Once again smitten by a pretty lady, the Falcon finds himself co-opted into guarding a wealthy woman’s jewellery. But when said jewels are promptly stolen, and murders ensue, our charming hero is implicated. Who would do such a dastardly thing? And what’s going on with the DJ in the roof of the hotel?
The jewels are almost an aside as the twelfth Falcon film gets stuck into a main plot about secret lovers and betrayal. It’s darker than usual fare for the series, bordering on the noir-ish. There’s still the usual Falcon charm and comedic antics of Goldie to lighten the mood, but they feel bolted on to the core of a slightly grimmer tale — everyone’s a crook; half of them die. Some elements are woefully underdeveloped, in that churn-’em-out B-movie way: we never see the conductor’s reaction to his lover being murdered by her secret husband, for instance; or the explanation for the jewel theft, stuck on the end in a throwaway moment — that was what drew the Falcon in, therefore ostensibly the main case! And what instead turns out to be the primary plot would have played out the same way even if the Falcon hadn’t become involved. Oh dear.
From all this, the film is somewhat rescued by Elisha Cook Jr.’s performance. He’s great as ever, a remarkably dependable character actor. (Though it does come with the slightly odd sight of Cook Jr. and Esther Howard being all best-chums-y after recently seeing him try to kill her in Lady of Deceit. I guess that kind of encounter probably happened a lot in those studio contract days.)
Among the rest of the cast, Vince Barnett becomes the fourth actor to play the Falcon’s sidekick, Goldie; and Jean Brooks and Rita Corday each appear in their fifth Falcon films! Brooks was previously in Strikes Back, in Danger, the Co-eds and in Hollywood, while Corday was in Strikes Back, the Co-eds, in Hollywood and in San Francisco (making this three in a row). Can you imagine anyone doing that today? (And Brooks is in literally one shot, I think. Considering she was a leading lady in at least two previous Falcons, that’s a tad weird to boot.)
I’m not sure Alibi is that good as a Falcon film, but the storyline featuring Cook Jr.’s performance make it watchable in spite of the other problems.
* As with the vast majority of the Falcon series, The Falcon’s Alibi hasn’t been passed by the BBFC since its original release. Nonetheless, it’s available on DVD, rated PG. ^
Based on a true story, this film noir sees two chums on the way home from a fishing trip pick up a hitchhiker. As you can tell from the title, he turns out to be rather significant: he’s a murderer on the run, and pulls a gun on the men so they’ll do his bidding, which is take him to Mexico so he can escape justice. Oh dear.
But does her gender add any different perspective? I think perhaps it does. If you read 
Director Robert Wise certainly had an eclectic career. Depending on your genre predilections, you may feel he’s best known for 
Even today, it’s quite a nasty little work, although tastes have evolved to the point where “discriminating people” are likely to be attracted to it — though not purely for the violence. You’d imagine that would pale by today’s standards, but even now the opening double homicide — presented pretty much in full on screen — is quite shocking, especially because it seems so horrendously plausible. Much movie violence is heightened, involving gangsters or spies or whatever, but here it’s a lover in a jealous rage killing two people in the kitchen of a regular house. Grim.
sometimes develop a cult following.
A B-picture from the middle of the classic film noir era, Armored Car Robbery is perhaps most notable today for being one of the first films directed by Richard Fleischer, who would later call the shots on 
Helmed by acclaimed director Nicholas Ray (
On the plus side, Bernard Herrmann’s score is unequivocally excellent, particularly the pulsating opening theme and the insistent action climax.
Directed by the inestimable Billy Wilder, winner of the Grand Prix (forerunner to the Palme d’Or) at the first Cannes, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1946, and also Best Actor, Director, and Screenplay, it’s a wonder that The Lost Weekend isn’t better known. I don’t think I’d even heard of it until Masters of Cinema announced their Blu-ray release 
all of them thwarted at the last possible moment, when victory seems assured. The film isn’t preachy, but if it does teach us a lesson then this is how it does it.
Milland is astounding. The film rides on him and he really carries it. It’s easy to play a comic drunk, but Milland doesn’t sink to that. Indeed he doesn’t do one type of drunk at all, swaying back and forth across various levels of inebriation as required. I often find films of this era contain performances we assess as great, but if you put them in a film today no one would buy it; they’d find it stagey and fake. Milland’s transcends that — it fits the era, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it would play just as potently today. I think it’s fair to say that Milland is not widely known today, but with every film of his I become more convinced that history has been unkind.
There’s also able support from Howard Da Silva as barman Nat and Doris Dowling as Gloria (is she a whore of some kind? Just an escort? A bar-crawler? Did I miss something?), whose slang is oddly infectious. No offence to Jane Wyman, but her lovelorn-but-strong girlfriend character only seems to really come alive in the closing minutes, when she considers abandoning Birnam to his fate.
but from what I do know of other conditions of addiction and mental health, this feels as if it’s still thoroughly relevant.
Here’s an unusual one from the pantheon of film noir. These days we’d probably call it a docu-drama, though thankfully there are no talking heads, but there is a factual voiceover narration. The story, we’re told, comes from the FBI’s files and is based on a real case — 
how they really work and investigate a case. At the time I imagine this was a fascinating procedural; now, we’re all a bit more familiar with how such things go, but it still works as an historical document.
Might be because no one ever knew they were making a film noir, eh? How can you expect something to conform to a set of rules that were only defined after the fact? Hathaway and co didn’t fail at making a noir, they just made a film that doesn’t fit the later-defined template as well as the films used to define said template. I know, four words from some other online critic hardly merit a whole paragraph, but it does bug me when people write daft things like that.
If The Locket is known for anything, it’s for a plot structure that places flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. There’s always the potential for good fun in that kind of structure, though it’s usually the kind of thing that sounds more complicated than it is — the straightforward ‘concentric circle’ arrangement here makes them a doddle to follow; so straightforward, in fact, that it would be easy to miss how it was so structured.
It might have been more interesting if the doctor had been making it all up; or if it had been left open ended, with Nancy set to ruin someone else’s life. That could well have worked, leaving the audience to come to its own conclusions, etc. Considering the film’s age, however, I’m sure there were demands we see this thief and murderess brought to justice.
manipulative criminal it seemed all along, but instead a damaged individual doing these things involuntarily. This isn’t the wholly nonsensical part of the film — her apparently-accidental marriage to the son of the house she grew up in would be that bit — but I preferred it when she was just a villain. Psychologically it holds relevance, but at the same time she’s rather taken it to extremes. Or maybe I was just fed up by then.
Ray Milland stars as Dr. Allan Fields, a nuclear physicist working at the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who is photographing secret files and passing them to The Other Side, until something goes wrong and the authorities are on his tail. But that’s almost beside the point, because if The Thief is known for anything it’s for its dialogue — as the poster proclaims, “not a word is spoken…!”
Obviously we can look back to the silent cinema for that kind of thing, but while that era could probably still teach many filmmakers something about visual storytelling, it’s hard to deny that the advent of synchronised sound adds a helluva lot to the ability of film — if it didn’t, it wouldn’t have taken over so fast and remained virtually 100% dominant for the last 80+ years.
Perhaps this is why the villains are never explicitly named. But they’re definitely not American! Tsk tsk. More crucially, it’s a bit slow at times — it seems to take longer to explain things when stuck doing them through visuals alone. That said, it could probably have survived a speedier approach even doing what it does — perhaps, then, Rouse is playing for time: the film only runs 87 minutes in spite of its pace.
100Films.co.uk 