The Lady Confesses

Not having too much old stuff on the DVR thanks to recording a bunch of interesting things during the Showtime free preivew, I decided to look for something older by putting one of the DVDs from the Mill Creek crime/noir set into the DVD player. The selection was an ultra-cheap PRC (the studio probably best known for Detour) film, The Lady Confesses.

One of the women in the movie is Vicki McGuire (Mary Beth Hughes). She's the long-suffering girlfriend of one Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont, later of Leave It to Beaver), not because Craig was found in an airport bathroom, but because he's been waiting for the seven years to pass from the time his wife was declared missing so that she can now be declared dead and Larry can marry Vicki. But it turns out that Mrs. Craig isn't dead at all. And somehow, she's able to go right back to her old house and find where Larry's girlfriend lives, so she can visit said girlfriend and tell the girlfriend that she (Mrs. Craig) is never going to grant her husband a divorce. This being a B movie, none of this is explained very well if at all.

It's all enough to drive a man to drink, and Larry has gone to the 7-11 Club to get plastered. He sees the club manager, Lucky Brandon (Edmund MacDonald), as well as the club's singer, Lucille Compton (Claudia Drake). Lucille, seeing how drunk Larry is, lets him lie down in her dressing room for a while until he can sleep off the alcohol.

Some hours pass, and Vicki is finally able to figure out that Larry is at the club, getting the bartender and Lucille to get Larry to the phone. She of course never knew until know that Mrs. Craig wasn't dead at all, and wanted to talk to her boyfriend about that. Larry picks Vicki up and heads over to Mrs. Craig's residence, presumably to talk things over. But they get to Mrs. Craig's place where it seems like there's a party going on and everyone's invited. Only it isn't a party, it's the police because Mrs. Craig has finally been found dead. Of course, it was murder, which is a bit of a problem.

Larry has that alibi in that he was asleep in Lucille's dressing room. Vicki claims she was in her apartment all evening except for about a half hour when she nipped down the block to get a bite to ear. And Lucky? He was presumably at the club all night, but when Larry is called to the phone, he calls over to Lucky who doesn't answer, which makes Lucky look like a suspect too, especially when it's determined that he had connections to Mrs. Craig.

It goes on like this for just over an hour, which includes the time it takes to let Lucille sing a couple of songs. It's competently enough acted, but certainly nothing memorable, thanks to the screenplay or relative lack thereof. It tries to be too complicated for its own good and doesn't always make sense as a result. The being a Mill Creek box set, the print was also of relatively poor quality, but then, it was also a PRC movie so I wonder if there are any good prints out there.

People who want to see Ward Cleaver doing something completely different may get a kick out of The Lady Confesses, as may people who are looking for a B movie they've likely never heard of. But don't expect anything great here.