by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Midnight
Alibi, which I recorded from
Turner Classic Movies last July as one of a run of quirky “B” movies they were
showing from 3 a.m. on (one thing I miss about no longer being able to record
since Cox’s damnable “all-digital” conversion is the long runs of “B”’s from
the classic era TCM generally shows in the wee hours), this time as a birthday
tribute to actor-turned-director Vincent Sherman. From the title I had guessed Midnight
Alibi would be a gangster movie,
which it was — sort of — though the credits proclaimed that it was based on a
story called “The Old Doll’s House” by Damon Runyon, and once the film started
and we got to see the usual Runyon lowlifes Charles had the feeling we’d seen
it before even though we hadn’t. (Runyon was a good writer but he did tend to write the same stories over and over,
which is why the most successful adaptation of him was the 1950 musical Guys
and Dolls, which blended several
Runyon tales and characters instead of basing itself on just one.) The central
character is gambler Lance McGowan (Richard Barthelmess), who as the film opens
is just returning on an ocean liner from a trip to Europe. While on board he
romanced Joan Morley (Ann Dvorak, acting even more than usual like the beta
version of Bette Davis) and fell in love with her, but there’s a problem with
their relationship: she’s the sister of Angie Morley (Robert Barrat) — that’s
right, a boy named “Angie”; Charles suggested it could be short for “Angelo”
but a first name like “Angelo” hardly seems to go with a last name like
“Morley” (unless we’re supposed to think the name was originally “Mortellini”
or something and his family “Anglicized” it) — and while Lance has been away
Angie has completely taken over the illegal gambling business in New York (we
know the setting is New York because at the film’s beginning we saw a
tacky-looking matte painting of the New York skyline) and managed to stay in
business despite the major hit in organized crime’s income following the repeal
of Prohibition.
We see Lance at work in one of Angie’s casinos, shooting craps
and hiding the dice under his hat so no one can see what he’s thrown and they
have to take his word for it when he says he’s made his point. Lance’s attempts
to romance Joan are continually being frustrated by the attempt of Angie’s
gangsters to kill him, and during one hair’s-breadth escape he flees into the
supposedly “haunted” house near Angie’s Hummingbird Club. Lance makes a joke
about Boris Karloff living there — it’s interesting that just three years after
Frankenstein, a screenwriter at another
studio (Warren Duff, adapting Runyon’s story and getting quite a few
Runyonesque wisecracks into the film) was already invoking Karloff’s name as a
symbol of menace. The house is actually occupied by Abigail Ardsley (Helen
Lowell), an elderly woman who inherited a fortune from her father, who got the
bright idea of buying up as many corner lots in New York as he could at a time
when most people regarded them as worthless. Abigail tells Lance it has been a
long time since anyone visited her at home — though she’s not as reclusive or
as deranged as Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, she was similarly traumatized as a young woman by
the loss of her great love, though instead of falling in love with a man who
stood her up at the altar she fell in love with a clerk in her dad’s office,
and her dad not only threw her boyfriend out of the house but ultimately shot
him dead for trespassing. (Presumably, as a well-connected 1-percenter in the
Gilded Age, he escaped legal jeopardy.) We learn all this in a flashback to
Abigail’s younger days, in which the youthful Abigail is played by Helen
Chandler from Dracula and her
clerk-suitor, Robert Anders, is Richard Barthelmess in a dual role, equipped
with a moustache and with all the greasy kid stuff scraped out of his hair so
for once Barthelmess looks like a normal human being instead of (as S. J.
Perelman once joked about him) someone with Duco cement lacquered to his scalp.
When the film returns to the 1934 present, Lance accepts an invitation from
Angie to visit him in his office at the Hummingbird to settle their
differences, and much to the consternation of Lance’s own gang members he refuses
to bring a gun — only one of his henchmen follows him into Angie’s office and,
when Angie pulls a gun on Lance, the guy from Lance’s gang draws his own gun
and shoots Angie dead. Then the actual killer gets himself killed in an
accident and Lance is arrested and put on trial for the crime, courtesy of a
“reform” administration anxious to use Lance’s case to set an example and let
the citizens of New York know that the age of gangsterism has ended with
Prohibition. All seems to be going well for the prosecution — none of Lance’s
former friends in Damon Runyon’s underworld are willing to risk the wrath of
the city government by putting up money to bail him out, so he has to stay in
jail until his trial, and the prosecution puts up a strong case until at the very
last minute Abigail Ardsley emerges from her decades of seclusion and demands
to testify. (One of the biggest things the movies get wrong about courtroom
procedure is the whole idea of the “surprise witness.” In real trials, each
side must provide a list of all the witnesses they intend to call and make it
available to the other side before the trial begins; if they want to call
someone who isn’t on the list they have to petition the judge, and they have to
have a pretty damned good reason to convince a judge to let them put on the
so-called “surprise witness.”) Since the prosecution already established that
the murder occurred at midnight, Lance’s defense attorney asks what Abigail was
doing when the clock in her home was at midnight, and she said Lance was with
her — thus providing him the titular “midnight alibi.”
Lance’s attorney gets
the charges against him dismissed by the judge, and Lance is released, he and
Joan get together at last, and in a tag scene Abigail reveals that the reason
she could testify that he was there when her clock was at midnight without
committing perjury was that her late boyfriend was killed at midnight lo those
many years ago, and she responded by stopping every clock in her house at
midnight — though there’s a final shot of her restarting her big grandfather
clock at last once Lance and Joan are safely paired up. Though hardly a great
movie, Midnight Alibi is a
solidly entertaining one with a certain charm that makes up for the plot’s
improbabilities. TCM showed it as part of a birthday tribute to
actor-turned-director Vincent Sherman, but this early in 1934 he’s only an
actor, playing the minor part of a dealer at Angie’s casino and just appearing
in one scene. The actual director of Midnight Alibi is Alan Crosland, who in 1926 and 1927 had been
one of Warner Bros.’ top directors, helming the first Vitaphone
music-accompanied film, the John Barrymore Don Juan, as well as the generally recognized “first
talkie,” The Jazz Singer. Then
his star had fallen from grace on the Warners lot until by 1934 he was getting
“B” assignments like this and Warren William’s first film as Perry Mason, The
Case of the Howling Dog — but
Crosland was still a highly talented filmmaker and there are some striking and
sometimes disorienting camera angles here. When I looked this film up on
imdb.com I noticed a review by someone variously identified as “gerrytwo” and
“gerrythree” from New York, who claimed that after Warner Bros. bought the
First National company in 1928 — First National had been formed in 1918 by a
group of independent theatre owners who were worried that Adolph Zukor’s
Paramount studio was going to freeze them out by releasing their star product
only to Paramount theatres, so they put together their own resources, formed a
studio and hired the two biggest stars in the business, Mary Pickford (from
Paramount) and Charlie Chaplin (from Mutual) — they continued to run it as at
least a nominally independent company with Hal Wallis as studio head, while
Darryl F. Zanuck ran Warner Bros. under Jack Warner’s supervision.
Then came
the Depression, and by 1933 most of the studios were under court-ordered
receivership under what was then called Chapter 77B of the federal bankruptcy
law (today it’s Chapter 11), and to forestall the studios going out of business
altogether Louis B. Mayer of MGM (ironically the one studio that hadn’t had to declare bankruptcy, and was even paying
dividends to its shareholders) concocted a plan that everybody in the movie business take a 50 percent pay cut
for the duration of the crisis. Needless to say, the studio workers,
particularly the ones on the lower end of the income scale who weren’t making
anything like star salaries, went ballistic — instead of forestalling
unionization of the movie business, the plan actually accelerated it — and
Zanuck angrily quit Warner Bros. when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, which was in charge of Mayer’s plan, refused to allow him to restore
Warners’ workers to full salary when he had promised them he would. Jack Warner’s
response was to fire a lot of the people on the lot who had supported Zanuck or
were working with the unions to organize the studio — though, significantly, he
did not drop James Cagney from his
contract list even though Cagney was one of the 12 founding members of the
Screen Actors’ Guild and was as tough off screen as he was on when the rights
of his fellow actors, including character actors and bit players, were
concerned. Among the people he fired were Alan Crosland and Richard
Barthelmess, whom Jack Warner had inherited from First National — who in 1927
had signed him to a contract guaranteeing him $250,000 per film and giving him story and script approval as well as
powers nearly amounting to being an independent producer. Midnight Alibi, a 58-minute film, was Barthelmess’ last film
under either the Warner Bros. or First National banner (which were actually
used pretty interchangeably — the 1934 Al Jolson/Dick Powell musical Wonder
Bar was billed as a First
National production on its own credits but as a Warner Bros. production on its
trailer), and afterwards he cycled through the cheaper studios playing minor
parts until he bade farewell to the screen as the second male lead in Howard
Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings for Columbia in 1939. What was ironic about gerry-whatever’s defense of
Barthelmess was that throughout Midnight Alibi I had been thinking what a better film it would
have been if Jack Warner had given it to Cagney! Still, it’s an engaging movie
and a nice blend of gangster movie and soap opera in the typical Damon Runyon
style.
