True Confession is a rather entertaining picture, the various faults or shortcomings of which should not hamper it at the box office.

Although True Confession had a pulpwood sound, it proved yesterday to be a highly polished, smoothly grained Yule log which deserves to crackle right merrily... from now until well after Christmas.

True Confession is skillfully played and paced, keyed up to the pitch of the dizziest haywire skit. Yet what makes True Confession funnier than most haywire comedies is that as melodrama it could be just as effective.

Fred MacMurray as the husband who couldn't tell a lie, and Carole Lombard as the wife who did it with her little hatchet, are both exceptionally good, but the picture owes its peculiar hobgoblin quality to John Barrymore as the eccentric crime expert.