True Confession

I think a whole lot of people don't really get this film from the reviews I'm reading. Carol Lombard who likes to spin tall tales of exaggeration is married to poor, but honest lawyer Fred MacMurray and tries her best to help.

The key scene here in True Confessions is right at the beginning when Lombard fetches MacMurray a client who happens to be guilty. Someone should have told Fred that only Perry Mason can afford to represent innocent clients only. So when he declines to be a lawyer for a man who will pay him out of the stolen hams he swiped from a butcher shop, Carol decides that he needs a name acquittal to gain him clients.

When she goes for a job with lecherous millionaire John Murphy who later winds up dead and circumstantial evidence points to her, she 'confesses' kind of, sort of to exasperated police detective Edgar Kennedy. It's enough to get her arrested and her husband his first real client.

It's all kind of dumb, but Lombard's scheme is right out of the Lucy Ricardo playbook. The trial is one for the books as well with District Attorney Porter Hall letting victory slip through his fingers.

Another character pops in to almost upset the applecart. John Barrymore who was cast in the part at Lombard's request to repay the debt she owed him from Twentieth Century plays a 'criminologist' down on his luck who comes across some key evidence that could upset everyone's plans. Sadly though Barrymore does a great job in the part, he's really not acting at all. The role is a caricature of what Barrymore had become. But it was a payday and I'm sure he was grateful to Lombard somewhat.

Playing Ethel to Lombard's Lucy is Una Merkel, a role she'd done before and would again. Lombard's 'True Confession' scene with Kennedy is a priceless one.

I'm sure Fred MacMurray felt in this last of four films in which they were paired that Carole had a lot of 'Splaining to do'.