They Won't Believe Me

Irving Pichel's 1947 film has one of the strangest narrative structures in the noir tradition. On trial for the murder of his girlfriend, the stockbroker Larry Ballentine takes the stand to claim his innocence and describe how events actually unfolded, and the whole story proceeds through his testimony. Robert Young plays him as weak, selfish and self-pitying to a degree unusual for a leading man of the period, and the film goes after that weakness rather than excusing it. Each of the three women, played by Susan Hayward, Jane Greer and Rita Johnson, is presented as a version shaped to the narrator's advantage, which shows how deliberately the film works its unreliable narrator. The ending is one of the bitterest resolutions anyone found inside Hollywood's censorship code. Who it's for: viewers who like noir, unreliable narration and 1940s RKO production. Who it's not for: anyone looking for a protagonist to sympathise with, or who will find a story told entirely through one man's mouth confining.