One Girl's Confession

This movie has everything: murder, deception, the big house, hidden loot, a fisherman in love with a dame, and the dame, Cleo Moore. Cleo tries to right a wrong against her deceased father by stealing money gotten under suspicious means by her boss and her father's supposed friend. When he calls the law on her, she refuses to tell where she hid it and ultimately spends time in the clinker. She is let out, on good behavior, and things start happening again. Wherever she goes, there's action in this witty and fast-paced film noir, written and directed by costar Hugo Haas, who plays her new boss. She tries to start a new life and to find the right time to get "her" money without being followed by the law. Every once in a while, you'll find a movie to really talk about. It may not win any awards, but it sure was a lot of fun, with quick one-liners, her hip-shaking figure, and trouble galore with Cleo Moore.

Ill-gotten gains seldom prosper.

Sandwiched between " "strange fascination" and " bait" , "one girl's confession " ,although featuring the Moore/Haas couple is much more melodrama than film noir ; its numerous sudden new developments , its emphatic moral side ( the heroine wants to be punished for what she's done -though she has extenuating circumstances ,her father having been ruined by her boss- ,her good behavior in prison , her donation to charity , her desire to stay on the straight and narrow in spite of it all );sometimes her attitude takes naiveté to new limits : even if she may be afraid of being followed by a detective , telling where her dough is hidden to a man whose reputation is shady (an unrepentant gambler) is not very smart ,even though it provides the screenplay with another sudden new development.

The best idea is the scene with the gardener :pay attention to a moment which may be insignificant ,but has a pivotal importance for what comes next.

Cleo Moore plays a remarkably strong-willed young woman who is an orphan kept as a work-slave in a waterfront café by the man who stole all her father's money. She is too glamorous for her own good, and no one stops ogling her for a minute, despite the fact that she has no time for that kind of thing. One night she accidentally sees the horrid old man receiving a large sum of cash in his office from a crook, to whom he has passed some stolen goods. She waits until he is asleep and creeps in and steals the money and takes it outside and buries it in a secret place where no one could possibly find it. She then confesses to the police the next morning that she is the thief, and is sent to prison, where she learns gardening and is told by the old gardener of the power which plant roots have to shift things underground and break through walls (this is important later in the story). She is let out after three years for her excellent behaviour and then makes her way back to the café, but it has been demolished and the old man has absconded to South America, so she cannot take revenge. She gets a job in another café owned by a compulsive gambler, to wait things out until she can be certain the various local crooks aren't following her when she goes to dig up the loot. He loses all his money and she wants to help him out with her stolen money. She also falls for a handsome young fisherman. Things get complicated and then more complicated. She sends someone out to dig up the dough but it isn't where she buried it. Then he suddenly comes into money and she thinks he has tricked her, so she goes to see him to protest and he ends up slightly dead, or is he? The film is very good viewing, and Cleo Moore is something all right.

I've decided that Hugo Haas is one of the undiscovered gems of film noir.

He had a knack for making quirky little movies that are tons of fun and as casting himself in likable and memorable roles. He also managed to get terrific performances out of mostly unknown actresses. In this one, that actress is Cleo Moore, who reminded me for the entire movie of a blonde, 1950s version of Marcia Gay Harden. She plays a young woman who steals some money, fesses up, spends time in jail, then goes back to get the money, which she hid away in a forest, once she's released. But the interference of her bar owner boss (played by Haas) complicates things, and we wonder for a while if she'll ever recover the money.

I was really rooting for her to, since she ends up being such a winning character. She's basically a really good person, even if she's got a noirish femme fatale attitude. Every time she does something wrong, she immediately confesses to it, a recurring detail that I thought was pretty funny, whether intentionally so or not. There's also a hunkadoodle sailor played by Glenn Langan, he of the manly, hirsute forearms, but he doesn't have much to do except stand next to Moore every so often, towering over her and looking like he wants to rip her clothes off. One can't really blame him.

This is just a really fun little pot boiler.

Grade: A-

All around great movie.....so realistic in its nature, kept me glued to it and happy at the end, seen it a few times, one thing I realized today is the mailman who is delivering to the church at movie's end is a real mailman, he holds his mail correctly, so many movies they get that wrong!