I Accuse My Parents

Come on. Seriously. Who actually said that this movie would be a good idea? What idiot sat in a writing room and said "Hey! I know! A kid accuses his parents! For his lame crimes that he committed after gaining really weak mob ties!" And who said "Hey! I like it!" Yes, Jimmy is pitiful. And yes, he writes a dang fine essay (full of lies). But a angst-ridden teenager and a deceitful essay do not a good movie make. I cannot possibly imagine watching this movie without MST3K. It would be unbearable, especially the awkward singing numbers. I really enjoy the scene where Kitty and Jimmy meet for the first time when he is cleaning the window of the shoe store. That wonderful bit of classic cinematic romance goes on for about...10 minutes. What is going on there?? Why doesn't she just GO IN?? Come on, Kitty. Although she is not a bad actress (can't say as much for Jimmy), there is no chemistry at all between those two. It's like negative chemistry. My advice: stay far away from this movie if you don't see Joel and the bots in the corner. They make it a thousand times more enjoyable.

I almost called this review "I Accuse My Parents... of NOTHING!" Looking back, that wouldn't have been such a bad choice either. Though it's certainly true that many kids from broken homes wind up with lives of crime, even Wally and Beaver Cleaver could've wound up in the mess the main character ended up in.

Jimmy is on trail for manslaughter and accuses his parents of leading him to a life of crime. His parents are drunks, and his dad is a gambler. The worst thing you can say about them is that they're a little embarrassing. It's not like they're beating the living sh*t out of him on a regular basis, or selling his ass to perverts on the street so they can maintain their smack habits or anything like that. Nevertheless, he wants to tell himself and everyone else that they're pillars of the community, and wrote a glowing essay on the benefits of his parents, which is proved to be complete BS when Mom shows up drunk to the kid's graduation planning committee.

So Jimmy gets a job selling shoes, and one of his first customers is a girl with a job as a lounge club singer with ties to the mob. He falls for the girl, and she falls for him, but he doesn't know about the illegal activities of her boss... that is until his boss makes him a wheel-man for some of his crimes. The big boss makes his girlfriend break up with him, and sends a couple of goons after him, so he skips town, and actually tried to pull a robbery at some local greasy spoon. The boss of that place knows what's going on and risks his ass to give the kid a free meal, a job, and a place to stay in exchange for attending church.

Ironically, it's his meeting with greasy spoon owner that gets him in more trouble with the law than the mobsters. Regardless, the whole point is that Jimmy is actually a half-way decent kid who got mixed up with the wrong crowd through no fault of his own, or his drunken neglectful parents, despite the premise of this long-winded ephemeral film. If there were any REAL justice, he would've gotten off on the grounds of self-defense. Luckily a good 49 years later, the cast and crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 had enough sense to riff on this lame-ass flick. Thank God, or whoever for that.

This film tries to show you the importance of parents to a child and how if they are not around bad things can happen, but it fails in so many ways. The main reason it fails is that I could find very little to actually blame the parents on. The movie starts of with this guy accusing his parents and blaming them for the fact he had committed manslaughter then the movie flashes back and shows what led up to that point. Unfortunately, other than a couple of instances right at the beginning of the story for the most parts the parents aren't really responsible. The thing that gets this kid in trouble are the constant lies and the fact he is a bit stupid. I mean a lot of people have neglectful parents, but they don't somehow get involved with organized crime and not even realize it.

I accuse my parents is a film that definitely has not stood the test of time. Blaming one's parents for your criminal ways is a very out-of-date idea, and the whole premise is silly. There are people out there who have grown up in abusive homes and managed to make things work out fine for themselves.

Don't watch this unless you're looking at the MST3K version. In the end credits they mention that this film was sent to our fighting forces in Europe. They probably used it as a torture device.

This film is one of those "message" films from the 1940s. Produced by PRC, one of the cheapest of the B pifcute studios, this film premise is that parents had better take more of an interest in their children's lives, otherwise your child might find himself involved in uderworld sumggling rings and commit murder.

The title of the picture is poor, for no matter how you view this film, the parents of the lead character have no more to do with his downfall then you or I.

This was one of those cheapie B films made to fill the lower half of a double bill.