Naked Alibi (Universal-International, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 30) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good entry on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies: Naked Alibi (1954), directed by Jerry Hopper from a script by Lawrence Roman based on an “original” story called “Cry Copper” (a title Muller ridiculed) by J. Robert Bren and Gladys Atwater. It turned out to be considerably better than I’d thought from Muller’s introduction and the review by “bmacv” on imdb.com: “Naked Alibi wastes some potentially terrific talents by forcing them into last-ditch, half-hearted retreads of characters and situations that had already, by 1954 and halfway down the leeward slope of the noir cycle, been done to death – often, in fact, done by these very same actors.” Naked Alibi starts with a scene in a police station in which Al Willis (Gene Barry), a local baker, is rousted by the cops of a medium-sized Southern California city by Lt. Fred Parks (Max Showalter, billed as “Casey Adams”) for being drunk in public. The commander of this particular precinct, Joseph E. Conroy (Sterling Hayden, top-billed), takes an instant dislike to Willis for reasons the writers don’t bother to explain, and he and Parks try to beat him into confessing to heaven knows what. The next day Lt. Parks is murdered with a small-caliber Mauser gun (a weapon sufficiently odd that Conroy is convinced no other person in the city could have one) and Conroy immediately orders Willis arrested for the crime, but without evidence he’s ordered by police chief A. S. Babcock (Stuart Randall) to let Willis go. The night after that two more police officers are killed when a bomb planted on their patrol car goes off, and Conroy is now more convinced than ever that Willis killed all three officers. Willis is once again taken into custody, though this time his wife Helen (Marcia Henderson) calls his attorney, Gerald Frazier (Paul Levitt).

For the first half-hour Naked Alibi comes off as a modern-dress version of Les Misèrables, with Willis the seemingly innocent young family man (he has not only a wife but a son who still uses a crib) put upon by an obsessed cop with a vendetta against him. When a paparazzo catches a photo of Conroy browbeating Willis in his bakery and pushing him uncomfortably close to an open fire, it gets published and Conroy is fired from the police force. But he’s so determined to get Willis he hires a private detective, Matt Matthews (Don Haggerty), to have Willis tailed 24/7 and to make the surveillance obvious enough so Willis will notice it. At this point I joked, “Sterling Hayden wasn’t this crazy in Dr. Strangelove, and in that movie he started World War III!” Then the action cuts to “Border City,” a town just over the U.S.-Mexico border where Willis has fled after telling his wife he has to take one of his regular “business trips” out of town. We see Willis head to a bar called El Perico (which means “the parakeet”) and give an intense embrace to the bar’s singer, Marianna (Gloria Grahame, who only enters 35 minutes into the movie but dominates it from then on). From the moment we see that we know that Willis is not only an adulterer but the psycho killer Conroy said he was, though we’re still left in the dark wondering, “How did Conroy know?” Conroy follows Willis into Border City, gets panhandled by a local boy named Petey (Billy Chapin), and is ultimately beaten up by three thugs who turn out later to be in Willis’s employ. Petey takes him to his friend Marianna, who nurses him to health – it’s sheer coincidence that the fired cop ends up in the apartment of the mistress of the man he’s looking for – but then tries to drug him with sleeping powders in his milk and coffee.

Once he comes to and is well enough to move around again, Conroy resumes his hunt for Willis, who in some surprisingly graphic scenes for a 1954 Code-era movie physically beats up Marianna on more than one occasion. Marianna, the kind of femme fatale who’s amoral rather than immoral – she doesn’t really care that much what sort of man she’s with as long as he protects her and doesn’t beat her up – makes a play for Conroy. Ultimately Conroy kidnaps Willis and he and Marianna, whose ultimate loyalties remain uncertain, take him by force back across the border to the U.S. They end up hiding inside a freight truck delivering vegetables and fruit and stay there until the driver hears two shots from his freight compartment and investigates to see what they are. Willis grabs the chance to escape, knowing that his men back in Mexico have already reported his kidnapping and if the cops get involved, it’ll be Conroy that they’ll arrest. Conroy has become convinced that Willis hid the gun with which he shot Lt. Parks inside the Community Church, a nondenominational outfit literally open 24/7, and he’s hoping Willis will go there, try to extract the gun, and Conroy can catch him with it and nail him for Parks’s murder. Only the plan’s success is contingent on Conroy getting to the church before Willis does, which he doesn’t because the police detain him. Instead it’s Marianna who goes to the church to try to entrap her abusive ex-boyfriend, though both Conroy and the people still on the city’s official police force corner him there. The film ends with a big gun battle taking place across various city roofs – anticipating the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo by four years – in which Willis falls to his death and Marianna gets mortally wounded, though not before giving Conroy a big send-off scene telling him she wishes she’d met him earlier under better circumstances.

There are a lot of things wrong with Naked Alibi, starting with the deceptively lurid title, including the the sloppy construction of Roman’s script and the plywood cheapness of the sets. Universal-International’s publicity department made a big deal of how they allegedly went to Tijuana for location scenes in Mexico, but the locales still look fake and hardly as convincing as the ones in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), even though Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty (who shot Naked Alibi as well) didn’t shoot in Tijuana but staged the Mexican scenes at Venice Beach. But there are a lot of good things as well, including Metty’s marvelous all-out noir photography and the way Roman and director Hopper created the same kind of hero-heroine-villain love triangle Alfred Hitchcock used again and again and again (in The Lodger, Blackmail, Sabotage, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and North by Northwest). Naked Alibi has a haunting quality that makes up for all it gets wrong, including the sheer shock when we see Gene Barry in the throes of an extra-relational affair with Gloria Grahame just after we’ve been led to believe that Barry’s character (a family man after all!) is a good guy being railroaded by a crooked cop. It’s an impression reinforced by Barry’s previous roles as a hero in films like The Atomic City and The War of the Worlds. Eddie Muller invidiously compared it to Touch of Evil, also a film set largely in Mexico and dealing with a corrupt cop out to get a seemingly innocent suspect who turns out to be guilty. He pointed out that Jerry Hopper directed 14 feature films in four years and that Tab Hunter had called him “a traffic cop” who wasn’t concerned with whether his films were any good or not as long as they came in on time and under budget. Muller wished that a better director (the ones he named were Don Siegel, Phil Karlson and Joseph H. Lewis) had got hold of this script, but as it stands, despite its weaknesses, Naked Alibi is a haunting film that works as noir and deserves to be better known.