They Won’t Believe Me (1947)
They Won’t Believe Me offers an unexpected set-up: Robert Young, Mr. Father Knows Best himself, as a heel dangling three women, including two smart cookies—Susan Hayward and Jane Greer—who just happen to be knockouts. It’s one of those movies that benefits from an intriguing flashback structure, with Young on the witness stand, on trial for murder. Its neat, clever plotting carries the film all the way to an unforgettable shockeroo ending. Maybe we’d hear more about this movie if it had been directed by a “name” in the film-noir racket. Irving Pichel, just about equally known in the ’30s and ’40s as both an actor and a director, helmed some good movies—The Pied Piper (1942), The Moon Is Down (1943), A Medal for Benny (1945)—but They Won’t Believe Me is his best, a deft mix of calculating coldness and genuine feeling. Pichel’s direction may not be stylish or inventive, and he doesn’t quite fulfill the script’s potential, but he made a flat-out good movie that’s worth seeing (more than once).
This film captures its three stars at significant moments in their careers. For Young, it was released almost simultaneously with one of his most admired films, Crossfire, a Best Picture Oscar nominee and a taut, socially conscious noir dealing with anti-Semitism, a movie noted for starring three guys named Robert (the other two are Ryan and Mitchum). Ms. Hayward had just come off her breakout Oscar-nominated performance as the alcoholic singer of Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, while Ms. Greer would next make Out of the Past (1947), in which she gives, in my estimation, the quintessential “femme fatale” performance in all of film noir. They Won’t Believe Me is simply a movie lost in that impressive shuffle.
Young’s casting as a womanizing opportunist may be debatable, but the movie actually gains from its dark view of a usually lightweight leading man, similar to the inspired use of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944). Married lovelessly to a wealthy woman (Rita Johnson) who adores him, Young is in love with her money while seeking sex and other pleasures elsewhere. Ms. Greer plays a magazine writer he dumps when Ms. Johnson learns of the affair and offers him an enticing partnership in a brokerage house in L.A., prompting their immediate exit from New York. Then he hooks up with Ms. Hayward, a gold digger working in his new California office. What the film delivers is the unmistakable contrast between the women, who really love him, and Young himself, who loves no one (except himself). He’s a selfish child for whom love is a fleeting fancy. A liar, a schemer, and a user, he’s not worth the love of any of these women. If the movie sounds like a basic romantic melodrama, well, it soon finds its footing in the turf of film noir. What follows is a car-accident death, a mistaken body identification, deadly intent, suicide, a dumped body battered beyond recognition, and, yes, Young on trial for murder. That’s more than enough black-and-white rottenness for any film noir to handle.
Young isn’t especially sexy or charismatic, yet he still gives a solid, believable performance. What is interesting about Young’s character is that he’s not an all-out villain, just a despicable “ordinary” fellow with a casual flair for doing (and excusing) anything he wants. A more dynamic actor might have given the role a bad-boy glamour, but Young’s regular-guy plainness makes his actions all the more chilling. Hayward, top-billed though clearly in support of Young, is beautiful and likably direct but perhaps too classy for her role as a “little tramp” (as Ms. Johnson refers to her). Greer is lovely and intelligent, but her role is the haziest, the least successfully conceived. Unfortunately, Hayward and Greer have no interaction. The film’s best performance comes from poor-little-rich-girl Rita Johnson. Her role, as the wife, isn’t large, but she’s the most compelling character, the one who gives the film its piercing humanity. She is truly touching as a woman who loves her husband too much to leave him, even though she knows he doesn’t love her. She’ll do anything for him, certainly buy him anything, even though she knows he isn’t worth it.
Blond, attractive, and raspy-voiced (with a slight lisp), Ms. Johnson, who died at age 52 in 1965, would have turned 100 this week (on August 13th). She is mostly forgotten, and her personal life was nothing to envy, but luckily she’s in a few still-popular movies (even though most viewers don’t know her name). She is the woman you love to hate in two classic early ’40s comedies, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and The Major and the Minor (1942), making her a supreme bitch of Hollywood’s Golden Age. After They Won’t Believe Me, she played the murder victim (Charles Laughton’s mistress) in The Big Clock (1948), another nifty noir. Though typed as a bitch, she proved in They Won’t Believe Me that she was a sensitive actress able to portray naked vulnerability and need, endowing this cinematic walk on the dark side with an aching heart.
