ONE GIRL’S CONFESSION. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Cleo Moore, Hugo Haas, Glenn Langan, Ellen Stansbury, Burt Mustin. Written, produced & directed by Hugo Haas.

   And if Hugo Haas could have played Cleo Moore’s part, he’d have done that, too. But since she’s a hard-featured, statuesque blonde, it think it’s just as well that he didn’t try.

   Statuesque in the Anita Ekberg sense. Bodies like this don’t seem to be in favor today, but back in 1953, I’ll bet this movie was the trash equivalent of Gangbusters. This was long before nudity was acceptable on the screen, but there are a lot of open blouses with frilly lingerie underneath to (almost) make up for it.

   Anybody who’s honest about it knows exactly why this movie was made. And yet — even though at times it reminded me of the cinematic equivalent of a Gold Medal novel — when it comes down it, this movie is as moral as a Sunday morning in church.

   Mary Adams is a waitress who robs her employee and long-time benefactor of $25,000, and goes to jail for it, without telling anyone where she hid the money. As bad it sounds, it’s not, since the money was part of the rackets, and her boss at the restaurant is also the crook that cheated her father many years ago. This, at last, is her chance to get even.

   Crooked money is cursed, as they say, however, and when she’s paroled after only three years of good behavior, she finds this out. When she finds a need for the money, the plot suddenly doubles back on her. After some travail, justice finally wins out.

   The plot is flawed — how could anyone believe that Mary Adams would be as trusting as she is? — but the essential point is that she is really a Fine Person at Heart. You may not believe it from the screen images you see here, but Cleo is a marshmallow in this film, and so is Hugo Haas.

[UPDATE] 12-01-10.   You’d think with all that this movie has going for it, I’d remember it, but I don’t, and I have no idea why.

   This is a problem with a solution, however. This film was released on DVD earlier this year as part of the Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume II collection, a set I purchased as soon as it was out.

R. C. ASHBY – Death on Tiptoe. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1930. Greyladies, UK, paperback, December 2009. No US edition.

    A house party in a 12th century Norman castle in Wales is the setting, and the characters make up quite a Christie-like cast: young dissolute and irresponsible heir; portrait artist/womanizer; flirtatious heiress; pouty melodramatic young woman jilted by the artist; lovestruck governess; two bratty children; vengeful British Major; reserved and sensible barrister; failed diplomat who is an utter twit; his wife who is love with someone else; and the host and hostess, Sir Harry and Lady Undine Stacey.

   It is Lady Stacey — a transplanted French woman with pretensions to becoming a great baronial estate holder — who is the victim. The opening chapters quite brilliantly plant the seeds for her cruel murder, and there are at least four characters who outright threaten her prior to her body being discovered three weeks later in a chest in the attic where she had hid during a game of hide and seek (an entertainment for her guests).

   Cleverly done, fairly well clued, with quite a bit of misdirection. Melodramatic ending with a somewhat surprising culprit and an intriguing motive. Ashby would later expand the idea of this Gothic detective novel in He Arrived at Dusk (reviewed earlier here ), a far better book with more effective use of folklore, legends and supernatural content.