I Accuse My Parents

I'll be up front with you; I've never seen this movie in its original unadulterated form. I think if I had, I would found it a harmless (if slightly dull) melodramatic "message" film.

The truth is, I've only seen this movie as an MST3000 episode, and as such, it is one the funniest and most entertaining movies I've ever seen! Young Robert Lowell (the poet?) as Jimmy is endearingly dim-witted, and Mary Beth Hughes is charmingly wooden as his love interest. (I like her singing, by the way). But the clincher here is George Lloyd as Al, the kindly gravel-voiced father figure and church-going diner owner who tries to set our hero straight (good luck!). When Al's scenes come up, I rewind and watch over and over and over...

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.

The fact that "I Accuse My Parents" is a bad film shouldn't at all be surprising. After all, it's made by one of the cheapest of the so-called 'Poverty Row' studios of the 1940s==where entire scripts NEVER were bought for more than a few hundred dollars! Also, with an exploitation title like this, it sure sounds like a recipe for dreck.

The film begins with a trial. A young man is accused of manslaughter. In an insanely unrealistic moment, the judge asks the accused to come to the front of the room and talk about his life story. At first, it's all about how his childhood sucked because his parents were both self-involved jerks (hence the title), but so many of his actions seem to have little to do with his upbringing and more to do with that he's a total idiot! To earn some extra money, he goes to work as a courier for a mobster--and having absolutely no idea that he's doing anything illegal! Think about it--he gets paid huge amounts of money to do 'odd jobs' at all hours and he isn't suspicious! Anyway, but the end of his long story, the young man once again asserts that it's pretty much his parents' fault--at which point the judge summarily decides on his fate--with no deliberations, no additional testimony...nothing! And then, what follows, is the judge's message to the parents! Uggh...it's really pretty dumb. However, I must admit that despite being pure corn and bad script writing, it was, in an odd way, entertaining...yet still quite bad. For bad movie buffs, this sort of silly sermonizing and bad writing is exactly what they are looking for--and I can't recommend it enough for those who occasionally like a bad film. Dopey but easy to like.

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.

Of all the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episodes I have seen, and I haven't seen that many, this movie is probably the least terrible of them all. Sure it is slow, boring, outdated, and without any redeeming quality, but at least it has a coherent plot and resembles a professional film. It isn't as bad as some other MST3k stinkers like "Manos: The Hands of Fate," "Mitchell," "Eegah," or "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians." However, if it weren't for Joel and the bots, I don't think I would have made it through the entire movie; which is true for all the MST3k movies.