Confidence Girl

Andrew L. Stone's Confidence Girl is an above average B crime film about a team of bunco artists. This 1952 flick is a tight and compact 81 minutes with nary a rhetorical flourish or flashy camera movement. Stone, ably assisted by his editor wife Virginia, was able to churn out B features that he also wrote and produced for nearly forty years. His hallmark was documentary like verisimilitude utilizing actual locations. If you want to see what the May Department store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles looked like in 1952 then Confidence Girl is the place to start. The police procedural aspect of Confidence Girl reminded me of Dragnet which had premiered on radio in 1949. In fact, Stone's pictures closely resemble the just the facts directorial style of Jack Webb. A cheap, but direct style with which to create cinema. Tellingly, Confidence Girl begins with a speech from the real life LA chief of police, warning the audience to be wary of scammers, flim-flam artists, and swindlers.

Happily, the audience soon is ensconced in the machinations of the film's miscreants. Roger Kingsley (Tom Conway) and Mary Webb (Hillary Brooke), along with a couple of confederates, are lifelong fraudsters, adept at all sorts of chicanery. We witness them pilfer an expensive mink coat from May's and fleece a pawn broker. Kingsley keeps the couple one step ahead of the law by posting as a private detective. He feeds the police just enough info to earn their trust, but not enough for him and Mary to end up in the clink. His access to the police comes in handy when Mary embarks on a career as a medium, packing them in at a nightclub. The reveal as to how Mary appears clairvoyant is the cleverest bit in the script. Eventually, Roger and Mary's scam is intertwined with a murder case. Do the nefarious duo reform in the final reel in order to prevent a tragedy? You betcha, but the flick is enjoyable in its predictability. 

Tom Conway was best known as being the older brother of George Saunders. Conway had similar talents as his brother and a similarly limited range. Thus, he is well cast here as a cad. Conway had a pretty good career, all things considered, with memorable roles in a number of classic Val Lewton films and appearing as the Falcon in a successful serial. Hillary Brooks did not have as stellar a career, but, like Conway, was an effective performer within a narrow range. She is better displaying the hard bitten aspects of her character than her vulnerable side. She is best when mesmerizing an audience as a medium. Somebody connected with Confidence Girl must have remembered her superb turn in a similar role in Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear. John Gallaudet and Jack Kruschen, well remembered by the surviving remnants of my generation who were glued to the boob tube, offer wonderful support as a pair of clueless, yet dogged flatfoots. The MVP of the picture is cinematographer William H. Clothier. His elegant compositions give depth to the minimal production values on display while adhering to the demands of Stone's realism. Clothier would graduate to A films and work with practically every American Western director before retiring in 1973. His most eye-popping work, in which he was required of much more than on Confidence Girl, includes Track of the Cat, The Comancheros, Merrill's Marauders, and Donovan's Reef.