"The Sin of Nora Moran" was a tragedy, and the tragedy was how bad it was. Every step of the way this movie swung and missed. The writers were just flailing at the plate hoping to make contact. It is so off the mark it can't even be quantified how badly this movie missed its target.
When you boil the movie down to its base, it's about a rape victim sacrificing herself to protect a philandering politician, and said politician and the D. A. letting her get executed. How can anyone get behind such a plot?
Let's start with the main character, Nora Moran (Zita Johann). She got a job with King Bros. Circus where she would work with Paulino (John Miljan). When we first see Paulino he's "wrestling" a lion. And by "wrestling" I mean punching the lion in the face repeatedly.
Yeah, Paulino was a piece of work, but who knew his abuse would extend to rape. That's what he did to Nora Moran, a young lady just looking to make some money to put food in her stomach. But, like the very few movies that had sexual assault in them back then, they glossed over it. It happened and Nora moved on. Only the movie "The Story of Temple Drake" showed the devastating effect sexual assault has on women. In "The Story of Temple Drake" we got to see just how dead inside Miriam Hopkins' character was after she was raped by Jack La Rue's character.
In "The Sin of Nora Moran," Nora seemed unaffected which is a sin of the writers and the director. She went on performing and we got no glimpse into her emotional or mental state. All we saw was a smiling Nora Moran continuing to perform and begin a relationship with Governor Dick Crawford (Paul Cavanagh). Little did Nora know that Dick was married.
Nora found out that Dick was married from Dick's brother-in-law D. A. John Grant (Alan Dinehart). John entered upon the two at their love nest and blew up the spot. When Nora found out Dick was married she intimated that she had many partners before him which caused him to walk out. Although it was false, she did that to make him leave and go back to his wife.
Yeah, Dick was such a hypocrite that he'd cheat on his wife and then get upset when he found out that Nora had several partners before him. He did come back after some introspection and that's when he fought and killed Paulino.
We find out that Dick (Paul Cavanagh) killed Paulino (Nora's attacker) in an act of self-defense. However, even if it was self-defense, he killed Paulino in the cottage he was renting for his mistress. Should this get out he'd be ruined. For that reason Nora offered to take care of Paulino's body so that no one got in trouble.
OK. I'll buy that. Why should anyone get in trouble for killing a rapist?
Nora's plan involved contacting John Grant, the D. A. and Dick's B. I. L. Surely John would help get rid of the body because he, too, wanted to protect Dick's reputation.
The plan was simple. Nora knew that Paulino got drunk all the time. They would dump his body near the circus where some circus employees would find him and assume he was passed out drunk. Nora would rest his head on a rock to make it look like he fell and hit his head if and when they discovered he was dead from a blow to the head. No one had to go to jail, except Nora's plan didn't work.
We don't see how Nora was captured by police or even WHY she was arrested. All we find out is that Nora was on the circus train, somehow she was linked to Paulino's death, and she confessed.
Hunh? How do you gloss over these details because they don't make sense.
She was discovered by two drunken circus women, but nothing was said about her being near Paulino's body. Nora said she panicked and got on the circus train, but nothing about being a suspect. Somehow someway she became a suspect and she confessed. I still think it's a gaping plot hole, but we'll just roll with it.
After confessing to a murder she didn't commit she refused to give a reason as to why she murdered Paulino.
Again, illogical.
I get that she doesn't want to involve the governor, and she didn't have to. She had a PERFECTLY good reason to kill Paulino without the governor's name being mentioned at all. The creep was a RAPIST!!! But I guess we can't broach such a topic in 1933. Had she said she was defending herself, or that she thought he was going to attack her again she could've gotten off, or at least gotten a significantly reduced sentence. Why in the world would she not offer up such a defense? A child could've come up with something better than "I refuse to say why I murdered him."
Then, to convolute things further, she was being prosecuted by John Grant who helped her dispose of the body! This guy could've gone soft on her in court even if he did keep his criminal behavior secret. And make no mistake about it, even though he was the moral voice of this awful movie, he was a criminal. It's called accessory after the fact.
He could've gone easy on her or even slipped her a plausible defense so that she would given a lighter sentence, but he didn't. Cheater, governor, and coward, Dick Crawford, the real murderer, could've pardoned her, but he didn't. Dick Crawford took his own life for his cowardice. John, however, saw it best that he preach to Dick's widow about forgiving Nora for seeing her husband--which I thought was hypocritical, self-serving, and didactic.
Here is a man who helped put an innocent woman in the electric chair now lecturing Crawford's widow about letting go of her beef with her husband's mistress because of what the mistress went through. Regardless of how much of a ball-breaker he tried to make the widow out to be, she was still wronged and she had every right to be upset. She wasn't a guilty party in all this. Dick, her husband, was. Paulino the rapist was. John the D. A. was. But not Mrs. Crawford (Claire Du Brey).
In fact, I wanted her to air the dirty laundry. It wasn't going to make Nora look any worse because she died as a convicted murderer. What it would've done was expose her trifling husband and her coward brother, and quite possibly expose Paulino. But no. John convinced her to burn the letters so that everyone's sins would be forever hidden.
So I say that this movie missed the mark terribly. It was frustratingly off base and it was only made worse by the horrendous and overbearing soundtrack. There was no "sin" of Nora Moran, she was the only sinless character in this. The "sin" lay at the feet of Paulino, Dick, and John who all took something from Nora and they ultimately took her life.
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