... because the human beings in this story are completely unsympathetic.
Set in Paris, Francoise Moilet (Ruth Chatterton) suspects that her husband, playwright Paul Moliet (Adolphe Menjou) loves someone else. Hiding outside the theatre after rehearsals, she learns the truth. The leading lady, Odette, is having an affair with her husband. Paul tells Odette that he doesn't love Francoise anymore but doesn't want to hurt her. Odette pretty much says the kitchen is closed until he asks for a divorce, so he relents.
Paul comes home that night and tries to tell Francoise he wants to leave, but she doesn't give him the chance. The next day she leaves so early that he can't tell her that morning. And then during the rehearsals that day Odette is shot in the back and killed. A bank robber who was hiding in the theater, who had shot and killed a teller, is blamed for the crime and arrested.
But Paul finds his own gun, dumped in a bucket of water backstage, and confronts Francoise who admits to the crime but refuses to do anything about it. Paul says he hates her, tells her she's a murderess - seemingly forgetting that his coldness towards her and his hotness for an actress drove her to this - and goes to be with the remains of his girlfriend.
The titular journal is where Paul writes about Francoise' emotional state after the crime. How will this turn out? Watch and find out.
So these are our players - An unrepentant philanderer who doesn't see his part in all of this to the point he writes in a diary about how wrong everybody else is, a distraught wife who was driven to the ultimate criminal act, a murdered home wrecker who might have stopped and wondered if Paul got bored of Francoise so quickly why wouldn't it have been all the same when they got together, and a wrongly accused murderer who is also a rightly accused murderer - the bank robber. They can only hang you once.
I was touched when Toby, Odette's dog, was brought to live with the Moilets. He seemed to really miss the feminine touch and thus was always following Francoise about, a living reminder of her crime.
One funny moment in retrospect - At a dinner party that the Moilets are having in 1934, one guest is a member of law enforcement in, by that time, Nazi Germany. And he is up and arms about lawlessness. Oh the irony.
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