La ruelle du péché

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.

A thrown-together gumbo from, of all directors, Raoul Walsh, Glory Alley (named for a raffish stretch of Bourbon Street) can't decide what flavor should dominate: the sweet, the piquant, the bitter. It seems to have been assembled from ingredients on hand at MGM in 1952. They were:

Ralph Meeker. Best remembered as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly, he caught the studio's eye when he replaced Marlon Brando on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. On the off-chance that the N'Awlins setting might work its voodoo once more, the brawny Meeker was cast as a prizefighter called Socks Barbarossa.

Leslie Caron. Fresh from An American in Paris, she was at best a dancer with a Gallic accent and gamine charm. Here, she supports her blind father (Kurt Kaszner) by kicking (en point, no less) in hoochie-koochie numbers in a dive called Chez Bozo; it's a cross between Harriet Hoctor and Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, dancing in Capris.

Louis Armstrong. Instead of turning him into a jazz-joint headliner, he's relegated to the part of a philosophizing guide for the sightless old grump; thankfully, he sings a few songs and blows his horn now and again.

All in all, Glory Alley is a Runyonesque slice of life set among the poor people of the Big Easy. Meeker, in love with Caron but hated by her father, sustains a none-too-plausible run of ups and downs (there's even an excursion to Korea). It's a pot-luck special, made (it seems) to clear out the studio's larders.

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.

This is one of the few movies I consider so bad they're interesting. The champion in this category is "The Guilt Of Janet Ames." "Glory Alley" is not that awful but it is a real mess. Yet, it is intriguing.

Ralph Meeker, the brilliant star of "Kiss Me Deadly" who did way too few movies, plays a boxer named Socks Barbarosa. Maybe Bill Clinton named his cat after this character.

Meeker is also very good in "Show In The Sky." He was generally underused ion movies, though.

"Glory Alley" is a kind of faux-Damon Runyon. Runyon gone South to New Orleans. We have Socks. We have a blind man called the Judge. His helper, played by Louis Armstrong, is named Shadow.

The Judge has an Italian accent; yet his daughter has a French accent. And no wonder: She is Leslie Caron. Caron and Meeker could have been a fantastic combination. She's appealing. It's hard, though, to believe that she is doing music hall numbers at a dive called Chez Bozo and her father doesn't know it. He seems to know everything else that's going on.

The movie is narrated by newspaper reporter John McIntire. It's a voice-over narration, looking back on the vents we're seeing. But this is no noir. McIntire tells us it's the most fascinating story he ever covered -- and he's never told the truth till now -- is that of Socks Barbarosa.

Well, it could have been a fascinating story. It's peopled with fine actors and a superb leading man. But it doesn't hold together. This is not to mention its preaching: Much of the dialogue, especially toward the end, sounds as if it came from a sampler on a wall. Nor what sounds like the MGM Chorale that accompanies some of Armstrong's trumpet playing and is sort of an uplifting Greek chorus.

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.