Cross My Heart
Cast & Crew
John Berry
Betty Hutton
Sonny Tufts
Rhys Williams
Ruth Donnelly
Alan Bridge
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Chorus girl Peggy Harper is desperate to marry her fiancé, veteran and lawyer Oliver Clarke, but he does not want to marry until his law practice is successful. Peggy brings Oliver his first client, Tony Krouch, the janitor's cousin, who has been arrested for stealing hams from a truck, but the principled Oliver refuses to represent Tony because he is guilty. Peggy then calls Wallace Brent, the producer of her nightclub show, and agrees to be his personal secretary after he promises to send Oliver business. When piano movers arrive to repossess her piano because she is late on her payments, Peggy, a compulsive liar, concocts a story that Oliver is insane and terrifies the movers into leaving without the instrument. The next day, Peggy goes to Brent's home office to report for work, and finds Peter, an Eastern European actor, waiting there because he wants to be cast as "Hamlet" in Brent's revival of the William Shakespeare play. Brent mercilessly throws Peter out of his office, and begins pawing Peggy, who tries to distract him by singing, and making a recording of her voice on his phonograph. When the distraction fails to stop Brent, he chases her around the office until she knocks him out with a punch and runs from his house. Not long after, Peggy returns to Brent's with her mother to collect her coat, and is arrested for stealing $12,000 and killing Brent. Making no reference to the morning's events, Peggy confesses to the murder in the belief that Oliver will become famous by defending her in court. Peggy invents a story which leads police detectives to believe that she killed Brent for the money, but when police actually find the murder weapon in her purse, she gets scared. Although Peggy repudiates her confession, she is not released from jail, and swears to Oliver that she has no knowledge about the knife. The case makes headlines, and Peter visits her in jail, saying that he knows she is not guilty. Peter asks her for some newspaper clippings, but Peggy claims never to have seen them. At the trial, all the evidence points to Peggy as Brent's killer, and because she is such a compulsive liar, Oliver starts to doubt her innocence. Peggy tells the truth on the stand, then sings for the courtroom, believing it will earn her sympathy. When Peter brings in the recording of Peggy singing for Brent, Oliver realizes that Peggy lied when she told him Brent was harmless. After the jury deliberates for over a day, Peggy is declared not guilty. Although the news is good, Oliver breaks their engagement because he no longer trusts her. As time passes, Oliver becomes a successful attorney with his own practice, and Peggy becomes the main attraction of a new nightclub show. Detective Flynn attends the opening of Peggy's new show, and when he visits her backstage, the heartbroken Peggy admits that she confessed to the murder to help Oliver. Flynn then accompanies her to see Oliver, who reunites with her when he learns the truth. Now suspicious that Peter is somehow connected to Brent's death, Peggy sends Oliver to find him at the theater at which he is working as a doorman, while she and Flynn go to search Brent's office one more time. While looking through Brent's desk, Peggy finds Peter's packet of newspaper clippings, which give detailed accounts of how Peter killed two actors, in two separate versions of Hamlet , while playing the lead. Peggy realizes that Peter murdered Brent and rushes to the theater. Oliver, meanwhile, has been lured into enacting the play with Peter, and is about to be murdered by the obsessed actor when Peggy arrives with the police. After Peter confesses to killing Brent, he is arrested, and Peggy promises Oliver that she will never again lie.
Director
John Berry
Cast
Betty Hutton
Sonny Tufts
Rhys Williams
Ruth Donnelly
Alan Bridge
Iris Adrian
Howard Freeman
Lewis L. Russell
Michael Chekhov
Milton Kibbee
Nolan Leary
Shimen Ruskin
John Kelly
Ethyl May Halls
Chester Morrison
Besse Wade
Mae Busch
Wilbur Mack
William Meader
Ida Moore
Jimmy Conlin
Lou Lubin
Tom Dugan
Tom Fadden
Almira Sessions
Dorothy Vaughan
Sarah Edwards
Joe Whitehead
Larry Thompson
Dick Rush
Arthur Loft
Walter Baldwin
Gladden James
Harry Harvey
Charles Campbell
Catherine Craig
Clark Eggleston
Charles Mayon
Syd Saylor
John Harmon
Frank Ferguson
Eddie Carnegie
Spec O'donnell
Frank Faylen
Jody Gilbert
Grace Gillern
Ralph Littlefield
Howard Mitchell
Kathleen Howard
Harrison Greene
Ken Carpenter
Carleton Kadell
Norman Nesbitt
Bobby Larson
Olga San Juan
Albert Ruiz
Ricky Riccardi
Gene Ashley
Fred Nay
June Harris
Lucy Knoch
Paul Bratti
Len Hendry
Crew
Franz Bachelin
Guy Bennett
Claude Binyon
Johnny Burke
Charles Campbell
Harry Caplan
Billy Daniels
Robert Emmett Dolan
Robert Emmett Dolan
Ross Dowd
Hans Dreier
Hugo Grenzbach
Edith Head
Ellsworth Hoagland
Gordon Jennings
Charles Lang Jr.
Paul Lerpae
Joseph J. Lilley
Larry Neill
Walter Oberst
Marie Osborne
Charles Schnee
Stuart Thompson
Harry Tugend
Harry Tugend
James Van Heusen
Wally Westmore
Philip G. Wisdom
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The working title of this film was Too Good to Be True, which was also the working title of Paramount's 1947 release The Trouble with Women, starring Ray Milland and Teresa Wright (see below). Cross My Heart is a remake of Paramount's True Confession, a 1937 adaptation of Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr's play, which was also written by Claude Binyon, and was directed by Wesley Ruggles, and starred Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray and John Barrymore (see AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1931-40; F3.4779).
