Glory Alley

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 ****

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.

Not a total loss: Louis Armstrong sings, Leslie Caron dances, some very good actors try to do something with this turkey of a script, but good directors cannot make good movies with bad material and Raoul Walsh was always a man in a hurry. Kurt Kasznar plays a pompous blind man, a good warmup for his greatest role, Pozzo in "Waiting for Godot." Screenwriter Art Cohn hit the jackpot three years earlier with a much better boxing yarn, "The Set-Up" and wrote some good scripts before getting in a plane with Mike Todd. In bit parts, we see Barrie Chase, Joi Lansing, Emile Meyer, Kid Chissell, and King Donovan. TV was just starting in 1952, so it was still possible to get away with fanciful, farfetched fluff like this.

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.

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.