by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Turner Classic Movies showed True Confession last night as part of their all-day “Summer Under
the Stars” tribute to Carole Lombard — one of her lesser-known films and, it
turned out, one of her best. Made for Paramount in 1937 — the last film she
owed them under contract (afterwards she’d become a free-lancer and work all
over Hollywood until her death in 1942) — it was released December 24, 1937,
less than a month after Lombard’s just previous film, Nothing Sacred. This perturbed Nothing Sacred’s producer, David O. Selznick, who was worried that True
Confession might harm Nothing
Sacred at the box office because both films
cast Lombard as a woman at the center of a highly publicized hoax. Despite
less-than-legendary talent behind the cameras (the director was Wesley Ruggles
and the screenwriter was Claude Binyon, adapting a 1934 French play called Mon
Crime — “My crime” — by Louis Verneuil and
Georges Berr) True Confession
emerged as a comic masterpiece, casting Lombard as wanna-be writer Helen
Bartlett. She’s married to compulsively honest attorney Kenneth Bartlett (Fred
MacMurray, oddly outfitted with one of those thin “roo” moustaches that in
1930’s movies generally signaled that the wearer was a man up to no good), who
refuses to represent clients that aren’t genuinely innocent. There’s a nice
opening scene establishing that about him: he gets a visit from an underworld
type who’s accused of stealing hams, but who swears he didn’t do it until it
comes time to negotiate Kenneth’s fee, whereupon the would-be client says, “I
can’t pay you right away — I have to sell the hams first.” Thanks to Kenneth’s
compulsive honesty, Helen’s typewriter is about to be repossessed — and she
concocts a preposterous series of excuses to keep that from happening, first
summoning her best friend Daisy McClure (Una Merkel) from work by (falsely)
telling her she’s accidentally taken poison, then telling the repo man that
Kenneth is crazy and thinks the typewriter is their baby, and when Kenneth
arrives in the middle of all this she tells her husband that the repo man is
Daisy’s boyfriend.
That’s a pretty good indication of how Helen works
throughout the entire movie, whose main intrigue emerges when, to make more
money for the family but without her husband finding out (like a typical 1930’s
movie married man, he hates the idea of his wife working because that means he
can’t support her on his own), she takes a job as “private secretary” for a
family friend, Otto Krayler (John T. Murray), who wants her to work three hours
a day, five days a week — though he also wants her available for weekends out
of town. Since Helen types with two fingers and can’t take shorthand at all
(though she says she’s willing to learn), it’s pretty obvious to us in the
audience what Otto really wants
her for — and when that becomes obvious to Helen as well she flees the scene,
leaving her hat, coat and purse behind. Later she enlists Daisy to return with
her to Otto’s to retrieve her stuff, but instead she discovers the place is
crawling with cops (one of whom is Edgar Kennedy, in a marvelous “turn” that
proves he could be funny in his own right and wasn’t just a comic foil for Laurel and Hardy and the Marx
Brothers) and Otto is dead, shot with a gun registered to Kenneth Bartlett —
one Helen had taken with her to work intending to pawn for more spending money.
Kenneth naturally agrees to take his wife’s case, but when he laments that it
would be easier to win her acquittal if he argued that she shot Otto to fend
off his lecherous attacks than it would be to say she didn’t kill him at all,
Helen takes that and runs with it big-time. Over the objections of a manic
prosecutor (Porter Hall), Kenneth and Helen re-enact the alleged self-defense
shooting in court and win her acquittal — and the notoriety of the case earns
her a contract to write her life story for a major newspaper and has clients
beating down his door for his legal services. They buy a resort home in the
mountains — where they’re confronted by alcoholic ex-criminologist Charlie
Jasper (John Barrymore, who got third billing even though he doesn’t appear
until midway through the film), who tries to blackmail them by offering to sell
them Otto Krayler’s wallet. Jasper claims that he shot Krayler and threatens to expose Helen as a
fraud and get her prosecuted for perjury — and the revelation that his wife
lied and claimed responsibility for a killing she didn’t commit sends Kenneth
into a hissy-fit and makes him determined to leave her — until she wins him
back by yet another lie, claiming to be pregnant.
In a running time of just 84
minutes (for a story that in a modern movie would probably run at least an hour
longer than that!), True Confession
zips along at warp speed, offering laughs mainly from the relentlessness of
Lombard’s character (Robert Osborne in his intro suggested that Lombard’s
screwball characters influenced Lucille Ball — which they did and they didn’t;
Lombard and Ball were friends but Lombard generally played ditzes with a
crackbrained sort of intelligence while Ball’s “Lucy” character was more naïve
and silly) and the sheer preposterousness of the situation. Early on Charles
joked, “It’s like Preston Sturges directing The Public Enemy” — and though Binyon is the only screenwriter it
wouldn’t surprise me at all if Sturges had had a hand in the script. True
Confession is also a fascinating movie in
that it really pushes the envelope of the Production Code; at times —
especially when Helen’s predecessor as Otto’s “secretary,” blonde bimbo Suzanne
Baggart (Toby Wing, ex-Berkeley chorine), testifies in court and makes a
surprisingly lascivious comment about the services Otto wanted from both of them — it seems more like a movie from the
so-called “pre-Code” era than one from 1937. It also produced a title song, composed
by Frederick Hollander (Marlene Dietrich’s favorite composer) with words by Sam
Coslow, which is listed in the opening credits even though no one actually
sings it in the film and its melody is heard only as part of Hollander’s
background score.
