The World Gone Mad

On another blog I frequent, one of the contributors likes to use a poster from the 1933 movie The World Gone Mad to illustrate that the world of today is, in fact, going mad. I had never seen the movie before, but I'm always up for an interesting pre-Code, so when I noticed that the movie is available on TubiTV (granted, with ads, although when I watched it was only 9 minutes of ads for a 71-minute movie so much less than traditional TV), I decided to watch it.

The movie, as a 1933 release, deals with a couple of themes that were quite common in the early 1930s: Prohibition and the underworld crime that it caused; and how the Depression led to people trying to enrich themselves through stock deals that aren't quite legal. Add a crusading prosecutor and wisecracking journalists, and you've got a lot of the tropes of the era. As for the crooked business dealings, this involves Grover Cromwell, who heads an investment firm. One of the companies in which his company owns a large stake is Suburban Utilities, and two of Cromwell's underlings have a plot to loot the coffers of Suburban to enrich themselves.

The District Attorney, Henderson, has gotten wind of this, and is getting the state examiners to investigate the books. So the embezzlers, knowing the jig is about to be up, do what any crook in the early 1930s would do, which is to arrange a rub-out. The DA is killed and replaced by his assistant, Lionel Houston (Neil Hamilton), who also happens to be the boyfriend of Cromwell's daughter Diane (Mary Brian). Houston, now that he takes over as acting DA, starts investigating the case, leading to an attempt on his own life and the suicide of an accountant that fingers Cromwell in the crime.

Houston also has a roommate, Andy Terrell (Pat O'Brien), who is a hard-boiled journalist. He investigates the case, too, since it's got enough lurid and headline-worthy elements that it's a natural for the big-city press to be covering, and because Terrell has an in what with being good friends with the new DA. Terrell's investigation is going to get himself in danger, too, before everything is resolved.

The World Gone Mad was made at Majestic Pictures, a Poverty Row studio. Majestic was fairly obviously, it seems to me, trying to pack as much into a small package as they could. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work to the movie's benefit. There's too much going on, and things move from one plot strand to another too quickly, making it difficult at times to figure out what's going on while at others one wonders whether critical material got left on the cutting-room floor. But despite all the flaws common to Poverty Row cheapies, The World Gone Mad isn't a bad little movie.

Note that some of the reviews suggest that at one point in the past, The World Gone Mad was included as part of a box set of public domain horror movies. The World Gone Mad is not horror in any way, and if you had come across it listed under that genre, you might be disappointed.