Glory Alley

IT HAS LONG been said that there is no such thing as strict fiction. The premise being that all writers are influenced by actual happenings involving real people, either by choice or subconsciously. Having just recently screened GLORY ALLEY years after seeing on the nightly TV movie series, we must say that it flies in the face of that adage.

THE FILM APPEARS to have been assembled using bits and pieces of other genres from previous periods in Hollywood history. Director Raoul Walsh, himself being if not exactly a sort of living anachronism, was a sort of living, breathing history of the film industry. His own career had begun in the Silents, but before the cameras as actor. (He famously portrayed John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION.)*

SO, CALLING ON his many experience as actor and director to bring us a story that was both similar and yet unlike anything else. The story exists both in a period of time (Post World War II New Orleans, Louisiana) and yet is timeless. Its reference and involvement with the Korean War could just as easily have been World War II. This leads us to believe that the story had been around, sitting on the shelves, gathering dust before it finally got made.

IN MANY RESPECTS the production looks like a comic strip or comic book display of "sequential art". The manner in which the characters, both main and supporting, are made to fit neatly into conformity of their particular pigeon holes. The Judge, Pig and Shadow Johnson (Louis Armstrong) are all prime examples.

AND IN SPEAKING of the cast, we found it to be both well constructed , if just a trifle far ranging. Leslie Caron finds her way into a most unusual portrayal of a potentially gifted ballerina's being forced to perform in dance halls. Louis Armstrong does a fine job of being general purpose good guy and servant. His duties range from boxing corner man, musician and valet to the Judge.

IT IS PERHAPS the one role, odd as it may seem, to showcase the talents of Ralph Meeker as main character, Socks Barbarossa. Being a very complex man with great wisdom and many other eclectic talents. Making the hero a denizen of the gutter (Glory Alley) just adds to the drama.

WE MUST MENTION the role of narrator, retiring newspaper man, Gabr Jordan (John McIntyre), who adds a touch of authenticity to this convoluted, meandering, hybrid of a story.

WE ALSO MUST posit the question: Did John McIntyre ever look young or portray a younger type? NOTE: * As director Raoul Walsh had compiled a tremendous number of very memorable pictures, largely at Warner Brothers. They include: WHITE HEAT, GENTLEMAN JIM, THED STRTAWBERRY BLONDE, HIGH SIERRA, THE ROARING 20's,.......................

GLORY ALLEY is one of the films that signaled the end of the golden age of MGM. Set in a silly back-lot New Orleans, the drama centers on a prizefighter who inexplicably flees a championship bout just as it is about to begin. We have to wait the whole movie to find out why - and when we do the reason is so silly that it makes the whole movie seem like a complete waste of time. Ralph Meeker, a good-looking but rather genteel actor, struggles to play the street-wise boxer. It's the sort of part John Garfield played so well, but Meeker, lovingly filmed by William Daniels, just seems too pretty. The ludicrous 'on-the-skids' montage hardly helps - nor does the fact that his character is called "Socks"!

Then we have Leslie Caron as his love interest. It looks like this part was hurriedly re-written for her after her triumph in AN American IN Paris. She performs ridiculous ballet routines in a seedy bar (you know the patrons would have booed her off immediately). You see she wanted to be a ballerina, but she gave it all up to support her blind father. He's played by Kurt Kaszner - an actor still in his thirties but donned with silly silver hair to make him look ancient and wise.

Then there's Louis Armstrong, sadly named "Shadow", and seemingly the only African-American in New Orleans. He's supposed to be Meeker's trainer, but he spends the whole movie playing his trumpet and leading absurd sing-a-longs at the local bar. He does have a couple of good acting scenes though. The excellent Gilbert Roland floats around the film's edges with nothing to do, while John McIntire adds pseudo profound narration to the story - told in flashback like a film noir.

Probably the worst sequence in the film, and that's saying something, is the ludicrous Korean War scene, with some stock footage, four soldiers, some sort of pine forest and a rear projected bridge deemed sufficient to portray a major world conflict.

So we have a boxing picture, a musical, a film noir, a war film, and a pseudo-Freudian psychological study all rolled into one! What more could you ask for?

It's hard to believe a fine hard-boiled director like Raoul Walsh oversaw this mess - he probably wanted to run straight back to Warner Bros afterwards.

Would-be 'hard-bitten' product from MGM suffers from too many disparate ingredients. A retiring newspaperman in New Orleans reflects on his best subject: a prize-fighter named Socks (!) who infamously deserted a boxing match at the eleventh hour; after stints as both a huckster and a soldier in the Korean War, he makes a celebrated comeback. This may be revered director Raoul Walsh's worst film--but really, no director could segue smoothly between these slabs of superficial melodrama (including a fighter with neuroses, his ballet-dancing girlfriend, her blind father the Judge, and a jazz-singing, trumpet-playing member of the troupe). As an early vehicle for Ralph Meeker and Leslie Caron, it's a wash-out; neither star is shown to a good advantage, although Caron's jerky choreography is an odd hoot and Meeker does look great in boxing gloves. Louis Armstrong's final musical number in a barroom is rousing--and his general good will is infectious--yet the music, the milieu, and the material never quite come together. * from ****

This film is a confused mess, but yet I can't write it off completely. Leslie Caron, Louis Armstrong, and Ralph Meeker do the best they can with this pointless mishmash. The judge character was utterly insufferable. I wanted one of those old-timey giant vaudeville hooks to pull this guy off the stage. Meeker's character has plenty of absurd and self-pitying lines. The plot twists at the end fell into complete hyperbolic absurdity. But there's just enough here to keep it together, somehow, and the glue is Caron and Armstrong and Meeker. Especially Leslie Caron. She seems to be having a great time and her scenes are delightful. So really, if you like these three, you might want to check it out.

Rarely have I seen such uniformly bad reviews for a studio production with name stars as this one. No need to repeat many of the negative points already made. I am curious, nonetheless, how such a misfire not only got released but also how it got made in the first place. Director Raoul Walsh was one of Hollywood's most respected filmmakers, and deservedly so. Yet his direction of Meeker suggests that neither of them had a clear concept of the character of Socks who comes across like a grinning doofus instead of a tough-guy boxer (compare with Meeker's genuine tough guy in Kiss Me Deadly). In fact, Walsh's direction really comes alive only during the crowd scenes which do show some sparkle. My guess is he took one look at the screenplay and went for the payday. And who was it, I wonder, who gave final approval to a script (Art Cohn) that has all the coherence and plausibility of an Ed Wood creation. To me, the movie has too many earmarks of a rush-job that ended up doing nobody any favors. Cable should do viewers a favor and give this sorry concoction a belated burial, decent or otherwise.