by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Thougn I haven’t posted my journal comments on it until now, on February 11 I ran my husband Charles and I a movie I got on a grey-label DVD mastered from a Kino on Video VHS we’d already watched many years before: Alibi, a 1929 gangster movie directed by the enigmatic Roland West. William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film describes West as an independently wealthy dilettante who made films simply because he liked doing so. In 1926 he had become a star director with a silent film called The Bat, featuring a super-villain who poses as a detective and also dons a bat-like costume; Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, admitted he borrowed the character of Batman from this film even though his Batman was a superhero instead of a super-villain. (Kane also acknowledged he got the look of the Joker from Conrad Veidt’s makeup in the 1928 Paul Leni classic The Man Who Laughs.) Alibi was West’s first talkie, and he produced, directed and co-wrote (with C. Gardner Sullivan) the script based on a play called Nightstick by John Griffith Wray, J. C. Nugent and Elaine S. Carrington. One thing I learned when I first saw this film was why a police officer’s baton is called a “nightstick”; in the days before police had radios with which they could communicate with each other over long distances, they would use the nightsticks and hammer them against the sides of buildings or on a paved concrete sidewalk to call for backup when they needed it.
Alibi stars Chester Morris (in what William K. Everson calls “a James Cagney performance, well before Cagney” – though Cagney would make his first film, Sinners’ Holiday, just one year after Alibi) as Chick Williams, a convict who in the film’s marvelously expressionistic and dialogue-free opening scene is being released from prison and making the expected promises that when he gets out he’s going to find a job and lead a respectable, law-abiding life. Only the next time we see him he’s getting sucked into masterminding a fur robbery with Soft Malone (Elmer Ballard), who drives a cab as his “cover” and uses it to transport Chick and the other crooks to the site of the job and then haul away some of the stolen furs. A cop spots the robbery in progress and gets shot and killed by Chick, but before he dies other cops respond to his backup call and arrest at least some of the robbers, recovering some of the stolen furs. Meanwhile, Chick has been dating Joan Manning (Eleanor Griffith), daughter of police sergeant Pete Manning (Purnell Pratt), who of course warns his daughter not to date Chick and even threatens to disown her if she keeps seeing him. Chick worked out an elaborate alibi for the night of the robbery – he took Joan to a theatre to watch a musical (which gives Roland West an excuse to show a chorus line in action – in fact there’s also a nightclub with another chorus line, and West introduces it with a tracking shot from the street inside the club that may have been where Alfred Hitchcock got the idea for the famous long tracking shot through a dance hall that reveals the killer in Young and Innocent – only he timed it so he could go to the fur warehouse and participate in the robbery during the show’s intermission.
The police figure this out and do the drive themselves to determine that Chick could have done it, so Chick needs someone who’ll testify that he was on the phone to this person from the theatre during the intermission. Only the someone to stand his false alibi, picked by fellow crook Buck Bachman (Harry Stubbs), is Danny McGann (Regis Toomey), who poses as a perpetually inebriated stockbroker but is really an undercover cop. Chick shoots McGann but yet another cop, Tommy Glennon (Pat O’Malley), who’s also Chick’s rival for Joan’s affections, figures out the whole thing and corners Chick, insisting he’s going to shoot Chick in the back the way Chick shot McGann. Actually it’s a trick; Glennon has loaded his gun with blanks and he scares Chick into fainting as if dead, then announces that he’s shown Chick up as the yellow-bellied coward he is. Chick tries to flee and he gets out of the building and leaps across the street to the building next door – but he can’t keep his hold on the other building and ends up falling to his death.
Alibi is a frustrating movie because so much of it is done well one’s even more impatient with the glitches of early talkies than usual – particularly the careful beats the actors take between hearing their cue line and delivering their own, as well as the noisy recording which sometimes makes it hard to figure out what the actors are saying. The film’s most powerful moments are the ones that were shot silent and had sound added later – the sort of thing Sergei Eisenstein had in mind when he said the future belonged to “the sound film,” which would not have dialogue but would use music and synchronized sound effects to tell its story and add to the visuals. Alibi is also a frustrating movie because the basic story is a strong one and one wishes it could have been made – or remade – better a few years later. I found myself wishing Warner Bros. would have bought the remake rights, put one of their speedfreak directors in charge and cast Cagney and Humphrey Bogart as the male leads. It’s also got so much singing and dancing in it – including at least one vocal from Eleanor Griffith – it practically qualifies as a musical, though at least the nightclub in the opening scene is small enough it actually looks like a nightclub and not an airplane hangar done up in Art Deco. In fact so many of Willliam Cameron Menzies’ sets are Deco that they practically become characters themselves – and when the crooks flee from indoors to outdoors the cityscapes are so blatantly artificial and stylized it looks like they’ve escaped into the expressionistic world of Fritz Lang’s M.
On the other hand, a lot of the outdoor night scenes – notably the one in which Chick takes Soft’s taxi to the robbery site – are done in fast-motion, and today people associate fast-motion in films only with comedy. Indeed, the first time I saw that cab I thought it was a toy being propelled down model streets, and it was only when Chester Morris got out of it that I realized it was a real car! There’s also one rather underdeveloped character who had real potential to add pathos to the story – Daisy Thomas (Mae Busch, long-time favorite of Erich von Stroheim, Laurel and Hardy and Jackie Gleason), mistress of Buck Bachman, who laments that she left a comfortable life with a nice, respectable, well-to-do husband to run off with Buck, who slaps her around and locks her in rooms for reasons that aren’t especially clear. I found Alibi reminiscent of another 1929 talkie by a major filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, which also features a potentially strong plot involving a hero-heroine-villain love triangle (a device Hitchcock used again and again in The Secret Agent, Sabotage, Notorious and North by Northwest, among others) and also alternates scenes with creative visuals and sound effects with other scenes that all too faithfully reflect the ponderousness of many early sound films – only Hitchcock continued to direct for nearly another half-century while West retired after just two more films, The Bat Whispers (a sound remake of his 1926 silent hit The Bat and an early example of a wide-screen process called “Magnifilm” over two decades before wide screens became standard) and Corsair (yet another gangster story).
