Recently I was looking through the streaming movie channels on my Roku box, and Cinevault Classics was about to show something that looked interesting, and that I hadn't heard of before, so I sat down to watch it. That movie was the 1958 version of The Whole Truth, a title common enough that there are other movies with the same title and completely different plots.
Stewart Grainger, back in his native Britain more or less, is the nominal star here. He plays Max Poulton, a movie producer whose marriage to his wife Carol (Donna Reed) is hitting a bit of a rough patch. That's in part because his work has him away from home a lot, with the current movie he's working on having him on the French Riviera, or what a British studio's backlot thought could pass for the French Riviera. That movie stars Italian actress Gina Bertini (Gianna Maria Bertale), and because they're both away from home, they spend some time together.
That time together blossoms into something a little more, but of course Max is married, and he's been thinking about trying to patch up his relationship with Carol. Gina, for her part, now has information she could use to blackmail Max, information that might help her advance her career. Max goes to her apartment hotel where she's staying during shooting, to try to deal with this headache. It leads to the sort of heated verbal dispute that the folks in the next apartment would be able to hear, and they'll definitely see Max coming and going.
Max returns home where his wife is hosting a soirée, and coming to that party is an uninvited guest, Carliss (George Sanders). Carliss wants to see Max alone, and informs him that he's from Scotland Yard and that, much more distressingly, Gina has been found stabbed to death! Carliss is going to be working with the French authorities, and starts to pump Max for information about when he last saw Gina and the like.
After the conversation, Max is understandably worried, since the evidence might point to him, even though he's presenting himself to the viewing audience as completely innocent of Gina's murder. But some of the evidence is all the stuff he's left at Gina's place. He goes there to retrieve it so that the police won't find it, and when he returns home, he finds among the guests at the party... Gina, very much not dead!
Max talks to Gina, and we learn that Gina is actually Mrs. Carliss, and that their marriage is estranged in part because her being an actress with some public flings has been bad for her husband's career as a publisher of religious textbooks. (Whatever, although he needs to be in some career where having a straying wife would be very bad PR.) This leads Max to suspect Corliss is lying about a lot. But then Gina winds up being murdered, for real this time, with the body being found in Max's car! Is Max really guilty, or did Carliss do it?
The Whole Truth isn't bad, but the whole thing feels like the sort of material that, in a later generation, would have been a TV movie of the week. In fact, reading about it reveals that the material was originally written as a teleplay for the BBC when they were this sort of live drama the way that US shows like Playhouse 90 or the like were putting on live teleplays. The material then got worked into a stage play, from which the resulting movie was lifted.
Everybody does as well as they can with the material, but, as I said above, it feels kind of lacking. This especially for poor Donna Reed, who doesn't have much to do at all. The casting of George Sanders also sets off a metaphorical flashing red light over him, as if to indicate "Bad guy! Bad guy! Bad guy!"
So, if you're looking through the Cinevault Classic listings and see this one come up again, definitely give it a chance, even if it's by no means the greatest thing any of the cast did.
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