El callejon de la gloria

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.

This film starts out as Gabe Jordan, a New Orleans columnist, prepares to retire, and talks about all of the interesting people in New Orleans that he has written about over the years. But he settles on one person of interest that sticks out prominently in his mind - Socks Barbarosa (Ralph Meeker). Now the name is interesting enough as he neither wears socks differently from anybody else, nor does he have a red beard, but I digress.

So the story of Socks is the plot, and oh what a tangled mess it is. First, Socks is supposed to be heading for the championship in the ring, but one night he just runs away before the fight even starts. He says he is quitting, and will not say why. This is apparently enough for his blind backer, the Judge (Kurt Kasnar), to turn from friend to enemy. Every time he sees the guy he practically hisses and spits on him Come to think of it, I think he does spit on him. Socks is in love with Angie, the Judge's daughter (Leslie Caron), and she wisely postpones their wedding because married women can't work burlesque, which is what she has been doing and Socks is not trained to do anything but fight.

So Socks hits the skids for awhile, drinking his troubles away, and then joins the army and goes to Korea where he wins the Congressional medal of honor. He comes back, feted by military brass and the political elite of New Orleans, but after awhile he is forgotten again. So he picks up where he left off before Korea, whining endlessly about how bad he has it. I think he was going for the Frank Sinatra, "I'd-have-no-luck-if-it-wasn't-bad" vibe, but Meeker just plays this like a 20-something that never grew up. He lacks Sinatra's ability to project an interesting melancholy mystique.

I'll let you see how this film meanders to its confusing conclusion. It is probably worth a look for a few reasons that have nothing to do with the main character or the plot. For one you have musical interludes featuring the musical talent of the great Louis Armstrong and the dancing of Leslie Caron who does the best she can with a part in which she is completely miscast. Also, the film does have great atmosphere. You feel like you are on the gritty rain soaked streets of New Orleans back before it became riddled with crime and was just full of characters. You can almost hear Marlon Brando tear his tee shirt while crying "Stella!" somewhere out there in the French quarter.

Thus it's a 50/50 proposition as to whether it is worth your time.

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.

While this is no great film, it isn't quite as awful as others have suggested here. To be so extreme as to presume to know what MGM executives thought of genre films at other studios is only total guesswork based on no evidence whatsoever. This is not strictly a "film noir" and really a mishmash of several Hollywood genres, but it does feature some fine actors and a well-played appearance by Louis Armstrong, who always maintained a positive attitude toward roles which were not the most flattering but still helped preserve his mighty presence for posterity.

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,.......................