They Won't Believe Me (RKO, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 25) Turner Classic Movies presented on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying film called They Won’t Believe Me, a film noir (or at least a film gris, my term for a movie that attempts to be noir but doesn’t quite make it) directed by Irving Pichel from a script by Jonathan Latimer based on a story by Gordon McDonell. It stars Robert Young as Larry Ballentine, who married a woman named Greta (Rita Johnson) for her money and then cut a swath through any of the ranks of humanity that were young, female, and sexually available. The original poster said of Young’s character, “He lived a lie that led him from one disastrous love to another!,” and for once the original poster got it right. His first extra-relational partner, at least the first one we see, is Janice Bell (Jane Greer), a staffer for a photo magazine whom he romances in New York. Unwilling to break up Larry’s marriage, Janice requests that the magazine transfer her to Montréal. Larry insists he’ll follow her there and divorce Greta so the two can get together, but Greta finds his train ticket, deduces his plans, and ends up on the train with them. Greta offers to buy Larry a one-quarter interest in a brokerage in Los Angeles run by a man named Trenton (Tom Powers). He slacks off on his job because he’s too busy cruising Trenton’s secretary, Verna Carlson (Susan Hayward), though Verna saves Larry’s bacon at the company by writing a letter to a major client, in Larry’s name, proposing a new investment strategy. Eventually Larry and Verna start dating even though Trenton, a bachelor, is also interested in her and Larry and Verna have to sneak around behind both Trenton’s and Greta’s backs to see each other. Greta discovers the affair and responds by buying her and Larry a house from an old Spanish land grant in Tulare County, California, where she keeps them isolated from all other humanity, especially all other female humanity. But her plan to isolate him goes awry when she decides to have a guest house on the property so her aunt, Martha Hines (Lillian Bronson), who despises Larry, can stay with them. This gives Larry an excuse to drive to L.A., ostensibly to meet with the architect for the addition but really to see Verna again. Ultimately Larry and Verna work out a plan whereby the two will run off together to Nevada, Larry will divorce Greta, and he and Verna will get together. To finance their new life, Larry decides to loot $25,000 from the $30,000 he and Greta have in a joint bank account, though Verna virtuously tears up the check.

Unfortunately, on their way to Nevada, their car crashes into an out-of-control truck (its driver got a flat tire). Larry survives the accident but Verna is incinerated when the car catches fire and explodes. The cops find a cheap brass wedding band Verna had bought at a drugstore and tell Larry that’s all that’s left of her. Larry decides to pass off Verna’s remains as Greta’s, so he’s now officially a widower in full possession of Greta’s fortune even though Greta is still alive. At least we think that’s what’s happened, but in the meantime Greta has read Larry’s note saying he’s leaving her and she responds by … well, it’s not clear whether she deliberately commits suicide or just dies accidentally in an isolated section of the ranch, but either way she’s really most sincerely dead. Larry deduces the location of her body and tosses it into a nearby stream. Unfortunately for Larry, his former partner Trenton has decided to go all Javert on him; Trenton is convinced Larry murdered Verna and recruits Janice Bell (ya remember Janice Bell?) to return to L.A. and romance Larry to get his secrets from him. Larry falls for it and resumes his affair with Janice until he overhears her and Trenton talking about the plan. Trenton and two L.A. police detectives he’s contacted end up discovering the nearly lifeless body of Greta’s favorite horse, a white Palomino, still alive but with both front legs broken. The cops shoot the horse to put it out of its misery and then discover a human female body, which they assume is Verna’s instead of Greta’s since Greta had already been ruled legally dead in or near Nevada and the body is too badly decomposed to make identification possible. All this is narrated by Larry Ballentine himself during his trial for Verna’s murder, and in a surprise ending [spoiler alert!] Larry becomes convinced that the jury will find him guilty. He tries to evade justice by throwing himself out of a window in the multi-story courthouse, and just after he’s dead, irony of ironies, the jury’s verdict is read in court and it’s “not guilty.” In Jonathan Latimer’s original script the ending is clearly depicted as a suicide, but the Production Code Administration ruled that RKO and its producer, Joan Harrison, couldn’t have Larry evade justice by killing himself. Instead Larry is killed by a trigger-happy bailiff who “reads” his suicide attempt as an escape and shoots him to death in the courtroom.

I’d seen They Won’t Believe Me once before in the 1970’s and hadn’t liked it. I still don’t like it, partly because Robert Young is just too smarmy to be believable as a cad character (George Sanders would have been ideal for the role, even though audiences would have “read” him too soon) and partly because it’s like a modern movie in that none of the characters are particularly likable. One thing I didn’t know about the movie is that I’d previously seen it only in an 80-minute cut version prepared by RKO in the 1950’s so they could use the film as a “B” second feature on double bills. The version on TCM last night was a restored master of the original 95-minute release version. Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” introduction made a great deal of the fact that the film was produced by a woman, Joan Harrison, who had “made her bones” as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant both in Britain and the U.S. Then she got a producing contract on her own at Universal and had a major hit with Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), a major noir based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Alas, she ran afoul of both the Production Code Administration and Universal’s own preview system on her next project, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), and instead of the morbid ending of the Thomas Job play she was adapting, the studio forced her to accept the old chestnut: “It was all a dream!” Harrison bailed on Universal and signed with RKO, where she produced a number of interesting noirs, including Nocturne (1946) and, on a one-shot return to Universal, Ride the Pink Horse (1947), before her producing career ended in 1951. She was bailed out by her former employer, Alfred Hitchcock, who used her and Norman Lloyd (a one-time actor who’d played the villain in Hitchcock’s 1942 film Saboteur) as co-producers of his long-running TV series.

Muller tried to make a case that owing to Harrison’s presence as a producer, this film had more dimensional female characters than your average noir, and instead of a femme fatale it had an homme fatal in Robert Young’s character. I’d previously used the phrase homme fatal to describe Bruno Anthony, Robert Walker’s character in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), a far, far better movie than They Won’t Believe Me and one that’s considerably kinkier in that the character Bruno ruins with his seductive attentions is also a male. Muller argued that a male producer like Jerry Wald (who salvaged James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce as a Production Code-filmable property by adding a murder Cain didn’t write) or Mark Hellinger could have strong-armed the Production Code people into accepting the original suicide ending of They Won’t Believe Me but a woman like Harrison couldn’t, which seems dubious to me. When it was new They Won’t Believe Me got mixed reviews; James Agee wrote in Time that the film was “a skillful telling of a pretty nasty story ... Thanks to the fact that the ice was broken with ... Double Indemnity, Hollywood can now get by with filming this kind of shabby ‘realism.’ The blessing is mixed ... in this, as in most such ‘adult’ movies, the semi-maturity is well mixed with trashiness.” Robert Young himself recalled in 1968 that They Won’t Believe Me was his only villain role, and the only movie he made that was a box-office flop. (Apparently he’d forgotten his other villain role in Hitchcock’s 1936 British production, The Secret Agent, a major British hit.) The reputation of They Won’t Believe Me has improved in recent years, but it’s still not a movie I care for; Young’s acting is just annoying and the women in his life aren’t much better, though at least Susan Hayward and Jane Greer are electrifying given what they had to work with and this film helped Greer land her next big role as a femme fatale in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past – another film I find overrated. Though Eddie Muller regards Out of the Past as the quintessential film noir, I’d give that honor to Murder, My Sweet (1944), director Edward Dmytryk’s and writer John Paxton’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Dick Powell’s breakthrough role as an actor and noir icon.