Hello, moviegoers! Today I am showing up with a film that is not a sequel and does not belong to a franchise. I guess this automatically makes this movie a pre-2000s one :-)

Enter Accused of Murder, a noir film from Republican pictures, a producer that can boast of having the Americaniest logo ever.

Accused of Murder tells the story of a nightclub singer who the police suspects has killed a famous lawyer with mob connections. Only a cop is willing to trust her innocence: meanwhile, the actual mobsters that killed the lawyer are doing their best not to get caught themselves.

I will be honest here and declare that the first thing that came to mind when the film got started that was it was a second class movie which was trying to be like one of Humphrey Bogart s hits. The scenarios have this classic vibe that only classic films posess, and the vestuary is quite fine, so it does not look _cheap_. It is clear right from the start that the plot is not going to be overly suspenseful or complex, though.

The strongest point of this film is its cast, and more surprisingly, the secondary actors. It is not that the characters are multidimensional and complicated - quite the opposite, actually - but characterization scores 10 out of 10. You can tell certain cop is a bad cop just by the way he looks at people while interrogating them. You can tell certain girl at a nightclub is a lowlife that would stab somebody for pocket change just by the way she manages around. In fact I'd say straight that the main characters, the Nightclub singer and the cop who covers for her, fall flat in comparisson.

Just so you get an idea: when I was watching this movie with my father, he mentioned that the bad cop was doing a great role for a secondary. After the movie was over, I looked the cast up and found out the actor playing him was fucking Lee Van Cleef.

Sadly, the movie is lacking what it takes to achieve true greatness. The plot is fine, but there is a crippling lack of suspense. Since the audience already knows (or believes to know) what is going on, the only question is whether the singer will get to the electric chair or not... and, quite frankly, she is not hot enough, or smart enough, or interesting enough for me to care too much.

Accused of Murder is like a preparation for dementia: you will have a nice experience and then forget about it in half a minute. Still, it is much better than the material available on modern streaming platforms, which is itself a _cause_ of dementia, among other ailments.

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken

---
■ Synchronet ■ Palantir BBS * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL