The Lady Confesses (1945)

The greatest movie ever made..!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Shortly before she is to be married, a young woman gets a visit from her fiancé's wife, who had been missing for seven years and presumed dead. Soon both the girl and her fiancé find themselves mixed up with a crooked nightclub owner, gangsters and murder.It's a nifty little very low budget film.Will keep your interest more or less.Not sure why they cant make these sorts of movies today. With video being so cheap it should be a shoe in.Guess no one is writing this stuff anymore.Best part -- the guy who played the father on the TV show Dennis the Menance is in it!

This low budget PRC epic is a modestly entertaining murder mystery about a man who strangles women. "Dead Men Walk" director Sam Newfield and scenarists Helen Martin and Irwin Franklyn pull off one of the oldest and slickest tricks in the mystery genre: the use of the red herring. The big surprise in "The Lady Confesses" occurs well past the half-way point of what seems like a grown-up version of a Nancy Drew mystery.Vicki McGuire (Mary Beth Hughes of "The Oxbow Incident") is planning to marry Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont of "The Blue Dahlia") when his long lost wife Norma (Barbara Slater of "Monsieur Verdoux") shows up to tell her that the marriage won't happen. According to Larry, his wife Norma and he haven't laid eyes on each other in seven years. Larry plans to wed Vicki until Norma throws a monkey wrench into the works. No sooner has Norma been in town than she is killed. The police learn that she was strangled by a wire. This sounds like a precursor to a 1970's Italian murder mystery. Captain Brown (Emmett Vogan of "Ride, Vaquero!") starts snooping around town to see whose alibi won't hold water. Everybody at a local night club--Club 711--assures the captain that Larry was passed out in the singer's room when the murder occurred. The catch is that nobody actually saw Larry Craig sleeping off a drunk on a couch. During a scene in a restaurant, Larry explains to Captain Brown that Norma inherited her money from her mother. Meanwhile, the most suspicious person, night club owner Lucky Brandon (Edmund MacDonald of "Detour") behaves even more suspiciously. All of this prompts Vicki to launch her own investigation and Captain Brown doesn't dissuade her from acting like a sleuth. The surprise is actually a matter of performance because the last person that you think murdered Norma is the last person you should suspect.

By the humble standards of both director Sam Newfield and bottom-rung distributor P.R.C., The Lady Confesses (irrelevant title but catchy) shapes up as an outstanding little film noir. The screenplay is reasonably gripping and intriguing, the players (particularly the four leads: Hughes, Beaumont, MacDonald and Drake) are all on the ball, and more importantly both director Sam Newfield (I'd rate this as his best film) and photographer Jack Greenhalgh give it their best college try, using lots of effective close-ups, framed against noirishly glossy, black backgrounds. Even Emmett Vogan (minus his usual trademark glasses) comes across with reasonable conviction, while Dewey Roninson makes the most of his comparatively large role as an over-buoyant bartender. My only complaint is that all three of Claudia Drake's pleasing song numbers are either cut short or interrupted by the demands of the swift-moving plot.

The Lady Confesses doesn't have a lot going for it, except for plot, and even that's pretty hackneyed. But it's foolish to expect more from a 64-minute cheapie from Producers Releasing Corporation starring Mary Beth Hughes and Hugh Beaumont (later to grasp immortality as The Beaver's dad). Nonetheless, there have been worse programmers.After a seven year absence (unexplained to us), Beaumont's wife suddenly shows up, putting the kibosh on his plans to marry Hughes. Soon after her return, alas, she's found garotted. Beaumont, the prime suspect, has an alibi: he was passed out in the dressing room of a nightclub singer. Hughes, in the plucky style of the 40s, cops a job as a roving photographer in the club to dig up clues. What she turns up, however, brings her into peril....The Lady Confesses has been called noir by virtue of its era and its setting, but it's really more of a quick-and-dirty mystery thriller with its roots in the previous decade. The director, Sam Newfield, started out in silents and directed a whole passel of forgettable Westerns before catching up with the emerging noir style of the post-war years. He retains the dubious distinction of having directed Beaumont in nine films.