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The Confession
Spinster Agnes Blakiston, summering in a country home, was practically begged to rent the large old estate by its remaining heir, the enigmatic Miss Emily Benton. Of course, strange things start happening in the house—a phone rings incessantly, candles burn down as if by themselves, odd footprints appear—until Agnes’s saucy Irish maid (Feagin, in a neat comic turn) feels the “downright badness” in the house. Eventually Agnes runs out of the usual Perfectly Reasonable Explanations, and a story that’s more psychological thriller than whodunit emerges. But the simple moments of suspense at the center of the plot, effectively staged by McCabe to send a delicious shiver of fear up the back, become overwhelmed by a sea of narration and quasi–psychological thriller speculation.
That’s probably no fault of adapter Feagin. Her script very ably manages the dusty plot devices deployed by Rinehart—the popular, prolific early-20th-century writer remembered as the “American Agatha Christie”—but it still must devote much time to her heroine’s remembrance of things past. Despite the best efforts of Poole’s solid, sensible Agnes, narrative and scenic passages are primarily distinguished by the movement of curtains, resulting, by Act II, in a lot of words and fabric moving. A good mystery is more journey than destination, and the very juicy one within The Confession regrettably is often hobbled by the telling of it.
