True Confession **** (1937, Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, John Barrymore, Una Merkel, Porter Hall, Edgar Kennedy, Lynne Overman) – Classic Movie Review 6,754

Great classic Thirties screwball comedy stuff, the 1937 film True Confession is vintage Carole Lombard, teamed again with Fred MacMurray.

Director Wesley Ruggles’s extremely entertaining 1937 screwball comedy is Carole Lombard’s fourth movie with Fred MacMurray, in which honest lawyer Kenneth Bartlett (MacMurray) gets his wife Helen (Lombard) off a charge of killing her boss Otto Krayler (John Murray) by a plea of self defence after circumstantial evidence points to her. Great classic stuff, True Confession is vintage Lombard.

[Spoiler alert] John Barrymore also stars as creepy criminologist Charley, who knows that Helen is actually a habitual liar, who has confessed to the killing just to make her husband Kenneth famous and successful, and tries to blackmail the couple after Helen is acquitted. Kenneth, who is naturally an unsuccessful lawyer because he is honest, knows about Helen’s pathological lying, so of course he thinks she is lying when she says she didn’t kill her boss.

The witty script’s high-spirited laughs get exuberant performances to match from three Thirties experts on their best form, as well as from a lovely bunch of support players – Una Merkel, Porter Hall, Edgar Kennedy, Lynne Overman, Fritz Feld, Irving Bacon and Richard Carle.

And director Ruggles takes it all at speed, and does not ever let up with the pace, and it is admirably brief, running just 84 minutes, brevity being the soul of wit.

Claude Binyon’s effervescent screenplay is based on a French play, Mon Crime, by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr. Remade as Cross My Heart.

Also in the cast are Tom Dugan, Garry Owen, Toby Wing, Hattie McDaniel, Pat West, Dudley Clements and Chester Clute.

True Confession is directed by Wesley Ruggles, runs 84 minutes, is made and released by Paramount, is written by Claude Binyon, is shot in black and white by Ted Tetzlaff, is produced by Albert Lewin, and is scored by Frederick Hollander.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6,754

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