I'm always up for Eddie Muller's Noir Alley on TCM because he always makes the movies he selects interesting, even if they're not always quite in the noir genre. So when I see one show up with in an interesting synopsis that I haven't heard of before, I'm going to record it to do a post on later. Such is the case with the Universal release (which might explain why I didn't really know about it before) Naked Alibi.
Sterling Hayden is the star here, as police detective Joe Conroy. But he's not the person we see first, instead meeting local baker Al Willis (Gene Barry). Willis is getting picked up on a drunk and disorderly and doesn't have his ID on him. Conroy and fellow detective Fred Parks (Max Showalter when he was being credited as Casey Adams) are sure Willis is guilty of more and part of the crime ring that's been going around the city, so they try to rough him up before being forced to release him. For their troubles, Lt. Parks gets shot in a phone booth later that night. Worse, later on another two policemen involved in the case also get killed when their car is bombed. And Willis is able to avoid the tails on him by going into a church open 24/7 and slipping out the back.
Det. Conroy is getting angry at this and roughs up Willis some more, to the point that the higher-ups can't avoid it any longer, especially with those good government types investigating everything that's going on in the city. Conroy is put on leave, but uses a PI to keep following Willis and make Willis know that he's still being tailed. So to get away from the tail, Willis leaves his wife behind to go to the Mexican border town not named Tijuana or Mexicali but the imaginatively named Border City. Part of the reason he goes there is to lay low until the heat is off, but the other reason is that he's got a mistress there in nightclub singer Marianna (Gloria Grahame) who doesn't know anything about Willis' family back in the US.
Conroy heads for Border City and when he gets there immediately starts being incredibly unsubtle about trying to find Willis. He's also a bit naïve in that he goes with a guy claiming to know where Willis is, which is clearly a set-up for Conroy to get mugged, or worse. Wouldn't you know it, however, but Conroy is found by a young boy who just happens to live downstairs from where Marianna lives. Marianna, taken with the handsome detective, starts nursing him back to health but also rifles through his things, which is where she finds a newspaper clipping of Willis that reveals to her that he's married back in California, which obviously changes her opinion of him.
There are still a lot of twists and turns to go, however, as Conroy tries to prove that Willis is behind the murder of the cops. To do that, however, Conroy is going to have to get back into the States and find the murder weapon without getting arrested by his fellow cops since there's technically a police brutailty charge awaiting him. Willis, for his part, really is guilty if you couldn't already figure that out. He gets taken by Conroy during a fight at the nightclub, and Conroy heads for home, Marianna in tow.
Naked Alibi is entertaining enough if rather pedestrian. A lot of it belies filming on Universal's backlot, and the movie has the feel of something that, like The Internecine Project that I recently posted about, would have been a made-for-TV movie had it been made well after the 1950s. Hayden is as gruff and emotionless as ever here, while Grahame isn't exactly the most talented nightclub singer beyond having the requisite sex appeal. Anybody who's watched reruns of The Rifleman will have no difficulty spotting Chuck Connors in his small role.
So, while no great shakes, Naked Alibi is OK for a rainy day.
No comments:
Post a Comment