Theology has not given
adequate attention to the
social idealizations of evil... The new thing in the
social gospel is the clearness and insistence with which it sets forth the necessity and the possibility of redeeming the historical life of humanity from the
social wrongs which now pervade it... The
social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern
conscience.
Nevertheless, the film's U-turn is so radical that it arguably transforms They Drive By Night into one of the U.S. cinema's earliest experiments in portmanteau —
adequate absolution, really, for this borderline
social -
conscience picture's zany mutation into a gothic melodrama.