True Confession

I wanted to watch a relatively short movie the other night so that I could get to bed at a reasonable time, and decided to finish up the movies on the Carole Lombard box set I have by watching True Confession.

Lombard plays Helen Bartlett, a struggling writer married to equally struggling lawyer Kenneth (Fred MacMurray, with an odd mustache here). In the opening scene, we see that Helen is less than fully truthful, as she recommend her husband take up the defense of someone who is guilty as sin. Then she calls up her friend Daisy (Una Merkel) and gives her every lie in the book to blow off work and come visit her.

Helen decides to help make ends meet by taking a job as a secretary for the wealthy Krayler, even though she doesn't know how to take dictation and only hunts and pecks to type. It's obvious Krayler has other things in mind for her, but she takes the job anyway.

When she realizes what's up, she leaves and gets Daisy to go back to the apartment with her to get her purse and coat, but when they get back, they find that Krayler has been murdered! Even though we know Helen didn't do it, and she'd have an alibi in Daisy once the police and coroner determined Krayler's time of death, Helen decides she's going to confess to the crime so that her husband can defend her and get her off on a self-defense argument. (If the real truth came out, Helen could face perjury charges.) Once her husband wins the case, he'll be a successful lawyer and the money will come flowing in.

Sure enough, Helen is found not guilty, Kenneth becomes a successful lawyer, and Helen actually becomes a successful writer by writing about the case. But there's one small catch. A drunk turned self-styled "criminologist", Charley (John Barrymore), has a piece of evidence that would prove conclusively that Helen didn't kill Krayler. He's willing to blackmail the Bartletts to get a bunch of money so he can live high off the hog.

I found True Confession to be the weakest of the movies on the box set. The problem is in Lombard's character, who as one of those chronic liars who just keeps piling one lie on top of another, she's obnoxious and someone I wanted to see get her comeuppance. This is supposed to be a comedy, and that sort of obnoxiousness didn't really work here. Barrymore is also overacting shamelessly, and relatively irritating too. The deus ex machina that solves Helen and Kenneth's problems doesn't really work for me, either.

Still, I always like to suggest people just for themselves, and since this was on a very low-price box set, getting one dud in the set isn't that big a deal.