Tongue in Cheek

Carole Lombard: The Glamour Collection: Disc 4- True Confessions (1937) is a bit of fluff, a bagatelle. Right up our alley.

Carole Lombard is the young wife of Fred MacMurray, a poor but honest lawyer. In the opening scene we see him refuse to defend a man accused of stealing a truckload of hams - because he can't pay until he sells the hams. Lombard, on the other hand, is not honest at all. She is an aspiring writer and inveterate liar. When she gets the urge to lie, we see her frown and thrust her tongue in her cheek. She sort of oversells this "tell", but on her, it's cute. She gets her friend to ditch work and come see her by saying that she took the wrong pills and is feeling faint. When her friend Una Merkel gets there, it turns out she just wanted to tell her about the job she has taken, as secretary for a rich man, at a ridiculous salary. At least Merkel knows what's coming.

The butler at the rich man's home (and office) is Fritz Feld, acting all arch and knowing. The rich man is John T. Murray, looking very George Saunders. He chases her around the desk a little, and she slaps him and runs out, leaving her hat and purse. When she comes back with Merkel as moral support, she finds the police. Murray has been shot, and Lombard is arrested by Edgar Kennedy, the slow burn guy.

Since Murray is a lawyer, he will be defending her. He thinks he can get her off on self-defense. She insists that she didn't do it, but he doesn't think the court will accept that. So her tongue goes back in her cheek and she "confesses".

A drunken fop and "criminological genius", John Barrymore, sits next to Una Merkel every day at the trial, making himself obnoxious and insisting that Lombard will fry. The prosecutor, Porter Hall (who looks like what R. Crumb was going for), is pulling out all the stops. But MacMurray's lawyering and Lombard's skill at tale-spinning get her acquitted.

In the last act, Lombard and MacMurray are no longer poor. She has written a best seller about her travails, and he is now a well-respected defense counsel. They have a lakeside house and Hattie McDaniel as a maid. But MacMurray isn't happy - he can't stand the idea that his wife is a murderer, even if justified. So she tells him the truth - and now he feels even worse, because everything he's done has been a lie. And then Barrymore shows up to blackmail them, claiming to be the real murderer.

The plot to this is a little wobbly, but the number of great character actors, along with Lombard and MacMurray, make it totally worthwhile. Two complaints: Fritz Feld disappears after his one scene, and MacMurray has a dreadful pencil thin moustache. Not really a good look.

Once I saw the lake setting - filmed night for night, it looked like - I realized that we had seen part of this before. We came early to the second part of a double bill at the Stanford and saw the end of this. It looked like it would be fun then, and it was.