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The Wet Parade (1932) Review · 6.2/10 | Dbcult

6.2/10

The Wet Parade Review: A Pre-Code Mess That's Hard to Look Away From

Author

Senior Film Conservator

26 May 2026

2 min read

A definitive 6.2/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. The Wet Parade remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.

Is The Wet Parade worth your afternoon? Only if you love dusty pre-code movies that feel like a chaotic, two-hour public service announcement.

Classic film buffs will enjoy seeing a young Myrna Loy, but anyone expecting a modern, balanced story will probably turn it off after twenty minutes.

The Wet Parade scene — Scene from The Wet Parade

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wet Parade (1932) through its definitive frames.

The whole thing is basically Upton Sinclair screaming at you about the evils of liquor. 🍷

We start before Prohibition, watching two different families get absolutely ruined by booze.

The Wet Parade scene — Scene from The Wet Parade

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wet Parade (1932) through its definitive frames.

Walter Huston plays a southern gentleman who drinks so much he can barely stand. His performance is incredibly loud.

There is this one scene where he stumbles down some stairs, and it feels like it lasts for five minutes. He's just flailing his arms and groaning.

The Wet Parade scene — Scene from The Wet Parade

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wet Parade (1932) through its definitive frames.

Then we jump to New York, where Lewis Stone plays another drunk who eventually walks out into a blizzard to end it all. It's pretty dark for a movie from 1932.

But once Prohibition actually starts, the movie gets way weirder.

The Wet Parade scene — Scene from The Wet Parade

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wet Parade (1932) through its definitive frames.

Suddenly, it's a crime thriller about bootleggers and bad moonshine.

And then... Jimmy Durante shows up. He plays a prohibition agent who cracks jokes while people are literally dying of wood alcohol poisoning.

The Wet Parade scene — Scene from The Wet Parade

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Wet Parade (1932) through its definitive frames.

It feels super jarring, like they shoved a vaudeville act into a funeral.

It has that same clunky, transition-era MGM feel you get in parts of The Big House.

Robert Young plays the romantic lead, and he gets blinded by some bad liquor near the end. The makeup team just painted his eyelids white, and it looks so fake it's hard not to laugh.

Myrna Loy is the only person who seems to be acting in a real movie. She has this quiet, tired look in her eyes that actually feels human.

By the end, the film doesn't really know what it wants to say. It hates alcohol, but it also shows that the law is a total joke.

It is a messy, deeply hypocritical piece of cinema, but I kind of loved how chaotic it got.