by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Falcon’s Alibi, a 1946 RKO “B” production towards the end of the
Falcon detective series and a quite good movie in which I remembered one of the
key characters — “Nick the Night Owl,” a D.J. who broadcasts from midnight to 3
a.m. on radio station KGR from inside a hotel, played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in
one of his best performances (rivaling his work in The Maltese
Falcon, The Big Sleep and The
Killing) — though somehow I had transposed
him to The Falcon in San Francisco
instead (perhaps because the “K” at the beginning of his station’s call letters
indicated a West Coast or Rocky Mountain zone location, and “KGR” sounds an
awful lot like the real San Francisco station KGO), though Cook’s casting and
the writing of his role (by Dane Lussier and Manuel Seff, with uncredited
additional work by Edward Dein and Charles “Blackie” O’Neal, Ryan O’Neal’s
father) are a weird breath of film noir air in an otherwise pretty formulaic plot line. Like several other Falcon adventures, this one begins at a racetrack, where
the Falcon, a.k.a. Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), runs into dotty dowager Mrs.
Peabody (Esther Howard) and her secretary/companion Joan Meredith (Rita Corday,
whose hint of a European accent sits oddly on an “American” character with an
Anglo name). Lawrence is immediately taken with Joan Meredith and agrees to
help her — as part of her job she took Mrs. Peabody’s pearl necklace to a
jeweler to be copied and appraised, and as a result she found it was a fake, so
she’s worried she’ll be accused of stealing the original and wants the Falcon’s
help in keeping her name clear — and the action pretty quickly moves to (and
resolutely stays in) the hotel where Mrs. Peabody and her entourage, including
a dispossessed baron (Lucien Prival) and his wife (Jean Brooks) and a man named
Beaumont (Jason Robards, Sr. — father of the Jason Robards we’re familiar
with), as well as an insurance man named Metcalf (Emory Parnell) who’s
investigating a series of jewel thefts in the hotel to see if they’re part of
an attempt by jewelry owners to scam his insurance company.
There’s a nightclub
within the hotel wherein Alex Olmstead (Paul Brooks) and his band perform. His
star singer is Lola Carpenter (Jane Greer), who’s secretly married to Nick the
Night Owl but wants to leave him and marry Alex because he can do so much more
for her career. One of the members of Mrs. Peabody’s entourage gets murdered —
it’s hard to remember which one — and eventually so does Lola Carpenter, and it
turns out Nick is the real culprit; he killed his wife out of jealousy and
because she had reacted to his confession that the jewelry he had given her had
been financed by robberies from the hotel guests. To alibi himself, he
transcribed his radio show so he could play the transcription record on the air
and people would think he was in his booth broadcasting his show. Only the
Falcon figures this out — which wouldn’t have been that difficult; in the
mid-1940’s transcribed shows were a relative novelty and several movies of the
period, including Laura (which I
think was the first one to use this gimmick), featured radio performers
pre-recording their programs and playing the transcriptions over the air to
give themselves an alibi for the murder they were about to commit. At the end,
Nick is doing this again — though he knew, or should have known, that someone
was on to him since his transcription disc was moved from one part of the
studio to another (by the Falcon as part of his test to see if he was right) —
so he can knock off Jane Meredith, only the Falcon arrives in time, saves Jane
and Nick takes a header off the balcony from which he had been planning to push
Jane so he dies. It also turns out that Mrs. Peabody herself, who up until the end has seemed like just another ditzy comic-relief character, is the mastermind of the insurance swindle — something that upsets Metcalf, who ends up whining, “I thought we were friends!” The Falcon’s Alibi
was directed by Ray McCarey (Leo McCarey’s far less prestigious brother — when
Charles and I watched a movie in which Ray McCarey directed Bob Crosby I joked
that both of them had brothers
with far bigger reputations than theirs!) and produced by William Berke, who’d
directed some of the previous Falcon
movies and who came to the major studios from a background in independent
production in the late silent era (and who actually returned to indies and made
the first two films of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels before dying
relatively young in 1958), and it’s an oddly schizoid movie in which Elisha
Cook, Jr. and the character arc featuring him seem to have come in from the film
noir world and settled uncertainly into the
more genteel mystery story represented by the Falcon series. If he weren’t in it The Falcon’s
Alibi would be just another series entry,
and a relatively weak one at that, but his performance gives this otherwise
mediocre movie real dramatic power and scope. And it did occur to me that it was interesting that just one day after having watched a crime film featuring George Sanders, here we were seeing one with his less well known and less highly regarded brother, Tom Conway!
