by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Remember Me,
Mommy? both my husband Charles and I were
getting tired of Lifetime movies, so we looked for something older and shorter
— and found it, ironically, in a 1945 “B” from PRC called The Lady
Confesses that anticipated enough of the
Lifetime clichés one could readily imagine Lifetime remaking it today. Written
by Irwin Frankyn (“original” story) and Helen Martin (screenplay), and directed
by the incredibly prolific Sam Newfield (whose brother, Sigmund Neufeld, was a
PRC producer — Sam “Anglicized” the name and Sigmund didn’t), The
Lady Confesses begins with Vicki McGuire
(Mary Beth Hughes, the superb femme fatale of Anthony Mann’s superb 1945 film noir The Great Flamarion but somewhat wasted here as a “good girl”), on the
eve of her marriage to playboy Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont — and naturally
Charles couldn’t help but make jokes about the contrast between his role here
and his most famous part as the father in the 1950’s TV sitcom Leave
It to Beaver), being confronted by a woman
who announces that she’s Larry Craig’s wife Norma (Barbara Slater) and that,
though she doesn’t want him back, she won’t let him marry Vicki — “or anyone
else!,” she adds menacingly. It seems that Larry and Norma had separated years
before, and then she disappeared and had been gone for six years and 10 months.
Larry was planning to go ahead with the marriage to Vicki because in just two
months Norma would have been gone for seven years and under New York law (the
story is set in New York City) he could have her declared dead and thus be free
to remarry. Only Norma turns up two months before the literal “deadline,” and
the next thing we learn she’s been killed for real, strangled with a thin wire
in her apartment. The cop assigned to the case is Detective Harmon (Edward
Howard), an avuncular figure with a penchant for letting himself in to the
homes and offices of the various suspects, including Vicki, without any of that
bothersome nonsense about a search warrant. The investigation centers around
the 7-11 Club, a night spot owned by sinister gambler Lucky Brandon (Edmund
MacDonald), where Larry Craig showed up the night of Norma’s murder already
inebriated (he’s drinking so heavily when we first see him we figure Vicki
would be better off not marrying him just because he’s an alcoholic!), falls
asleep in the dressing room of club singer Lucille Compton (Claudia Drake), and
as far as anyone knows stays asleep in that dressing room from 10:45 p.m. until
1 a.m., when the cops turn up at the 7-11 club looking for him to question him
about Norma’s murder. The film is surprisingly good for a PRC production, with
glimpses of film noir visual style
(enough that if Edgar G. Ulmer had directed instead of Sam Newfield, all the noir tricks he learned from working as a production
designer for Murnau and Lang in 1920’s Germany and the bizarre intensity he
brought to his PRC films Bluebeard, Out of the Night and especially Detour could have made this a masterpiece!) and a mystery
plot that for once is genuinely mysterious.
After pointing the finger of
suspicion at Brandon (who saw Larry Craig in the club the night of Norma’s
murder but told the police he didn’t) and Compton (until she becomes the second
victim, also strangled with a thin wire), the writers pull a genuine surprise
when [spoiler alert!] Larry Craig
turns out to be the killer after all. He carries around something that looks
like a tape-measure case that contains the thin wire that’s his murder weapon
of choice, and he shocks both Vicki and the audience by pulling it out and
threatening her with it until Detective Harmon comes along and saves her from
him. He originally killed Norma to get her out of the way so he could marry
Vicki, then killed the singer because she realized he hadn’t actually been sleeping a drunk off in her dressing
room all night, and finally felt he had to kill Vicki as well because she’d
figured him out. Like Lucille Ball — who played some fascinatingly “dark”
dramatic roles in her 1940’s feature films (Dance, Girl, Dance, The
Big Street, DuBarry Was a Lady, Lured and Easy
Living) before she got “typed” by the huge
success of I Love Lucy as a ditzy
comedienne on TV — Hugh Beaumont is surprisingly credible in the part,
especially once the mask comes off and he’s revealed as a killer, and this will
be a jolt to anyone who knows him just from his TV work. The film’s title is a
misnomer — no one actually “confesses” to anything in the film and the killer
is a man, not a “lady” — but The Lady Confesses is actually a quite good bit of dark melodrama
that’s missing only the last soupcon
of genius PRC’s best directors (Ulmer, Steve Sekely, Frank Wisbar — all
foreign-born) might have given it, but it’s still watchable and the
characterizations are strongly etched by both writers and actors even though
I’d rather watch Mary Beth Hughes as a bad girl than a good one!
