Journal of a Crime

I mentioned both yesterday and Tuesday that there were two movies early Friday that I wanted to blog about. I did a post on The Silver Cord yesterday, so now I want to do the post on the other movie, Journal of a Crime, which is on TCM at 9:45 AM tomorrow.

Ruth Chatterton plays Françoise Moliet, upper-class Parisian wife of theater playwright/director Paul (Adolphe Menjou). In the opening scene, Françoise is standing outside the stage door one night waiting for everybody to come out, staying far enough away that she won't be seen by the people who do exit the theater. Eventually, Paul comes out, along with the play's lead actress, Odette (Claire Dodd). The conversation makes clear that Paul and Odette are having an affair. Further, Odette wants Paul to leave his wife, and he hasn't yet been able to bring himself to tell Françoise about the affair.

In the Moliets' bedroom, we see a night-stand between the two beds and that there is a gun in the drawer, because everybody in movies seemed to have a gun back in those days. Paul has decided he's going to tell Françoise about Odette in the morning. But when he wakes up, he finds that she's already gone. And the gun isn't in the drawer either. It's pretty darn obvious what Françoise is going to do.

Meanwhile, not far from the theater, career criminal Costelli is robbing a bank, something that results in his shooting one of the tellers dead. He escapes, going into the theater. We then see Odette getting shot during a rehearsal. The police come, all of the entrances are sealed, and the police quickly find Costelli, so it's no big stretch for them to conclude that Costelli killed Odette while trying to escape.

We know better, however, and soon enough Paul does as well because he finds his and Françoise's gun discarded in a bucket of water, as if nobody was ever going to find it. (I guess Françoise didn't have much time to think, and she might have guessed nobody would look there so she could get the gun later.) Paul knows what his wife did, but he doesn't tell the police, letting her suffer instead. Theoretically, Costelli is being wrongly convicted for a murder he didn't commit, but then there's a murder he did commit so being in jail for two murders is no worse than rightly being in jail for one murder. They can't un-guillotine him after the first murder so that they can guillotine him a second time for the second murder.

Journal of a Crime comes right at the end of the pre-Code era, having been released about three months before Joe Breen really began cracking down on Code enforcement. This is why Françoise can kinda-sorta get away with a murder even though she really doesn't. But the final resolution is a rather bizarre one and a bit of a cop-out at that. Still, the first 60 minutes or so of the movie are quite interesting with a psychological premise Hollywood didn't give us much in those days.

The last I checked, I couldn't find Journal of a Crime on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the TCM airing. It's definitely worth watching.