Down and Dirty in Gower Gulch: Poverty Row Films Preserved by UCLA
- The Sin of Nora Moran
- USA1933
- Phil Goldstone
- 65 DCP
- NR
- Poverty Row Films
Screening Dates
- April 11, 2019 8:15
- April 15, 2019 6:30
“Has the cracked logic of a dream, with subjectivity and chronology shifting underfoot … One of the most formally daring films to come out of Hollywood in the early sound era.”
Imogen Sara Smith, Film Comment
A head-spinning highlight of our Poverty Row series, this lurid melodrama has a feverish, surprisingly complex narrative structure that allegedly influenced Citizen Kane! The film relates the tawdry, told-in-flashback tale of fallen woman Nora (Zita Johann), a circus performer who becomes the lover of an ambitious politician, then winds up on death row for a murder she didn’t commit. The movie may be best known for its risqué theatrical poster, featuring art by Alberto Vargas, later famous for his “Vargas Girls” pin-ups for Esquire and Playboy.
“Haunting, hallucinatory, artistic, exploitative—this may be the best B‑film of the 1930s.” UCLA Film & Television Archive
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the Packard Humanities Institute
preceded by
Hearst Metrotone News, Vol. 4, No. 269 • USA 1933 • 9 min. Short newsreel
Balloon Land • USA 1935 • Ub Iwerks • 7 min. ComiColor Cartoons short