Alias a Gentleman

Even though I've been blogging for 15 years, it's surprising how many films that were part of the old Turner library that make up the backbone of TCM's lineup I still haven't heard of. Another one of those movies was Alias a Gentleman, which showed up some weeks back and which I recorded.

Wallace Beery, nearing the end of his life and career, is the titular would-be gentleman, and since it's Beery you know he's not really a gentleman. Beery plays Jim Breedin, who got sent to prison for a long stretch but has been well-enough behaved as a prisoner that he's been reassigned to the prison honor farm; also, his sentence is going to be up soon. Before he went to prison, he and his wife and daughter lived on a farm in Oklahoma, but his wife died and the daughter abandoned the farm, not knowing that her father was in prison.

However, the warden receives news from an oil company that oil has been discovered in the area where Jim's old farm was, and they'd like to buy the property for a cool $250,000, which would have been more than enough to set him up for life in the late 1940s. So Jim takes the offer, hoping to become more high-class and hoping to re-connect with his daughter when he gets out of prison. Meanwhile, another prisoner, Johnny Lorgen (Tom Drake) saves Jim in a fight with a third prisoner, so Jim invites Johnny to come see him when Johnny gets out of prison.

Jim, having gotten out of prison, has his money in a bank an rents a fancy apartment. This comes to the notice of Matt Enley (Leon Ames), a gangster who knows Jim and figures that Jim must have had money stashed somewhere that was the fruit of a previous crime, perhaps one with which Matt was also involved. Matt, thinking he's been fleeced, decides to come up with a plan to get that money. Jim never heard the news of his daughter's death in a car crash a year or so before Jim was released from prison. Also, not having seen the daughter, he'd have no idea what she'd look like if she were still alive. So Matt is able to find a struggling actress, Elaine Carter (Dorothy Patrick), who could use some money, and convinces Elaine to play the part of Jim's daughter in an attempt to determine how Jim got his money.

Jim obviously likes Elaine, thinking she's his daughter, and she grows to like Jim because she finds he came about the money honestly, and has a conscience. However, Matt shows up looking for the money, and Johnny shows up like Jim invited him. Except that Johnny falls in love with lovely Elaine, and Jim doesn't want that, because no daughter of his is going to marry a criminal. Of course, with the Production Code still in effect, you can guess that this movie is going to have a relatively happy ending for the right people.

Alias a Gentleman was released about a year before Beery's death; by this time, the sort of screen persona that Beery's characters had was becoming decidedly out of date. It also doesn't help that this is an MGM movie, with all the gloss MGM can give a programmer, when it really needs to be something closer to a noir. So I'm sorry to say that I can't give Alias a Gentleman a very high recommendation.