This Day and Age

A group of teenage vigilantes take the law into their own hands in director Cecil B. DeMille’s rarely seen pre-code crime thriller, This Day and Age. When racketeer Louis Garrett (Charles Bickford) murders a tailor who refused to pay for protection, an enraged gang of high school youths demands the killer’s arrest. When a phony alibi leads to Garrett’s release, the students make plans to kidnap the murderer and try the gangster themselves. Considered decades ahead of its time, this shocker would be DeMille’s final foray into contemporary social drama before devoting himself to the spectacular epics for which the director is best remembered.