This Day and Age

A crude but efficient vigilante melodrama from the early sound days, and quite unlike the epics that came to be associated with DeMille, except in its reactionary nature. Bickford gives a powerful performance as a wealthy gangster who kills an old shopkeeper the local kids looked on as a friend; corrupt city officials do nothing, so a group of high school boys torture him into a confession (they hold him over a pit full of rats). Dismayingly fascistic, all the more so in that the action takes place during 'youth week', when the school kids temporarily assume positions of civic authority in the interests of learning how government works, and as such subject the gangster to 'trial'.