Alibi (1929)

The year of 1929 was in the middle of prohibition in America and notorious gangsters with the likes of Al Capone filled news stories across the country. It is only natural that motion pictures would adopt a new genre of gangster films. Throughout the 20s we would see dabs of this genre float around the silver screen and it would explode into a mega genre in the 1930s especially with the Warner Bros studio, but it was United Artist that made the gangster film in 1929. The picture was one of the first talking gangster films and would get a few nods at the Oscars that year, but in the end would be talkie that struggled and is hard to watch by today's standards.

The story is simple, about a gangster, Chick Williams (Chester Morris), newly freed from jail who pulls off his latest heist, but he has an alibi of being at the theater that night with his new wife, Joan (Eleanor Griffith) the daughter of Police Sergeant Pete Manning (Purnell Pratt). The movie is a cat and mouse game with the police trying to crack down the alibi by proving that Chick was in fact there at the heist. The police would eventually use hard nosed tactics to get people to confess of the warehouse break in that ended in the murder of a fellow police officer at the scene of the crime. The police worked to prove that Chick could have popped out during intermission of the stage act to perform the crime with time to make it back to the show before it resumed. Filled with all the old school gangster movie cliques, this film has an undercover cop that is discovered and has a long dying scene and even a police chase on rooftop that ends with Chick falling to his death. All this is tied together in a neat little bundle in the picture Alibi.

Like most films of this roughly two year period, this picture struggles with the use of integrating sound into an established medium of motion pictures. Director Roland West, known for his work in film noir pictures of the 20s, was no doubt chosen for this picture to add the layer of darkness in this crime drama. The film was a direct adaptation of the stage play "Nightstick" (which is an alternate title for the picture along with the name "The Perfect Alibi"). The story was set and rather simple, but to put it on screen is a different challenge as motion pictures were in this new flux with how pictures were assembled with sound. The sound quality for this picture was actually very poor. Knowing whether that was the actual recording or the deterioration over time I cannot say, but what I can say is that it fluctuated many times with its volume and there was a struggle to record the voices of actors who moved from time to time further away from the set position of the microphone. The microphone would also hurt the cinematography as the camera does not move at all for almost the complete film. These were the struggles in adding a new element to the productions of movies in a time that was use to "point, shoot, action."

The editing was a struggle to deal with while watching from today standards. Today's audiences are very savvy with quick editing we see in motion pictures and especially television, but this picture really dragged on slowly. You couldn't get any more linear of a story than this, but the editing did not add to the excitement or drama at all. One scene has a crook being interrogated and while he waits for two officers to talk in the corner we just wait with him. The scene was painfully slow to watch. The best editing in the film was a stand off with the undercover cop as he is discovered and shot for his lies to the gangsters. We watch his eyes as he looks around the room as three men move in on him. Having the men move towards the camera helped as the camera was fixed in one position, good direction when we know the camera lacks the dimension it once had when it moves around the room.

The film had its pros and its cons. The good included the use of shadows and light, the angles used in shots of the stage performers in theater scenes, and decent, though predicable story. The bad was cliques, including one slow, drawn out death scene with every clique you could imagine ("it's getting hard to see," "tell mother... goodbye," "I just wanted to be a good cop."). You can definitely tell this was a trend setter in the genre of gangster movies because this had everything wrapped in one.

All in all the film was bit of hit for 1929. It did garner three Oscar nods with best art direction, best actor (for Chester Morris), and even best picture. (All nominations for the 2nd Academy Awards where actually not nominated prior to the ceremony, but would be listed as nominations after the fact by the Academy for historical purposes.) Overall today the movie is not well known at all and is seen as poor by those that do, with a fraction believing it is a wonderful crime drama that set it up for all others to follow. Alibi wold be just another link in the chain in film history that was necessary during that shaky transitional period in movie history.