Hollywood's postwar mania for psychiatry provides a subtext for this tense thriller of a woman murderer on the run. Loretta Young plays a prissy professor of psychology who is invited out by a student who wants to discuss his research on “psychothymia.” On a remote beach on a dark night he begins his demonstration... She responds to his sexual advances by killing him, and then attempts to make his death look like an accident. No one questions the incident until her own guilt begins to give her away. Robert Cummings and Wendell Corey play the boy's lawyer and the police investigator--both in love with the accused. The original New York Times review noted, “Under William Dieterle's assured direction, the story...methodically builds up suspense to a punchy climax which leaves it to the audience to determine whether the defendant should be punished or go free. That must have been quite a concession for the Production Code...who are usually quite fussy about exacting retribution.”
A neat reversal of the Blue Angel/Scarlet Street motif (preying on the male intellectual's sexual repression), The Accused is interesting in its Forties conception of the intellectual woman and what happens when she lets her hair down.