Nora Moran's Sin

A couple of months back, TCM ran a night of pre-Code premieres, none of which I had seen before. Recently, I noticed that one of the films run that night, The Sin of Nora Moran, got a new Blu-ray release, so I watched it to do a review here.

Edith Crawford (Claire Du Brey) comes in to District Attorney John Grant (Alan Dinehart) with an anonymous letter from a woman to Mr. Crawford (Paul Cavanagh), who just happens to be the governor. It's a love note, and the DA, being not just a friend of the governor but the governor's major fixer, reveals that he has a whole bunch of other letters from this woman, named Nora Moran.

Nora, however, is currently on death row, scheduled to be electrocuted in a few hours time. In order to prepare her for her execution, she has to have her head shaved and is given sedatives to calm her down. These cause her to start having hallucinatory flashbacks to her past....

Nora (Zita Johann) had a difficult childhood, eventually running off to the big city to look for work as a chorus girl. There wasn't any for her, and as she's down to her last few dollars, she sees an ad for a job with the traveling circus, even though she's too young for it and has no circus experience. While with the circus, she has a difficult love affair with Paulino (John Miljan), another circus performer.

Eventually she leaves the circus, which is how she meets Crawford. Those two start an affair, having trysts in a place Crawford rented for her just across the state line. Remember, he has an ambitious political career, and is married, so if this affair become public, it would cause a scandal that would put the kibosh on that political career.

One night, the DA shows up at Nora's place, where she shows him that she killed Paulino. Apparently Paulino knew about the affair with Crawford, and was planning to blackmail Crawford, so Nora killed her. At least, that's her story. She's lucky she's in another state, because DA Grant tells her that he'd be prosecuting her to the fullest extent of the law in order to keep the scandal from hitting the governor or himself.

And yet, in the attempt to escape and dump the body, Nora winds up getting arrested in Grant's county and convicted and sentenced to death. Now Gov. Crawford has the chance to offer clemency and commute the death sentence, but in order to keep the scandal covered up, he's going to let Nora go to her death! Worse, it eventually transpires that the story Nora told Grant about having murdered Paulino isn't quite true....

The Sin of Nora Moran is a really interesting little movie. It keeps switching persepective back and forth between Nora, the governor, and the DA's study, and in some of the scenes with Nora it's difficult to tell what's real and what's just a dream/hallucination. That does make things hard to follow at times, but the movie turns out to be a very good little B movie for it. Everything does make sense in the end, although some might find the ending a little unsatisfying (I don't want to give more away).

If you can get your hands on a copy of The Sin of Nora Moran, it's definitely more than worth a watch.