The Lady Confesses

We might use “nightclub noir” as a label for the many films, especially Mexican cabareteras, whose action revolves largely around a nightclub milieu, such as Gilda (1946), I Walk Alone (1948), and Sam Newfield’s The Lady Confesses, a low-budget, low-quality Poverty Row noir that still manages to serve up a gripping mystery with more than enough suspects, motives, and red herrings to please even the most discerning whodunit fan. Mary Beth Hughes stars as Vicki McGuire, whose engagement to Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont) is disrupted when Larry’s wife Norma (Barbara Slater), missing and presumed dead for seven years, returns to town and warns Vicki not to marry him. When Norma ends up murdered in her apartment the next night, Larry becomes suspect number one but remembers nothing of that evening because he was passed out drunk, so he and Vicki set out to prove his innocence before it’s too late. Since Norma had opened the 7:11 Club with business partner Lucky Brandon (Edmund MacDonald), the nightclub becomes the epicenter for the couple’s investigation with Vicki taking a job there to find answers, the list of suspects including Brandon, his illicit lover Lucille Compton (Claudia Drake), and even Vicki herself. Along with high-contrast lighting, the incessant darkness and shadows intensify genuinely suspenseful moments, like Vicki’s break-in to Jordan’s office and Lucille’s glimpse of the fedora-donned, silhouetted killer behind her in the mirror. The only noir ever written by a black woman (Helen Martin, who would go on to a prolific film and television acting career), the screenplay includes unintentionally funny, illogical moments (a detective enters an apartment without permission and waits for the inhabitant to return in the dark, a woman opens fire on a man in a public place and is advised to go home and relax), but, strangely, doesn’t include a lady’s confession.