Alibi for Murder

Alibi for Murder is a B movie starring William Gargan, Marguerite Churchill, and Gene Morgan.

Gargan plays a reporter, Perry Travis, who has his own radio show. Interestingly, he is present at a Hindenburgh landing, as he wants an interview with an industrialist, Foster (William Worthington). He can't get near the man, thanks to Foster's secretary Lois (Churchill).

As a side note, I kept waiting for the Hindenbergh to burst into flames, but then I realized that was a year later.

Travis doesn't give up trying to get to Foster. He heads for the man's estate. However, when he arrives, a shot rings out, and Foster is found dead, presumably by suicide. Travis believes otherwise.

It turns out that Foster was an arms manufacturer. In fact, a male secretary (Dwight Frye) refers to him as a "wholesale stealer of death." Some dialogue, but who better to deliver it than the man who played Renfield in "Dracula."

Travis was led to believe, by a visitor to his office, that he had invented a formula, biopepsid, that was going to be sock-o for pharmacists. The visitor, in fact, was posing as a pharmaceutical employee and really wanted information on Foster's inventions, one of which appears to have been a poison gas.

Okay mystery. My main interest in this was the fast-talking Gargan. When I was a kid, he received a tremendous amount of publicity because his voice box had to be removed as the result of cancer. He thereafter used an artificial voice box. He spent his remaining 21 years as a spokesman for the American Cancer Society.

"Alibi for Murder" is one of those old movies for which I have mixed but largely fond feelings (the title sounds like it could be one from the Barnaby Jones files!). The movie is fun to watch because the portrayed characters are interesting to look at and the intriguing story is a little bit different than ordinary; the excellent print I saw made it feel even better than it is. In addition, Marguerite Churchill has a fascinating countenance that always imbues a film with added value.

On the other hand it obviously was made as cheaply as possible, having only a very few set locations and one gets the feeling the players did few retakes. Luckily the cast are tried and true hands and remembered the gist of their lines and delivered them largely improvisationally, but with involvement and feeling. They probably enjoyed coming to work on this project for a few days and then went on to their next quickies.

In sum, the film is minor but enjoyably pleasant nonetheless, moves along nicely in its 62 minutes, is deeply steeped in 1936 to be sure, and by tomorrow one will have forgotten having seen it.

William Gargan, private eye and radio broadcaster, gets mixed up in an apparent suicide and scientific formula, when the scientist/employer of Marguerite Churchill kills himself in a locked room. Arms dealer Egon Brecher seems to be involved, but all leads fall apart, except for some hoods who threaten Gargan.

Gargan plays nicely with his Everyman persona in this one, and there's a nice sequence in which he criticizes Brecher's means of making a living. Dwight Frye gets a nice rant, and there's just one flaw in the solution, which I'll give you: silencers do not stop all the noise on a gun. Still, if you accept that they do, it's a clever murder, and this second feature directed by D. Ross Lederman keeps chugging along.