I've had enough with being a policeman's daughter. And I don't want to be another policeman's wife!
Alibi (1929) - watched 7/5/24
Director: Roland West
Writer: Roland West, C. Gardner Sullivan, based on a play by Elaine Sterne Carrington
Starring: Chester Morris, Mae Busch, Harry Stubbs, Eleanor Griffith
Available to watch on YouTube
First Time Watch? Yes
Well folks, we made it to the second Academy Awards! This is a breeze! I’m sure this won’t become daunting or exhausting at all once the Academy expands the Best Picture category to 10 nominees!
After the first ceremony the prior year, the Academy made some changes to the award ceremony. The number of categories was reduced from 12 to 7—the awards for Best Engineering Effects, Best Unique and Artistic Production, and Best Title Writing were all discontinued, while the Academy combined Best Director (Comedy Picture) and Best Director (Dramatic Picture) into a single directing category, as well as Best Writing (Adaptation) and Best Writing (Original Story) into one (long!) writing category. The screenplay awards would rightfully be separated again a couple years later.
I also found it extremely funny that Mary Pickford, silent film superstar, AMPAS founding member, and wife of Douglas Fairbanks (the first president of the Academy), campaigned heavily for a Best Actress win, despite the lack of enthusiasm for her performance in Coquette. As we all know, connections in Hollywood are more valuable than actual talent, so sure enough, Pickford picked up the Best Actress Oscar that year. Makes Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar campaigning controversy in 2023 seem pretty tame.
With the 2nd Academy Awards, we’re also ushering in a new era, and officially declaring silent film a thing of the past. This week’s nominee, Alibi, actually had a separate silent version that was released at the same time, but it’s the version with sound that endured.
So that’s your defense, is it?
Joan (Eleanor Griffith) is the daughter of a police sergeant and in love with notorious criminal Chick Williams (Chester Morris). Tale as old as time. Joan, who is very stupid, doesn’t believe that Chick committed the crimes he has just gotten out of prison for. She does, however, firmly believe that the cops are corrupt. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Joan and Chick secretly wed, despite her father’s vehement protests and attempt to set her up with a fellow cop (yuck). Chick and Joan have a date night at the theater, during which Chick sneaks away to commit a robbery. You know, just a quick little casual robbery. It’s basically like taking a smoke break.
The robbery goes awry and a policeman ends up dead. Chick is immediately suspected of the murder, but he has a clearly airtight alibi of being at the theater the whole time, a claim which Joan stands by. The cops attempt to coerce a confession out of an innocent man, as well as threaten to kill him, because of course they do. Eventually, their tactics wear the man down and he implicates Chick in the murder. We find out that the police have planted an undercover cop, the perpetually drunk Danny (Regis Toomey), in Chick’s gang, but Chick is savvy as hell—he discovers that Danny is a plant, and murders him.
Danny survives his gunshot wound just long enough to tell the cops what happened—this is actually perhaps the longest scene of someone dying that I’ve ever seen. The cops find Chick and corner him in an immaculately decorated art deco apartment. To escape, Chick shuts off all the lights. Mayhem ensues, shots are fired, somehow no one is injured (?) and Chick escapes to the roof. During his escape, he attempts to jump from one building’s rooftop to another, but loses his footing and falls to his death. And then the movie just sort of ends!
I never carry a gun… Unless the police plant one on me as they did the last time.
Alright, so. I don’t really have much to say about Alibi that I didn’t already say about The Racket. Both films are fairly formulaic gangster films that smack of copaganda, despite the cop characters being especially dumb in both films. So overall, Alibi was like, fine! I guess! One interesting/puzzling thing about the film is that it really wants you to know that this is a picture with FULL SOUND, BABY!! There are four unnecessary song and dance numbers, which take place in a nightclub and have no bearing on the plot whatsoever. I do appreciate that the main singer is named “Toots.” I don’t care if it’s sexist, I want to bring “Toots” back.
I found that I really noticed the sound in this movie, and not in a good way. Maybe it was just a bad rip on YouTube that I was watching, but a lot of the sound was especially shrill and repetitive, to the point where I thought the sounds may have played a role in the plot. Which would have been cool, honestly! But no—the incessant bird chirps, the humming, the whistles, all were inconsequential and deeply unpleasant.
Living in The Future as seen from the 1920s has its benefits (I think flappers would have loved having phones), but the drawback is that my perception of what makes good art, and specifically good cinema, is particularly skewed. I’m sure in 1929 this movie was groundbreaking stuff, and reviews from the time reinforce that assumption, but from my perspective it’s a completely basic, unremarkable film.
I’ve had the benefit of decades of innovation! These poor fuckers just got movies with sound, and don’t even have movies in full color yet! Imagine showing people from 1929 Everything Everywhere All at Once. I can say with confidence that a good portion of the audience would probably pass out or die.
So shifting my perspective in some ways is going to be a challenging yet crucial aspect to this project. I do think this film did some interesting things with the cinematography—the way they played with lighting and shadows added some suspense and intrigue that would have otherwise been missing from the narrative.
At the same time, too many plot points didn’t make sense—in the very end, for one thing, it takes the cops an extremely long time to catch Chick, when they easily could have apprehended him, and at one point the police even shoot blanks at him, for some reason? And the scene with Danny the undercover cop dying takes way too long. His acting in this scene is fun to watch, but bro, just die already! Or like, why didn’t anyone get help for him? In the time it took him to die he could have easily gotten to a hospital or something, surely!
Keeping the whole “modern perspective” thing in mind, I’m trying not to be too critical of this movie—not sure why, it’s not like I’m going to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I digress. As I’ve mentioned before, my goal is to be as objective about these films as possible. In this case, I do think this movie is kind of objectively mediocre! It’s literally impossible for me to spend any more precious words talking about it, sorry!!
Oh please. Don’t talk about it. Do it.
Quick Facts:
Nominated for 3 Academy Awards (no wins)
Originally banned from being shown in Chicago due to “immorality, criminality, and depravity.” Seriously, why were Chicago cops so soft?
My Rating: ⭐️⭐
Next Up: Hollywood Revue of 1929