Pathological liar Carole Lombard causes problems for herself and husband Fred MacMurray when she confesses to a murder she didn't commit. "...It's this outsider status (that) Carole Lombard plays so particularly beautifully in True Confession...Lombard is not a nonconformist figure, like Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or (Irene) Dunne in The Awful Truth. Just the opposite: she is trying to conform, desperately, if only because she has so much to hide...What makes it even harder is that she's likely to be the only undeceived person in the movie-besides her girlfriend, if she has one...It's mostly the men in her films who talk about truth-and mostly to invoke it against her. She lies to them, of course; but they lie to themselves...Hypocrisy doesn't come naturally to her; she always has to learn it, and so she is always in danger of lousing it up, of giving the whole game away...(When her husband) accuses her of making 'a farce of our lives,' making a mockery of justice and the legal profession and him, too...he isn't far wrong. She is subversive in spite of herself-an involuntary outlaw...The Lombard heroine stands for that extraordinary promise American life once seemed to hold out: that anyone might grow up to be a crook." James Harvey, Romantic Comedy