Woman Against the World (1937) User Reviews

A Woman Scorned

[nammage · 5/10 · 29 August 2014]

A "B" flick that attempts to have heart but lacks the overall empathy of anyone. Basic story: "Woman marries man whose parents don't like, man dies, woman left to care for their child, child 'kidnapped' and adopted by loving couple but mother wants her child back." That pretty much sums up the movie.

In a fit of rage of wanting to know where her baby is she accidentally kills her Aunt who is the one, who without remorse, gave the child away illegally. Thus the 'kidnapping'.

The mother goes to prison, gets out, and then she 'kidnaps' her own daughter. But is it a kidnapping?

Everyone seems to be against her (except her lawyer, and her cell-mate), even the loving parents try to make her out to be a bad guy -- and this is such a great idea for a suspense film but it's just written below average, some of the acting has residual elements from the silent area, and the lead is so stoic throughout the film you want to root for her but (at least I didn't) you don't.

I wanted to like this film more than I did but there was no emotion, and the film was too short.

Oh well.

5/10

bad luck follows her around

[ksf-2 · 7/10 · 20 July 2014]

W.A.T.W opens with hunky Johnny, the farmhand, trying to help his girl Anna with her chores. Anna is played by Alice Moore, niece of actress and producer Mary Pickford. The grumpy old father gives him hell, so they marry in secret. Then things go downhill from there. Edgar Edwards (Johnny) seems to have written and starred in this shortie from Columbia Pictures, which was pretty rare for those days. Everything was so compartmentalized then... actors were rarely also writers. This one moves along pretty quickly... a little too quickly. We witness lots of big milestones, some unexplained, some are pretty straight-forward, and the couple runs into more and more bad luck. Can't really say too much here, storywise, to avoid giving away major plotpoints. The main plot line here is that she lost custody of her baby, and spends the remainder of the movie trying to find and reclaim her daughter. This seems to have been filmed in a Canadian studio, and at only 66 minutes, it feels like some helpful scenes have been cut or lost. It's an OK story, but given a few more scenes of explanation, could have been great. The sound and picture quality are remarkably good for a film from 1937.

Alice Moore died quite young at 44, but couldn't find out much about that. She seems to have married, moved to DC, and died just a couple years after her mother. Directed by David Selman; one of the last films Selman did.. he died the same year this was made.

Idiot Plotting

[boblipton · 4/10 · 20 July 2014]

Sour-puss aunt gives away widowed Alice Moore's baby and then refuses to say to whom. Alice tries to get the old.... biddy to tell her and accidentally kills her. Too depressed by this turn of event to help attorney Ralph Forbes mount a defense, she winds up in prison for manslaughter, where she decides she needs to get out and find her baby. Once out, she falls in with evil companions and hires a crooked detective to find her baby.

This idiot-plotted soaper was the last film of Miss Moore. She was the daughter of Tom Moore and Alice Joyce, but her career didn't go anywhere beyond Columbia Bs. In this one, she spends her time in a depressed state, which is a reasonable way to play the part, but not terribly interesting, and she soon retired to private life.

Co-star Ralph Forbes' star had fallen a bit since he had co-starred in 1928's BEAU GESTE, but he was working steadily for Columbia as a lead and in supporting roles for the majors. His career dribbled away in the 1940s and he died in 1951.

Dour performances and screwy plot leads to a bad "B".

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 16 June 2019]

This is melodrama at its absolute most absurd. Alice Moore is the unhappy daughter of a possessive father who blocks every chance for her to be happy with the farmhand she is in love with. She marries him anyway and ends up pregnant, made a quick widow and then later a murderess when her cold-hearted aunt takes the baby away and won't tell her where it is. Court reported attorney Ralph Forbes believes that she's keeping something from him when she wants to defend herself and goes out of his way to find out information on what caused her to kill her aunt. by some miracle, Moore gets paroled and suffers even more in trying to find the location of her child.

Slow-moving and depressing, this is only brought to life when Collete Lyons is on screen, playing her former cellmate who becomes her roommate when they are paroled together. Lyons is first seen saving Moore from a nosey inmate who is several buttons short of holes to put them in. I found it absurd (and quite convenient for the screenwriter) that Forbes would fall in love with his client so easily, and it doesn't help that her personality never allows Moore even to crack a smile.

Between the father and the aunt, it's a difficult choice to determine which one is a worse human being, and there was absolutely no sympathy for the victim. It is obvious that the screenwriter with a form of dialogue he uses was driving to be edgy, but the results fail at every level, making this a complete misfire. Considering that the adoptive parents of Moore's daughter had no idea that they were involved in something shady (which led to a legal adoption), it is also obvious that morally they have every right to keep the little girl home more encounters in a touching scene in the park. The finale is touching which does help improve this a little bit.