The World Gone Mad is a classic mystery story. It's somewhat obscure and not likely to have you rushing out to discuss it with all your friends, but it's an enjoyable old flick.

 

A District Attorney is murdered after uncovering a massive stock fraud and is framed for the very crime he was investigating with his reputation as a husband tarnished at the same time. His circle of friends includes a detective and a reporter who have set out to clear their late friend’s name and close his case. When the new DA, Lionel, takes over it’s anyone’s guess if he will fold under the pressure or suffer the same fate as his predecessor.

 

It turns out to be a fairly good mystery if sometimes cliché. The framing of the DA is good, but not everything is original. The common cliché is mostly in the form of the template of conflict between the accuser (always male – Lionel in this case), the accused (also always male – Grover this time), and the accused’s daughter (Diane) who has up to this point been in love with the accuser (Lionel) but can’t tolerate him suggesting her father (Grover) has done evil regardless of the evidence. There’s no telling how many movies I just described with that pattern, but I could name a handful just off the top of my head.

 

To summarize it in more precise terms (hopefully slightly less confusing): it’s the new DA, Lionel, who comes to suspect Diane’s father as complicit in the fraud, murder of former DA Henderson, framing of the victim, and staging of the adulterous acts Henderson supposedly committed. It’s not that The World Gone Mad does a bad job with this idea, it’s just that it seems to be frequently used. Although, to be fair, this one predates most of the examples I could name.

 

Most of the performances here are good though not necessarily always great. Sometimes they get a little goofy / corny. The domestic scenes with Henderson’s kid and wife/widow seem to be trying too hard to go for a Shirley Temple feel and come across poorly. Worse than that are the parts when it tries to be humorous and fails, eliciting groans instead of laughs.

 

The plot can be hard to follow partially because of the large cast. We’ve got the detective, the reporter, 2 DA’s, their close relations, and that’s just the good guys! Throw in the variety of crimes I listed earlier, some romance, and the conflict between Lionel and Diane over her father, and you’ve got yourself a complex, twisting plot that can get to feeling like too much without enough structure behind it.

 

The story goes so all over the place that it ended up not really sticking in my mind once it was over. Although I enjoyed it when I first saw it, trying to remember the details to review it flabbergasted me. I had to watch it a second time to remember any of the details. A multi-faceted plot is fine and dandy if it’s strong enough to stick in the viewer’s memory. This one doesn’t, but just the same I enjoyed sitting through it a second time.