After this past week's Tuesday TV Touchbase focus on Spider Noir, let's turn back to the clock to 1947 for a film noir about adultery, greed, deception and death.
It's... Movie Time!
Released in 1947, the film is called They Won't Believe Me, starring Robert Young, Susan Hayward, Jane Greer and Rita Johnson.
The film producer was Alfred Hitchcock's longtime assistant and collaborator Joan Harrison, a rare thing in that era for a movie to have a female producer.
The movie begins with a man on trial... for murder!
As we will discover, the man is guilty of many things.
Is one of them...murder?
They Won't Believe Me begins with a murder trial.
We begin in New York City: Larry is married to Greta, a marriage held together more by money and security than by love or at least that's how Larry tells it.
Writer Janice Bell has become Larry's confidant and more. Tired of being the other woman, Janice is ready to start over in Montreal.
Larry tells Janice he is prepared to leave Greta and run off with Janice to Montreal.
But Greta has other ideas. She knows about Janice and isn't prepared to give up on Larry without a fight. She's purchased a home in Los Angeles and secured him a position with a brokerage firm there. Larry has no choice but to abandon Janice (with no good-bye or explanation) and stay with Greta.
In Los Angeles with his wife in a new home and a new job, Larry tries to behave himself.
Until brokerage employee Verna Carlson comes sniffing around. Larry gets into some trouble with his business partner Trenton over a client but Verna bails Larry out.
Verna does not hide her aspirations: she admits to being a gold digger and she has her eyes on Larry. Yeah, Trenton has more money but Larry is younger, more handsome and he does all right for himself.
Verna is seducing Larry.
Larry lets her.
And Larry enters into another adulterous relationship.
Which Greta finds out about and gives Larry another ultimatum. She's moving from L.A. to a ranch house in the mountains. Larry can follow her or stay in the city with Verna.
Larry once more choose money and security over his passions and abandons Verna for Greta and a life of solitude in the mountains.
Which sucks.
Maybe Greta is all up for horse riding along the ravine or planting her garden and what all but Larry is bored.
Larry gets itchy for Verna. They hook up with a plan to steal money from Greta and start life over somewhere else. Larry promises to get a divorce from Greta and marry Verna. He even jumps the gun and puts a wedding band on her finger.
While driving down a highway at night, an out of control oncoming truck causes Larry's car to spin out and crash. Larry is able to extricate himself from the wreckage but before anything can be done to help Verna, the car explodes in a big ball of fire.
Waking up in a hospital with a concussion, Larry learns the authorities assume the horribly burned remains in the car was his wife Greta since all they could recover from the bones and ashes was a gold wedding ring.
Larry doesn't correct this assumption.
Larry returns to the ranch house to eliminate Greta before anyone knows she's still alive.
While he was gone, Greta fell down a steep ravine near the house and died. So he doesn't have to murder her. But there's the problem of the body which he dumps into the river.
Larry books it to South America where he just happens to run into Janice Bell. They reconcile and hook up, returning together to Los Angeles.
Where Larry learns running into Janice was not a coincidence. She's working for Trenton who's wondering what the hell happened to Verna and just knows Larry is up to shit.
Trenton calls the police and they start poking around, finding Greta's dead body in the river. Except since the official account is that the burned up body of Verna from the car wreck was Greta, the police assume the body of Greta is Verna.
Everybody got that?
And we're back in the present where a spent and weary Larry Ballentine has ended his tragic tale of stupidity and deception (but not murder). It's time for the jury to deliberate.
Back in court the next day, the verdict is about to be read.
When Larry makes a break for it to jump out the open 12th floor window. A courtroom guard runs over to the window to pull him back in shoots him.
Larry Ballentine is dead.
And the verdict? Not guilty.
And we've reach... THE END!
What the hell? Really? That is how it ends? C'mon! You gotta be kidding me!
In the novel on which this movie is based, Larry does jump out the window to commit suicide. He may not have been guilty of murder but his actions still led to the deaths of two women.
And all the sordid details of his life,the adultery, the lies, the fraud have been exposed and he is not prepared to live with it.
But the motion picture production code mandates that a character cannot escape punishment by the state for his crimes so the ending was changed to have the courtroom guard shoot Larry.
Even though the guard had more than enough time to cross the room and physically stop Larry from tumbling out the window.
It's not 2026 and he's not an ICE thug. It's 1947 and he's a courtroom guard, for crying out loud.
Let's take a look at who starred in this fershlugginer thing.
Robert Young who played Larry Ballentine was one of the three Bobs in Crossfire along with Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum.
The role of Larry Balletine was a rare outing for Young to play a total cad. Most of the time, he played friendly, genial characters. This was especially true of his time on TV in such shows as Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby MD.
Robert Young told Dick Cavett in 1968 that the one film he made that was a flop was when he played an unlikeable character in They Won't Believe Me.
Susan Hayward was Verna Carlson. Susan appeared in this blog before co-starring with Robert Mitchum (him again) in The Lusty Men.
Jane Greer was Janice Bell, Larry's writer friend and first illicit paramour at the start of the film. Jane is another (one more time!) Robert Mitchum co-star in the film noir Out Of the Past where she embrace the role of the classic femme fatale archetype.
Greta Ballentine was played by Rita Johnson who had a tragic back story worthy of it's own film noir.
Rita Johnson suffered a head trauma on September 6, 1948 that required brain surgery. The cause of the injury was subject to gossip and speculation, including her boyfriend had beaten her. Rita herself claimed a large, industrial-grade hair dryer at her apartment had fallen on her.
She was in a coma for two weeks and it took over a year after that to recover. Her left side was paralyzed temporarily and she had to re-learn how to walk. Her subsequent film career was severely curtailed due to reduced mobility and lack of mental focus.
Johnson struggled with alcoholism. She died of a brain hemorrhage on October 31, 1965, at age 52.
Back to the movie...
Writing for Time magazine in 1947, critic James Agee was a ready to pronounce a moral judgement on the film, a not uncommon trait among movie reviewers of the era.
"A skillful telling of a pretty nasty story ... Thanks to the fact that the ice was broken with ... Double Indemnity, Hollywood can now get by with filming this kind of shabby 'realism'. The blessing is mixed ... in this, as in most such 'adult' movies, the semi-maturity is well mixed with trashiness."
A lot of people of the era were not prepared to deal with the moral ambivalence of film noir. The protagonist is not necessarily a heroic character. Even a private eye or a police detective who is not on the take will be flawed and make some ethically questionable choices.
They Won't Believe Me turns that premise competely on it's head. Larry Ballentine is nothing but ethically questionable choices, blatantly using women for money (wife Greta) or sex (Janice and Verna), betraying them when the lure of one thing (money or sex) is stronger than the other. And his cowardice follows him as he fails to follow through on any commitment to his desires.
The only redeeming thing about Larry Ballentine is at the end of his confession to the jury and exposed himself of the self serving cad he is, he sees himself for who he is and he doesn't like it. But even then, he reveals himself once more a coward as he seeks to take his own life rather than face the consequences of his actions.
They Won't Believe Me is an intriguing case study in the human damages of one bad decision after another.
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