms about voicing all the chilly, suspicious thoughts the lieutenant hasn't wanted to allow into his own head, like the likeliest spur for Wilma's anger and the convenience of his own infatuation and Warren's. Even as he grimly nerves himself up to break her composure by playing on her damage, Warren unwittingly achieves the same end by taking her out to a prizefight where the last and most uncanny of Bill's doubles nearly has his brains beaten out in front of her eyes. Dorgan's there as they escape the arena; he could have been watching the fight on his own time, but it feels like more shadowplay, as if one man can't find out the truth without the other learning, too. All three are secret sharers now, all concealing from one another what they know. It's the highest-tension their non-triangle has been all film. For this reason I reserve the possibility that the production may not actually have intended to foreground its second lead to the detriment of its leading man and just misjudged the contrast in their complexities: until her secret breaks to the surface, Warren's feelings for Wilma are straightforward romance complicated only by the logistics of their separate cities and a still-open murder case, whereas Dorgan is cold-shouldered and smitten, his courtship consistently double-entendred by his investigation and his conflict of duty an entire noir theme in itself. In other words, I may have caught a het version of the phenomenon where the hero has more chemistry with the villain than with the love interest simply because of the broader range of emotions available beyond the limits of a love scene. Even if so, it still intrigues me that it happens in The Accused, not least because it means that the film gives its third wheel the last word on its twinned outcomes of romance and crime.
The Accused comes to an end before Wilma's trial does, but it is not an ambiguous ending, thanks to Lieutenant Dorgan. For a closing statement, Warren has delivered a somewhat rhetorically vague but powerfully heartfelt plea to find his client guilty of nothing more than "the crime of fear," the stacked deck of the patriarchy and its assumptions about women and assault which drove her to cover up the death of the man she killed in blameless and desperate self-defense. It's a hushed, passionate, therapeutically slanted address and as it concludes, the prosecutor nudges the detective lieutenant slouched beside him in an attitude of apparent apathy: "Don't look so gloomy. We haven't lost it yet." Dorgan unfolds with a faint look of amusement, glances over at the serenely seated defendant and back. With the greatest courtesy, he corrects his colleague: "Oh, but we have." It's as beautiful a piece of double-speaking as any other two-fer in this movie. The prosecutor means the case; the detective with his ironical smile means the case and the chance he can finally see for himself he never had with Wilma, whose face is transcendent with love for Warren, undisguised and unfeigned. It answers his last, lingeringly wishful question as to the sincerity of her romance and it assures the audience of her acquittal, even of a crime she worked so hard to conceal. Knowing that Warren has been arguing for the freedom of his future wife, it is possible to read this ending as profoundly conservative, the safe containment of the sexual energies of the independent woman after some aberrant ventures into repression, indiscretion, and being even inadvertently fatale enough to turn the heads of both a lawyer and a cop. I wondered what Paramount had had to bargain to the PCA for it, because the pattern of female-focused noir it constellated inside my head is arguably radical to this day.
It is more than noir that deals with sexual assault, more even than noir which condones the violence of women's self-defense. It is noir about women who are assaulted by men with whom they have some sexual engagement and whose experiences are nonetheless recognized unequivocally as assault. Chris Hunter in The Unfaithful (1947) is assaulted by a former lover, Norah Larkin in The Blue Gardenia (1953) by a stranger she picked up. Of the three, Wilma has the least relationship with her attempted rapist in the sense that they are on a date by only the most nervously dubious of definitions and most of her receptivity is fantasized on his part, but in a gesture which blurs scarily and realistically between forceful seduction and violent assault, she responds for an instant to his kiss. Even as she struggles to push him off her the next second, Bill exults, "Oh, you little firecracker. Don't pretend you don't like it!" It is noteworthy how much The Accused does not follow his lead. Whatever freeze or arousal Wilma felt in that moment, it is never adduced as evidence that she shouldn't have lammed him over the head with that half-spring when he didn't stop. None of these women are the straw man of the perfect victim, the mythically modest virgin who does nothing that could be construed as asking for it—ironically, that precaution is reserved for Ann Walton in Outrage (1950), otherwise the strongest and most explicit of the noirs I have seen on this theme. None of them end unhappily; beyond the nightmare current of events in which they find themselves, they are not punished for their participation in the sexual behavior which they ultimately refuse. None of these movies, of course, employ any of the language of consent or feminist critique which has evolved in the decades since their release, but all state more or less bluntly that no at any point means no and all depict vividly the systems that make their protagonists reluctant to report the truth of what happened to them. Dorgan is an unusually attractive policeman for a film noir and he still represents such a danger to Wilma that it does not feel gratuitous of the picture to place him at the center of two of its most stylistically noir scenes, the crime lab glass-glinting in shadow after a slideshow and his office stark-lit by a desk lamp late at night, the tension of their low-key expressionism rivaled only by the scene of the actual assault and its recursion in the flashback of the prizefight. The casual sexism slung around the dialogue even by men we are supposed to root for is so dense it feels it can't have been accidental. I am fond of the lieutenant just because he can't flirt for chump change and wanders out of scenes with lines like "Next life, I'm going to be a minister. Never have to pick on anybody but the Devil," but the correct response to "I'm no expert on women, but—" is never "Who is?" A shot of Wilma confronted by the studio in-joke of a poster for the fictitious Murder starring Macdonald Carey and Gail Russell caused me to wonder if the ur-text of this strain of noir could be Blackmail (1929), in which case it interests me that the Hitchcock film is so much more pessimistic than its descendants. Given what the heroines of this small but definite asterism are permitted in the Code-enforced era to get away with—cruising, infidelity, tampering with evidence big time—I will take the conservative compromises of the plots that enable them. They are art of their time and their time includes the nuance of sexual boundaries. Johnny Belinda (1948) and its tactful controversy can just go home.
The elephant on the soundstage of this production is Young's own 1935 experience of sexual assault, which she did not disclose or identify as such until late in life and which was not shared by her family until after her death. If it's true that she blamed herself for so much of her life, I wish she had been able to take the lesson of The Accused, which knew even if its star didn't that nothing means yes but yes and survivorship is not a mortal sin. It is not her resistance to a rape that makes Wilma worth an audience's sympathy. We have our shadow sides, too, our needs and hungers and fears; all she needs to be for us to care is human.
Despite its the parallelism of its psychological conceit, The Accused is not as neat a film as it could be; narratively it's belabored by one of the voiceovers that contribute little information the audience can't pick up for themselves and dramatically it slackens in the early stages after the explosive opening, before the principals have been properly triangulated and Wilma had a chance to do much beyond traumatically remember and fall into delirium like a heroine of the Gothic novels from which film noir also descends. I blame Frings for the former and director William Dieterle for the latter, although the cinematography by Milton R. Krasner ensures that even a meandering passage looks good as the day noir of the campus scratches against the shadow-slats of offices and the mirrored candles of nightspots. The ominous title comes up over the dreamy, lyrical theme by Victor Young. I would love to read the PCA file for this movie, not only to see how many fuses the censors blew over the essential subject matter, but because I am tremendously impressed by the gruesome sleight-of-hand of showing by the shattering damage to a plaster head all the human gore that had to be kept offscreen. In light of the obscurity of some of the movies I run into, I am glad to see there's a Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, but it didn't look too crunchy on the Internet Archive. The overall attitude is pleasantly durable even if the psychobabble has not remotely survived. If three examples make a genre, I'm sure there's a fourth I haven't seen yet and maybe by then it won't surprise me at all. This rule brought to you by my expert backers at Patreon.
On the bare-bones level of plot, it is not a complicated film, although it flourishes its noir credentials by opening with the aftershock of the events it will allow its heroine to recall at the most dramatically propulsive moments, surfacing through fevers and triggers like a body rolled inconveniently to shore. A convertible coupe stands abandoned by the overlook of a white-lined sea, a dark-haired woman bundled to anonymity in a tight-belted trenchcoat and a soft hat pulled low hugs a briefcase to her chest as she hides from the passing flare of headlights on the rain-slicked 101. In her own front hall, she recoils from her reflection as if she doesn't see a sheltered, tweed-skirted associate professor of psychology with a deskful of blue books to grade, but the stranger inside her skin who knew what to do with a steel half-spring and a bucket of seawater, seventy feet of cliff-drop and the turn of the tide—the shape-shifting, irreversible moment from which all the rest of the psychomachia will proceed, intertwining the personal and the procedural as closely as figure and ground. Dr. Wilma Tuttle (Loretta Young) is far from the first woman in noir to kill a man in self-defense, but her split-second decision to restage it as an accident recoils on her with gender-pointed irony, as her professional expertise obliges her to assist like one of her male colleagues in the investigation of her own crime while her consciously feminine efforts to distance herself from the vestal profile of the killer encourage the attentions of the two men she can least afford to let down her guard around, Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), the criminal lawyer from San Francisco who happens to be the next of kin, and Lieutenant Ted Dorgan of the LAPD (Wendell Corey), the homicide detective on the case. Just to underscore the death-drive, pleasure-principle nature of the whole business, the killing was committed in the course of an attempted rape. Dr. Tuttle may as well have been stating the thesis of the film when she addressed her class before the morning's midterm: "Think of your needs, your hungers, your fears—for these are the things, I'm afraid, which rule most of us."
In a score for women behind the camera of noir as well as in front of it, The Accused was adapted for the screen by Ketti Frings from June Truesdell's 1947 novel Be Still, My Love and while its heroine's fragility can sometimes feel retrograde to her transgressive genre, its observations of the deep-dyed sexism of her world are not at all shy. From the aggressive, invasive flirtatiousness of his introduction, Bill Perry (Douglas Dick) seems at first like the outlier of an obvious predator. An oblique version, perhaps, of the ambivalent figure of the returned veteran, he's older than his female classmates who didn't spend their undergraduate years in uniform, closer to the age of the teacher he pursues with California-golden entitlement even as he may have knocked up the distraught foreign student whom he spurns as blatantly in class as he baits his discomfited professor, the power differential of the student-teacher relationship complicated by the inequalities of the male-female—in 1948, would a male professor harassed by a female student request the same kind of intervention from the Dean, or feel the need to disprove the sense of intimidation by accepting a ride home from the student even when the red flags are fluttering thick and fast? Describing his favorite sport of free-diving for abalone, Bill's bright-eyed enthusiasm leaves little to the metaphor of something secret and fleshy that must be opened by force to be enjoyed: "It's the fight they give you that's important." He's just as eagerly relentless when he tackles Wilma on the cliffs above Malibu, laughing like rape culture personified as he pulls her off the car's horn, wrestles her into the back seat as if he doesn't have to pin her painfully by the arms to keep her there: "Stop that! Nobody's going to hear you but me . . . You won't tell anybody about this, either, will you? You shouldn't have been out here with me." Within seconds he's permanently silenced, but it is not merely Wilma's anxieties that set the dead man's words echoing all around her in the days to come. The truck driver who offers her a lift when she stumbles by the side of the highway doesn't molest her, but his sensitive response to his passenger's disheveled, taciturn state is to speculate in jaded detail on the sexual frailties of women that get them caught in "wrestling matches," dropping her off with the cheerfully victim-blaming parting shot, "After this, be more choosy, huh?" A working-class, regular Joe, deliberately counterpoised to Bill when he reappears as a witness in the investigation, he seems to speak for the censure of the entire male world that Wilma imagines when she thinks to herself, "And even if they did believe me, the scandal would ruin my whole life—everything I've worked for and lived for would be gone—" A woman with a doctorate is not just a rarity on the campus of California College (UCLA). Especially unmarried, she had better be Caesar's wife. Professor Wilma Tuttle is already something of a contradiction in terms in a post-war America reassuring itself with the hard sell of domesticity, a professional, intellectual woman. On being introduced to her as a member of the faculty, Lieutenant Dorgan drawls world-wearily, "Does that make her any less gabby than most women?" Arriving to take her out for the dinner she has accepted in perhaps the first serious date of her adult life, the highest compliment Warren can pay her newly bobbed, softly styled and floral incarnation is the wolf-whistling "It's remarkable—your brains don't show a bit!" As if flattered by this complete dismissal of the career she is obstructing justice nineteen to the dozen to preserve, Wilma responds demurely, "If I can help it, they never do when I'm stepping out." The script puts a double edge on this transformation, otherwise as conventional as every other Hollywood equation of the beautiful and the good. Because it restores the dressed-down professor to the familiar screen image of the glamorous star who plays her, Wilma's newfound femininity may be interpreted as a long-suppressed natural state, but at the same time it is explicitly noted as a disguise, a point-by-point rebuttal of the long-haired, dove-dull, sexually naive woman so provocatively described in her dead student's exam book. Neither Warren nor Dorgan hesitated to express their initial interest pre-glow-up, when her severe tailoring and the massy braid of her hair just made her look like a hot librarian. The crucial eyewitness of Jack Hunter (Mickey Knox), however, takes one look at the beautiful distraction of her freshly powdered, lilac-wreathed face and scoffs, "Are you kidding?"
The film runs more than superficially with this idea of the polarized self. The most telltale clue in the blue book that Wilma withholds as long as she can from the police is Bill's identification of the object of his fantasies as a "cyclothymiac cutie." Like much of the psychiatric language of The Accused, it's an unnecessarily clinical justification of a device that needs none—not only does film noir draw from the literature of the fantastic and the grotesque where doppelgängers are a dime a dozen without a DSM code, at no point in the story does Wilma evince any of the symptoms of a bipolar disorder. For viewers who can roll with the diagnostic sloppiness, however, the phrase serves as a creative template for exploring the duality of a woman who is both victim and perpetrator, her consciousness of guilt and her simulation of innocence radiating visually and narratively until the motif of doubling and division can be felt through the entire film. "Under pressure," Dorgan's researches inform him, "these cyclothymiacs swing violently between two poles," like a literalization of his self-disgusted wish for "two of me . . . the idea being one could be mean and the other one nice." Wilma's professional evaluation of Bill as "charming and poised one minute, then erratic and poorly controlled the next" transfers so aptly to her post-traumatic self that it is effectively reprised by a combined description of her as "so nice, so intelligent . . . so tense, so emotional . . ." Her face is buried in her hands, one black-gloved, one bare and pale; then it ghosts in the darkened screen of a one-way mirror, double-exposed over the suspect for her crime. We can see for ourselves how easily she could scapegoat or stand in for the dark-haired, high-strung Susan Duval (Suzanne Dalbert) whose possible pregnancy by Bill reduces her sight unseen to a "so-called nice girl," the plausible murderer of her lover. With his mind on the date waiting for him, Hunter has to be reminded of the less playful consequences of a pick-up: "Think it couldn't happen to you?" Warren almost seems to acknowledge the interreflection of the characters around him when he proposes that "there is a very thin veil between what we cause to happen and what happens to us." After Wilma with her guilt-flushed narration and her coolly luminous face, he and Dorgan as her parallel suitors form the film's most obvious split. They have practical reasons for turning up as they do—they even have a prior acquaintance, working opposite sides of the criminal justice system—but all the same there's something dreamlike in their near-simultaneous appearance, as if Wilma herself has conjured them from the same subterranean stream of fears and fantasies. Equally enamored of the same woman, they elicit diametrically opposed responses from her. Charming as one of his actor's light comedy leads, ardent without aggression and even considerate of her career when he reminds her that San Francisco has universities, too, the lawyer piques her interest at once; after one business luncheon, he's sending her orchids while she recovers from a case of pneumonia and accompanies her to his ward's funeral where he identifies the lanky, preoccupied stranger at the service as a homicide officer. Quick-witted and disillusioned, curiously more wistful in his overtures, the detective repels her well beyond the deserts of his skeptically sexist introduction; the investigative progress with which he hopes to impress the reserved professor frightens her instead to the point of incautiously accusing him of falsifying evidence, denouncing him as "cruel and callous and smug." The men are puzzled, the audience doesn't need a PhD. In his capacity as an officer of the law, Dorgan has the power not just to expose and ruin Wilma, but to punish her potentially as far as the gas chamber—Thanatos to Warren's Eros, if you want to run with the Freudian theory which the writers undoubtedly did, making it an enjoyably perverse choice on the part of The Accused to devote far more emotional attention to its threat than to its romantic hero.
It's a hell of a testament to the shadow side. Warren provides all the romantic interest an awakening heroine could wish for and yet Dorgan with his wry loser's smile is the one the film keeps checking in on until he may appeal to the audience regardless of Wilma's feelings. His cat-angled face can quirk sensitively as well as with cynicism; most of his best lines are edged against himself, as when he reluctantly pulls himself out of a conversation with a sigh of "Too bad I'm married." He isn't, of course, rendering the line a weird sad joke or an attempt to give himself a graceful out after his transparently unsuccessful pass at Wilma. His flirtations with her are elliptical, almost contrafactual, bouncing his torch off his rival more often than he approaches the woman herself, even when she's standing right there in the same room. "What do you do with her when she's like this, Warren? Flowers? Candy? A mink coat? What I am saying? Champagne with dinner and bill me." Of the two men, however, he's the first to compliment her intelligence rather than her appearance when she punctures his demonstration of a rather deft bit of deduction with an ingenuously astute question; Dorgan catches himself looking around the rest of the crime lab for help and concedes with solemn chagrin, "Caught with our experiments down," then adds with real appreciation, "Smart girl." If he shadows Warren, then he's also a reflection of Wilma, his doggedly hard-boiled front as undermined by his misgivings about the case and his emotional entanglement in it as her increasingly brittle calm by the stress of everything it has to conceal. Notably, Dorgan is the only character into whose perspective the film cuts entirely away from Wilma's; after hours in his shadow-boxed office, he gets a monkey's paw of the split he wished for in the form of Dr. Romley (Sam Jaffe), a merrily feral forensic scientist with no filters on his gallows humor and no qualms about voicing all the chilly, suspicious thoughts the lieutenant hasn't wanted to allow into his own head, like the likeliest spur for Wilma's anger and the convenience of his own infatuation and Warren's. Even as he grimly nerves himself up to break her composure by playing on her damage, Warren unwittingly achieves the same end by taking her out to a prizefight where the last and most uncanny of Bill's doubles nearly has his brains beaten out in front of her eyes. Dorgan's there as they escape the arena; he could have been watching the fight on his own time, but it feels like more shadowplay, as if one man can't find out the truth without the other learning, too. All three are secret sharers now, all concealing from one another what they know. It's the highest-tension their non-triangle has been all film. For this reason I reserve the possibility that the production may not actually have intended to foreground its second lead to the detriment of its leading man and just misjudged the contrast in their complexities: until her secret breaks to the surface, Warren's feelings for Wilma are straightforward romance complicated only by the logistics of their separate cities and a still-open murder case, whereas Dorgan is cold-shouldered and smitten, his courtship consistently double-entendred by his investigation and his conflict of duty an entire noir theme in itself. In other words, I may have caught a het version of the phenomenon where the hero has more chemistry with the villain than with the love interest simply because of the broader range of emotions available beyond the limits of a love scene. Even if so, it still intrigues me that it happens in The Accused, not least because it means that the film gives its third wheel the last word on its twinned outcomes of romance and crime.
The Accused comes to an end before Wilma's trial does, but it is not an ambiguous ending, thanks to Lieutenant Dorgan. For a closing statement, Warren has delivered a somewhat rhetorically vague but powerfully heartfelt plea to find his client guilty of nothing more than "the crime of fear," the stacked deck of the patriarchy and its assumptions about women and assault which drove her to cover up the death of the man she killed in blameless and desperate self-defense. It's a hushed, passionate, therapeutically slanted address and as it concludes, the prosecutor nudges the detective lieutenant slouched beside him in an attitude of apparent apathy: "Don't look so gloomy. We haven't lost it yet." Dorgan unfolds with a faint look of amusement, glances over at the serenely seated defendant and back. With the greatest courtesy, he corrects his colleague: "Oh, but we have." It's as beautiful a piece of double-speaking as any other two-fer in this movie. The prosecutor means the case; the detective with his ironical smile means the case and the chance he can finally see for himself he never had with Wilma, whose face is transcendent with love for Warren, undisguised and unfeigned. It answers his last, lingeringly wishful question as to the sincerity of her romance and it assures the audience of her acquittal, even of a crime she worked so hard to conceal. Knowing that Warren has been arguing for the freedom of his future wife, it is possible to read this ending as profoundly conservative, the safe containment of the sexual energies of the independent woman after some aberrant ventures into repression, indiscretion, and being even inadvertently fatale enough to turn the heads of both a lawyer and a cop. I wondered what Paramount had had to bargain to the PCA for it, because the pattern of female-focused noir it constellated inside my head is arguably radical to this day.
It is more than noir that deals with sexual assault, more even than noir which condones the violence of women's self-defense. It is noir about women who are assaulted by men with whom they have some sexual engagement and whose experiences are nonetheless recognized unequivocally as assault. Chris Hunter in The Unfaithful (1947) is assaulted by a former lover, Norah Larkin in The Blue Gardenia (1953) by a stranger she picked up. Of the three, Wilma has the least relationship with her attempted rapist in the sense that they are on a date by only the most nervously dubious of definitions and most of her receptivity is fantasized on his part, but in a gesture which blurs scarily and realistically between forceful seduction and violent assault, she responds for an instant to his kiss. Even as she struggles to push him off her the next second, Bill exults, "Oh, you little firecracker. Don't pretend you don't like it!" It is noteworthy how much The Accused does not follow his lead. Whatever freeze or arousal Wilma felt in that moment, it is never adduced as evidence that she shouldn't have lammed him over the head with that half-spring when he didn't stop. None of these women are the straw man of the perfect victim, the mythically modest virgin who does nothing that could be construed as asking for it—ironically, that precaution is reserved for Ann Walton in Outrage (1950), otherwise the strongest and most explicit of the noirs I have seen on this theme. None of them end unhappily; beyond the nightmare current of events in which they find themselves, they are not punished for their participation in the sexual behavior which they ultimately refuse. None of these movies, of course, employ any of the language of consent or feminist critique which has evolved in the decades since their release, but all state more or less bluntly that no at any point means no and all depict vividly the systems that make their protagonists reluctant to report the truth of what happened to them. Dorgan is an unusually attractive policeman for a film noir and he still represents such a danger to Wilma that it does not feel gratuitous of the picture to place him at the center of two of its most stylistically noir scenes, the crime lab glass-glinting in shadow after a slideshow and his office stark-lit by a desk lamp late at night, the tension of their low-key expressionism rivaled only by the scene of the actual assault and its recursion in the flashback of the prizefight. The casual sexism slung around the dialogue even by men we are supposed to root for is so dense it feels it can't have been accidental. I am fond of the lieutenant just because he can't flirt for chump change and wanders out of scenes with lines like "Next life, I'm going to be a minister. Never have to pick on anybody but the Devil," but the correct response to "I'm no expert on women, but—" is never "Who is?" A shot of Wilma confronted by the studio in-joke of a poster for the fictitious Murder starring Macdonald Carey and Gail Russell caused me to wonder if the ur-text of this strain of noir could be Blackmail (1929), in which case it interests me that the Hitchcock film is so much more pessimistic than its descendants. Given what the heroines of this small but definite asterism are permitted in the Code-enforced era to get away with—cruising, infidelity, tampering with evidence big time—I will take the conservative compromises of the plots that enable them. They are art of their time and their time includes the nuance of sexual boundaries. Johnny Belinda (1948) and its tactful controversy can just go home.
The elephant on the soundstage of this production is Young's own 1935 experience of sexual assault, which she did not disclose or identify as such until late in life and which was not shared by her family until after her death. If it's true that she blamed herself for so much of her life, I wish she had been able to take the lesson of The Accused, which knew even if its star didn't that nothing means yes but yes and survivorship is not a mortal sin. It is not her resistance to a rape that makes Wilma worth an audience's sympathy. We have our shadow sides, too, our needs and hungers and fears; all she needs to be for us to care is human.
Despite its the parallelism of its psychological conceit, The Accused is not as neat a film as it could be; narratively it's belabored by one of the voiceovers that contribute little information the audience can't pick up for themselves and dramatically it slackens in the early stages after the explosive opening, before the principals have been properly triangulated and Wilma had a chance to do much beyond traumatically remember and fall into delirium like a heroine of the Gothic novels from which film noir also descends. I blame Frings for the former and director William Dieterle for the latter, although the cinematography by Milton R. Krasner ensures that even a meandering passage looks good as the day noir of the campus scratches against the shadow-slats of offices and the mirrored candles of nightspots. The ominous title comes up over the dreamy, lyrical theme by Victor Young. I would love to read the PCA file for this movie, not only to see how many fuses the censors blew over the essential subject matter, but because I am tremendously impressed by the gruesome sleight-of-hand of showing by the shattering damage to a plaster head all the human gore that had to be kept offscreen. In light of the obscurity of some of the movies I run into, I am glad to see there's a Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, but it didn't look too crunchy on the Internet Archive. The overall attitude is pleasantly durable even if the psychobabble has not remotely survived. If three examples make a genre, I'm sure there's a fourth I haven't seen yet and maybe by then it won't surprise me at all. This rule brought to you by my expert backers at Patreon.
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Right? With the courtroom denouement, I was expecting the kind of suspended ending where the audience is left to make up their own minds about what happens to Wilma after the credits roll and in the privacy of our own heads we can imagine her acquitted, but realistically by the rules of the Production Code we know she's going to have to pay for her crime, and no! Dorgan who should know as well as anyone assures us otherwise. He's not even shy about reassuring the defendant of her own future during a recess in the trial, before the climactic speech: "You'll get the chance. You've got a great guy pleading for you." He's still carrying a godawful torch for her at that point, but the last line suggests to me that he'll get over it. Which is also a happy ending, since the whole point here is respecting boundaries.
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It's really interesting to me how they all have different strengths and concessions, but they all exist. And I don't think I've seen criticism on them collectively—other kinds of female-focused noir, but this movie wouldn't have hit me so hard upside the head if I'd known to look out for the pattern.
Are there any actual UCLA locations in the film?
Yes! I wouldn't swear to the interiors, but the exteriors are the campus. I suspect most of the student extras were just students.
This is yet another movie I wish I could have asked Sam Jaffe about!
He's wonderful in it. Romley is such a natural denizen of the crime lab, seeing him by daylight is slightly weird.
(I still think your connection to Sam Jaffe is cool, even if you didn't ask him about movies.)
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Sam Jaffe fascinated me when I was a child, even though I'd seen so little of his work and had no clue about the scope of his career. (I don't remember him talking about it at all.) In the 1970s it wouldn't have been possible for me to watch his films in a systematic way, and I didn't end up seeing a lot of his work until the '90s and later.
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Please report back! The AFI Catalog says only, "Some specific locations include the UCLA campus, the Civic Center and the Malibu coastline."
Sam Jaffe fascinated me when I was a child, even though I'd seen so little of his work and had no clue about the scope of his career. (I don't remember him talking about it at all.)
He had a lot of career to not talk about. I've never gotten over his presence in the Broadway premiere of God of Vengeance, the one where the entire cast ended up in court.
In the 1970s it wouldn't have been possible for me to watch his films in a systematic way, and I didn't end up seeing a lot of his work until the '90s and later.
Sometimes you want a time machine for a concert, sometimes for a conversation.
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This story in itself would be worth a time machine!
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Paula Vogel's Indecent tells part of it, but no one in it plays Sam Jaffe!
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Sounds like an interesting movie. I shall have to recommend it to Kestrell, as a possible discussion topic for her Gothic scholars group.
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I suspect it's just a confluence of Irish names, but I am chamed by the list of Tad Dorgan-associated slang—I'd heard the claim about "hard-boiled," but I just encountered "Nickelnurser" the other night as the surname of a skinflint character in an early Buster Keaton short.
Sounds like an interesting movie. I shall have to recommend it to Kestrell, as a possible discussion topic for her Gothic scholars group.
I would love to hear what a group of Gothic scholars make of some of these strains of female-focused film noir, which were generally described—like most films now classified as noir—as melodramas at the time.
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Your writeup also makes me start to daydream a fanfic written from the cop's point of view. In my imagination maybe he comes to have a slightly less sexist worldview. I like that he's the first to compliment the heroine on her intelligence.
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Thank you! I found myself much more absorbed in this film than I expected to be, even knowing the premise. Of the three in its immediate class, it may be the most attentive to its heroine's trauma in terms of what it costs her to pretend that nothing has changed when everything including her understanding of her own self has.
Your writeup also makes me start to daydream a fanfic written from the cop's point of view. In my imagination maybe he comes to have a slightly less sexist worldview. I like that he's the first to compliment the heroine on her intelligence.
I like your fanfic. Dorgan fascinates me as a character because he has so many of the attributes of a romantic alternative—funny, intelligent, vulnerable—and the film is crystal-clear that Wilma does not respond to him in that fashion, even by the time of her trial when she has ceased to be afraid of him because he's no longer the embodiment of the law coming to get her, he's an individual in his own right, awkwardly still in love with her (but improving), the man who served her arrest warrant with sincere apology. It feels like the same slight refusal of such Hollywood conventions that claim that if a woman is kissed forcefully enough, of course it's what she wants. Love triangles don't have to happen. Sometimes there's a perfectly attractive person in view and even without any additional complications of crime in play, they aren't the perfectly attractive person for you.
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Oh God, YES. Yes, yes, yes.
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He was excellent in the original television version of Twelve Angry Men (1954) which we watched in 2018, before the last glaciation. He's been sound in the other noirs I've seen him in, too; they play effectively against his light comedy good looks. The endgame of The Accused where he and Dorgan and Wilma are all working at emotionally fraught cross-purposes to one another is terrific.
Loretta Young, on the other hand, I've seen act all over the map. I hadn't known she was a survivor until you brought it up.
I don't think it's widely known. It certainly wasn't at the time of The Accused.