One Girl's Confession

This film could have easily been a tawdry exploitation film. Instead, it is a solid B move acted out by very good B actors. The writer is the real star of the film, as the story has several twists and turns, and the viewer will be fooled at least once. Cleo Moore, a very strong B actress who specialized in making several entertaining B films, has the lead in this one. She plays a struggling waitress working for a man who stole her father's business.

The miser gets what's coming to him (without violence), and Cleo takes his life savings. The film moves on from there with several nuances. Supporting Moore in her role is the king of B movies, Hugo Haas, who probably made more B films than any other actor I know of; at least in major roles. He plays a gambling owner of another hangout that Cleo eventually comes to work for. There is also a fisherman as a romantic interest. Well worth viewing.

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 suspect that in its day, most of the men who paid their fifty cents to see this in a theatre were happy the minute it started, as buxom, full-bodied, sensual Cleo Moore is stretched full screen on the beach late at night, having gone to sleep when she should be waiting tables elsewhere. In the first ten minutes of the film, driven by revenge for her father's death at the hands of her employer, Cleo decides to be very, very bad, robs her boss, and then pays the price! Bad Girl on The Move! Positives: The pace never flags, there are some fascinating camera angles reminiscent of Orson Welles, Moore is never less than charismatic (we don't watch these things expecting great acting), hunky Glenn Langen plays a local fisherman with an eye for the right blonde, and I would have paid twice just to experience the performance by the other bad girl, an extra named Ellen Stansbury who gives Cleo some competition! This film was released by Columbia Studios the same year they made the superior noir The Big Heat in addition to The Wild One, and From Here To Eternity--this little "B" special, directed by the infamous Hugo Haas, ain't heavy art and is barely noir--but I was never bored and often delighted. When it comes to Cleo, I'm easy to please.

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!

Written, produced, directed, and starring... one person.... is sometimes a sign of a so-so work. In this case, it's a Hugo Haas project, with Cleo Moore as Mary, the blonde bombshell. I thought she looked a lot like Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe, and reading Cleo's history, she had indeed lost a part in "All About Eve" to Marilyn M. and also like Marilyn, Moore died quite young, at 50, from a heart attack.

In our story, we learn that she has been raised by Mr. Stark, and has been working for him, but doesn't like the way he treats her. She also witnesses a shady deal with some character, and is sure that Stark cheated her father in business. She takes the money box, and is immediately caught by the police. Mary is off to prison, and must figure out how to start over. She gets released, but is constantly worried that someone will try to take "her" money... the money that she snitched. Mary finds work in another pub, and seems to fit right in. There are some funny bits here where we see the shop-owner's girl try to palm his poker winnings, but the shop-owner (Haas) is on to her, and keeps taking it back. Well, we're about halfway through the film now, and it's all been story set-up so far. Mary tries to lend Damitrof, the owner, her money, but things go all wrong, and it FINALLY starts being a film noir. Lots of close-ups on our blonde starlet, and things are happening now! I tried to guess the rest of the story, and I was partially right, but there were some surprises along the way. Pretty good story. Certainly entertaining. Part of a "Bad Girls Columbia Films Noir Collection" from Sony.

Also keep an eye out for the prison gardener played by Burt Mustin-- he was in TONS of early films, and I remember him as Frank Purdue, in the commercials for Purdue chicken!