I Walk Alone (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1947, released 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 26), after the two British mysteries on KPBS, I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a showing of I Walk Alone, a quite good if rather incredible (in the sense of “hard to believe”) crime melodrama produced by Hal Wallis at Paramount, directed by Byron Haskin (who’d make his best-known film, the 1953 The War of the Worlds, also for Paramount five years later) from a script by Charles Schnee based on an “adaptation” by Robert Smith and John Bright from a play by Theodore Reeves called Beggars Are Coming to Town. TCM showed I Walk Alone on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program but it’s only marginally noir: the chiaroscuro visuals (the cinematographer is veteran Paramount hand Leo Tover) and the overall air of seediness and unscrupulousness are noir, but the characterizations are (with one major exception, Liazbeth Scott’s Kay Lawrence) all good or all bad, with little or none of the moral ambiguity of film noir at its best. It’s unusually long for a film noir (it lasts 97 minutes and, unlike The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle, seems even longer than that) and it’s probably best known today as the first of six (according to Eddie Muller) or seven (according to imdb.com) films Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas made together.

Lancaster plays Frankie Madison, who partnered with Noll Turner (Kirk Douglas) – whom Frankie calls by his old gangland moniker “Dink” – making bootleg beer before Prohibition was repealed. Their partnership came to a sudden end in 1933 when one of their shipments of illegal whiskey was hijacked, Frankie shot one of the hijackers, and he and Noll made an agreement that they would split the business 50-50 and if one of them got busted, the other would hold his share for him until he got out. Later that same night Frankie was busted by the cops and sentenced to 14 years in prison, and the film opens with his release. He takes the train to New York and is met at the station by Dave (Wendell Corey), who sets him up in an apartment Dave describes as “not good, not bad.” Frankie is determined to meet with Noll Turner and demand his half of Turner’s money, only during the 14 years Frankie has been in prison, Noll has gone upscale and is now the owner of the Regent Club, a swanky night spot featuring Noll’s girlfriend de jour, singer Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott, voice-doubled by Trudy Stevens). To ensure the continued success of his club, Noll is also dating, romancing and intending to marry Alexis Richardson (Kristine Miller) as soon as she dumps her current husband Charles (whom we never see).

It occurred to me that I Walk Alone is largely a reworking of one of the films Hal Wallis had produced during his decade-long (1933 to 1943) run as production chief at Warner Bros., The Roaring Twenties, which featured James Cagney in Lancaster’s role, Humphrey Bogart in Douglas’s and Ann Sheridan in Scott’s. The gimmick this time is that Noll Turner has transcended his gangster roots and become an apparent pillar of respectability, and though he sent Frankie a carton of cigarettes every month he decided not to see him because any outward association between him and an ex-bootlegger serving an extended prison sentence would totally blow his image. I’d seen I Walk Alone several years ago but it struck me as better this time around, particularly in Douglas’s marvelously slimy performance as a villain (one of the big frustrations in both Lancaster’s and Douglas’s careers is that they became such major stars so quickly they kept getting cast as heroes and weren’t allowed to keep playing the villain roles they’d both been so good at). Oddly Lancaster and Scott (who was having an affair with Hal Wallis, and director Haskin noted that periodically through the shooting she’d go int o a dressing room with him and emerge crying, resulting in substandard work from her for the rest of the day) are both billed in a separate card above the title, while Douglas is billed fourth just below Wendell Corey in a card below the title. After a flashback sequence showing the robbery from 1933 (convincing enough as an evocation of the past it looks like Wallis and Haskin simply took the stock footage from an earlier film) narrated by Frankie during a private dinner Noll has set up for him with Kay (with a piano-guitar-bass trio providing entertainment via such songs as “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “I’m Yours,” “Heart and Soul” and “My Ideal”), the scene shifts back to the present in which Dave explains to Frankie that Noll can’t just give him back half of the club’s proceeds.

While the speakeasy they ran together before Frankie’s arrest, the Four Kings (it’s interesting that both Noll’s establishments have “royal” names), was a simple joint partnership, the Regent Club is established as a collective enterprise of three corporations, each owning a piece of it, and Noll can’t transfer any of it to Frankie without the approval of the board of directors. (I’m surprised the writers didn’t have an exasperated Frankie ask, “Then who’s on the board of directors?”) A number of former gangland associates of Frankie’s are now on Noll’s payroll, including Dan (played by the marvelous Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet and the 1945 Dick Tracy) and Skinner (Mickey Knox), Noll’s “muscle.” Unfortunately for Noll, both Kay and Dave are upset with the way he treated Frankie, and Kay is especially (and understandably) put out when Noll tells her he’s going to marry Alexis Richardson but that doesn’t mean he can’t still see her. Dave threatens to report Noll to the authorities and expose the secret set of books he’s keeping to conceal his crooked activities from the Internal Revenue Service, only before he can do that Noll has Skinner shoot Dave and frames Frankie for the crime. Kay has teamed up with Frankie (and Lizabeth Scott’s acting in these scenes is surprisingly good, especially for someone who had, to put it delicately, been a “protégée” of the producer) and ultimately puts the police onto Noll. There’s a climactic scene in Noll’s swanky office at the Regent Club during which Noll tries to kill Frankie, Frankie manages to escape by turning all the lights out, and ultimately the police arrive and shoot down Noll while Frankie and Kay end up alive, free and a couple.

I’d seen I Walk Alone decades ago but this time around I liked it considerably better; Lizabeth Scott’s acting was surprisingly good, Kirk Douglas delivers one of his superbly etched portrayals of villainy, and Eddie Muller criticized Burt Lancaster for overacting (and director Byron Haskin for letting him) but he’s really quite fine. If the character seems brusque and unformed, he’s supposed to be after 14 years in prison with no chance to keep abreast of what was going on in the world. The problem is the story, which piles on so many impossibilities or near-impossibilities it’s hard to take this movie seriously, though as an attempted transition between the conventions of 1930’s gangster films and 1940’s film noir is jarring and marred by too many technical glitches in the transitions between one sort of movie and the other. And there’s something of an oddity here: the big “plug” song, “Don’t Call It Love” (music by Allie Wrubel, lyrics by Ned Washington), sung by Trudy Richards as Lizabeth Scott’s voice double, sank in the music marketplace pretty much without a trace, while the title song (also by Wrubel and Washington), heard only instrumentally in a brief bit of background scoring, became a massive hit and helped promote the film.