Naked Alibi

source: Naked Alibi

****SPOILERS*** Being arrested and roughed up by the police especially after smashing Let. Park's, Casey Adams, face in with a coffee cup accused vagrant and drinking in public Al Willis, Gene Berry, is released due to lack of evidence. It's the next day that Parks is gunned down by an unknown assailant and a few days later two other cop are killed in a car bombing that has Willis, who claimed to get even with the police department for manhandled him, arrested as a suspect for all three murders. As we see Willis is as he always claims to be as innocent as the morning snow or is it dew but it's Chief of Detectives Joe Conroy, Sterling Hayden, who doesn't buy Willis' story. Going overboard in trying to arrest Willis for the murder of the three cops has Conroy suspended from the force and ordered to get a forced, by the department, psychological examination before he's allowed to get back to work. While on ice, or suspension, Conroy goes out on his own to get the goods on Willis whom he's sure is the one who murdered his three fellow policemen. This lead to this honky tonk town on the Mexican/USA border where Willis who works as a baker on the US side is the head mob boss there. There's also Willis' girlfriend Marianna, Gloria Grahame, who can't stand the guy but is terrified of leaving him in that if she did he'll murder her! ****SPOILERS*** Working behind the scenes, until he's discovered, Conroy gets to have Marianna, with a couple of free drinks, to talk about her boyfriend Willis' crimes including the one where he gunned down Let.Parks and even more important where he hid the murder weapon. Which is all the proof that Conroy needs to arrest him. Besides being a cold blooded murderer Willis isn't that bright either. Where he could have easily disposed of the gun he murdered Parks with he instead hid it in of all paces a local church! That Willis he attended not to pray but use as a alibi for where he was at the time that he in fact murdered Let. Parks. With the murder weapon recovered by Conroy Willis makes a run for it not on the street but on the neighbor rooftops where he's a perfect target for the perusing police. Gene Barry in one of the most craziest roles in his entire both film & TV career does a great job playing the Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde-like Al Willis who's so crazy it's a miracle that he can hold down two jobs, as a baker and mob boss, at the same time without anyone around, with the exception of the mentally and physically abused Marianna, noticing just who unstable he is. It's the suspended Chief of Detectives Joe Conroy who saw right from the start just how dangerous Wilis was and never stopped for a moment in trying to get the goods on him as well as have him arrested. That had the already not that on the ball, in his mental capacity, Willis crack and thus blow his cover as him being a perfectly normal and law abiding citizen which has him blown away at the end of the movie.

With having seen actor Sterling Hayden mentioned in a number of posts on various IMDb boards for the last few months,I was thrilled,when a DVD seller revealed that he had recently tracked down a near forgotten Hayden Film Noir,which led to me getting ready to see an alibi undress. The plot: Attempting to beat a confession out of him, Chief Joe Conroy and his fellow police officers find out that due to a strong alibi and a lack of evidence,that Al Willis must be freed from his cell.Shortly after Willis is freed,two of the officers that beat him up are killed. Suspecting Willis,Conroy goes to interrogate Willis,but is caught in a photo threatening him,which leads to Conroy getting fired from the force.Trusting his instincts,Conroy decides to go above the law and secretly follow Willis.Quickly finding out that Willis has suddenly decided to stay in a different town for a few days,Conroy decides to follow Willis on his "travels" in the hope of being able to finally undress his alibi. View on the film: For the opening 30 minutes,the screenplay by Lawrence Roman, J. Robert Bren and Gladys Atwater offers a tantalising glimpse that the movie may give the characters a real moral ambiguity,thanks to Conroy acting more like a real gangster than Willis ever does.Disappointingly ,once Conroy and Willis head to a new town,the writers give up on any criss-crossing morals,and instead give them each clear moral lines,which whilst they lead to a nice,downbeat Film Noir ending,do lead to the movie really struggling to build any tension. Matching Jerry Hooper's rather stilted directing, Hayden gives an unexpected stoic performance as Conroy,with Hayden giving Conroy a calmness when the character should have a real thirst for Willis blood.Keeping the character away from any hint of being straight-lace, Gene Barry gives a very good maniacal, smirking performance as Willis,with Barry showing Willis increasing desperation to keep his alibi naked.

The title "Naked Alibi" is a very strange one, as back in the day you'd never see naked people in mainstream Hollywood films and there is nothing naked whatsoever in the movie. Don't let that stop you from watching it, as it's an excellent and gritty film noir story. When the film begins, police captain Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) is investigating a case where a lieutenant was brutally murdered. He thinks Al Willis (Gene Barry) is responsible--after all, he's a HUGE hot-head and he had a grudge against this dead cop. Soon, two more cops are brutally murdered and Willis appears to be the likely suspect. But, when Conroy is fired for police brutality, he's determined to follow Willis into Mexico and prove he's a psycho killer. However, he's no longer a cop and has no jurisdiction...and Willis has a gang waiting for him. All Conroy has is a dame (Gloria Graham) and her kid! The film works well because Sterling Hayden (as usual) is excellent in these sorts of tough-guy roles. Additionally, Barry is very good as a scum-bag and the script keeps you on edge. Not a great film but certainly a good one worth your time.

A grimly determined homicide detective tries to nab a suspected cop-killer, even after getting kicked off the force. Although there are some implausible plot elements, this is a pretty good noir. It's anchored by stellar performances from Sterling Hayden (in a part quite similar to his role in CRIME WAVE, from the same year) and the great Gloria Grahame (whose character is rather suspiciously close to her part in THE BIG HEAT, from the previous year). Gene Barry is very good too, although I can't say much about him without spoiling things. The film takes an unpredictable second act twist, at least it was far different from what I was expecting, which was more of a LOOPHOLE scenario. Grahame's entrance is strange -- she looks a bit awkward doing the nightclub singer shtick, but perhaps it suits her character to be uncomfortable in that position. The story is paced very well and has some brutal scenes, fine cinematography and generally good dialogue. Maybe not one of the greats, but definitely worth checking out, especially for Grahame fans.

This is an underrated film noir that hasn't gotten much exposure within the genre. Sterling Hayden and Gloria Graham were well known performers in the genre at the time and they both do an excellent job in this film. But the big surprise to me was Gene Barry as the duplicitous criminal and supposed religious family man. When I was growing up in the 1960's, Gene Barry was a very familiar face on TV. He starred in numerous TV dramas such as Burke's Law, The Adventurer, and The Name of the Game. These were very predictable TV dramas where Barry often played virtuous characters fighting criminals. He was the epitome of the bland corporate TV actor. But in Naked Alibi, Barry portrays a much more conflicted character and he rises to the occasion. It does an excellent job in his role. What has often amazed me is how actors that were so good in low budget film noir movies in the 1950's eventually became stuck in vacuous and uninspiring roles on TV in the 60's. It is probably the greatest shame of American TV and movie culture that talented actors were forced into unimaginative and simplistic roles just so they could survive. Gene Barry is a perfect example of someone who could have had a great acting career if he hadn't been destroyed by Hollywood.

I'm not sure how Universal slipped this one past the Bureau of Consumer Protection, but they did. Despite the title's bold claim, this 1954 crime drama features absolutely no nudity or alibis - clothed or unclothed. On the plus side, it does co-star the deliciously sexy Gloria Grahame, but on the minus side it's a very poorly written part which does nothing to showcase her particular talents. She plays Marianna, a saloon singer in a sleazy town on the US side of the Mexican border, who manages to get herself involved with both an ex-cop (Sterling Hayden) and the suspected cop-killer (Gene Barry) he is obsessively pursuing. Even by the often convoluted standards of film noir (which this movie aspires to be) plotting, the story makes little sense, but there's little else to distract the attention. Hayden sleepwalks through his part with the air of an actor focusing on his paycheck rather than the script's obvious flaws, while Barry struggles unsuccessfully to create some sort of plausible whole out of the many inconsistencies in his character. In one scene he's a baker and family man wrongly accused by bullying detectives of murdering an officer, and in the next he's a big shot gangster (without a gang or criminal purpose) on the Mexican border, splashing the cash, roughing up the locals, and inflicting his particularly aggressive brand of lovin' on Miss Grahame. Quite how or why he leads this double life doesn't trouble director Jerry Hopper. In fact, very little seems to bother Mr Hopper. Not the implausible plot, the waste of talent (Grahame and Hayden) or the film's slapped-together-on-a-shoestring feel. NAKED ALIBI was shot in large part on the Universal back-lot and it looks it. The town square will be instantly recognizable from countless other movies made by the studio, while the border town's back alleys and loading docks are littered with those empty wooden crates one only ever sees in such large numbers in low budget movies where they're trying to fill in the space without spending money on props. Production values are so low that NAKED ALIBI plays more like a lackluster 1950s TV drama than a big screen entertainment. If Hopper thought he was contributing to the often stylish and memorable canon of low-budget film noir thrillers which many studios turned out in the early 1950s he was wrong. The confused plot, unimaginative camera-work and cast going through the motions put paid to that. For the Gloria Grahame completists among us this is a must-see, for everyone else there's plenty of other, much more rewarding things, you could be doing with your time. Check out more of my reviews at http://thefilmivejustseen.blogspot.com/

Someone is killing cops, and Chief of Detectives Sterling Hayden settles on baker Gene Barry as the guy who did it. He's sweating Barry, when his wife walks in with a lawyer. Eventually his mania gets so bad that he's fired. Barry tells his wife and son that he needs to take a trip to get his head straight. He heads down to just over the border in Mexico, where's he's the head of some criminal organization and has Gloria Grahame on the string. Hayden follows him, gets knifed in an alley, and rescued by Grahame. It's another of Hayden's starring roles that he walks through, a paycheck movie for back taxes and to subsidize his roaming the world on his boat. It's a fairly generic thriller, with towns named "Border City" and churches named "Community Church", passable, with little little of interest except for Barry talking out of the side of his mouth and slapping around Miss Grahame -- her lot in the movies as a floozy chanteuse who tries to reform to little avail. There's even one musical number, voice courtesy of Jo Anne Greer, in which she looks pretty awkward. All in all, another of the seemingly hundreds of indistinguishable programmers turned out by Universal, with sharp camerawork by Russel Metty.

Naked Alibi is directed by Jerry Hopper and adapted to screenplay by Lawrence Roman from the story "Cry Copper" by Gladys Atwater and J. Robert Bren. It stars Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame, Gene Barry and Marcia Henderson. Music is by Joseph Gershenson and cinematography by Russell Metty. Urgh! It's one of those lesser grade film noir movies from the classic cycle that should have been super, but isn't. It's also a Sterling Hayden film that gives his knockers ammunition to call him wooden, yet the tedious direction of Hooper and all round over staging of the production is what's at fault here. Plot has Barry (over acting) as a suspected cop killer who walks free to apparently wreak more misery on the police force. Hayden's stoic and robust detective is not having a bit of it and becomes obsessed with bringing Barry's edgy character to justice. Grahame slinks into view in shapely fashion after half hour of film, to naturally stir the hornet's nest still further. The potential is there for a hot-to-trot noir of psychological substance, a peek under the skin of men teetering on the thin line separating good and bad. Sadly it's all so laborious and fake, the male actors indulging in what I call auto-cue acting as they act out badly staged scenes. Grahame comes out of it relatively unscathed, while Metty gives the production an atmosphere it doesn't deserve with some slats and shads dalliances. But really it's average at best and the cast are wasted. 5/10

I saw this film many years ago in England and remember being shocked by it. Saw it once in France under the title "Alibi Meurtrier". It's a good film but I could not tolerate Hayden's "manipulation" of Gloria Grahame. Since that time, every time I see Sterling Hayden's face in a film I am filled with hate for this man !! But decors and music are good and the whole thing is a good example of a pessismistic film or 'film noir".