Robert Young forever played a good guy and wound up on TV as nice doctor Marcus Welby MD. In They Won’t Believe Me he doesn’t and the film really benefits from the against-type casting. As we meet his character, Larry Ballantine, he’s in the dock in court, where his own lawyer is describing him as “heartless, shameful, sordid and cruel”. Larry is a relentlessly womanising male of the first water and he’s now in court accused of murdering his girlfriend, or is it his wife? This incredibly twisted, brilliantly dovetailing plot is about a bad man being caught out by fate, which seems to have stepped in to intervene because Larry has simply taken things too far.
In flashback Larry tells his story to the stonefaced jury. Of how he married his wife for her money and then started playing around with a hot blonde called Janice. How the wife found out and wound up buying Larry a position in a brokerage firm on the understanding that he drop Janice and give the marriage another try. And how Larry then used that opportunity to take up with Verna, a “little tramp” and self-confessed gold-digger who encouraged him to run away with her to Reno and a new life (largely financed with money embezzled from his wife’s bank account).
It is, in Larry’s words, “a game of hide and seek with fate,” with fate eventually tracking Larry down and giving him his just deserts, though for other crimes. Larry’s tragic flaw is hubris and it’s his hubris that allows fate to take Larry down – he just doesn’t believe anyone is smarter than he is and is very slow to realise just how much he’s being played.
This serpentine tale about a reprehensible man is served up with a touch of Hitchcock “wrong man” plotting (Hitchcock’s old right-hand woman Joan Harrison is the producer here) and a touch of Grahame Greene’s celestial irony. Larry ends up being implicated in a murder, which he didn’t commit, and the only way to get himself off the hook is to admit to another one, which he also didn’t commit.
Won’t anyone shed a tear for the high-living philandering heel? It’s a great premise, but eventually we do. Partly because director Iriving Pichel presents Larry as at least 50 per cent dope. Partly because it is Young and he has a face that can conjure sympathy (though Larry himself can’t get anywhere with the jury), partly because Larry is telling the truth on the stand, possibly for the first time in his life, and partly because redemption feels more just when the recipient has really suffered.
Young is perfectly cast and the actors playing the women in his life are great too. Rita Johnson as Larry’s starchy, understanding wife, who clearly went into the marriage with her eyes open. Jane Greer as Janice, who returns towards the film’s end to deliver some bitter medicine. Best of all is Susan Hayward as Verna, a properly venal bad girl from the femme fatale playbook.
Harry Wild is the cinematographer and gives Pichel an image that is, for noir, very bright. It positively glows, and that’s clearly meant to be ironic, since the whole film turns on Larry’s failure to discern he is not the master of his own destiny – on the hook of one dame or another throughout, he is eventually undone by Lady Luck (the title of Young’s previous film).
The film was a flop, amazingly. Chalk another one up to the wisdom of crowds!
They Won’t Believe Me – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
