Midnight Alibi

While many people think 'B-movie' means bad movie, the term actually originated to describe the second and lesser film played at a double feature. The A-picture was the longer, more costly and more prestigious film in most cases and the B was made cheaper, more quickly and ran from 50-70 minutes...with most clocking in at about 60. So, when you look at "Midnight Alibi" on IMdb, you'll notice it's 58 minutes in length...clearly a B from Warner Brothers. Despite this, it's actually a very, very good film.

The story begins with Lance McGowan (Richard Barthelmess) returning from a cruise. During this trip, he met and fell hard for Joan (Ann Dvorak)...but they each go their separate ways. Soon you learn that Lance is a gangster....and his nemesis is Angie (Robert Barrat). This is a SERIOUS problem because soon you learn that he has a sister....and it's Joan!! Clearly, any sort of romance between Lance and Joan is going to be an uphill battle...especially when Angie orders some of his men to kill Lance. But they miss and Lance takes shelter in an old woman's mansion. What's next? Well, see the film.

What I liked most about this film is Lance's scenes with the old lady, Abigail Ardsley (Helen Lowell). It is very charming...as is the flashback scene when Abigail befriends Lance and tells him her life story. Overall, a film that managed to rise about the reputation of most Bs, as the story is quite well written as well as the acting. Well worth seeing...and rather charming for a gangster tale!

This movie is a pleasure to watch. It is a romantic gangster comedy. It moves quickly, has several nice plot twists, and allows some involvement with the Richard Bartelmess - Ann Dvorak characters.

Bartelmess looks and acts a lot like Robert Armstrong (king Kong) here. After seeing him in several heroic films, it is a little strange seeing him playing a gangster. He's fine and there is a good chemistry with Ann Dvorak. Helen Chandler appears in a couple of flashback scenes with Bartelmess and nearly steals the movie.

Basically, it is an entertaining hour long film that holds up well after 86 years.

Gambler Richard Barthelmess meets Ann Dvorak on ship while returning from Europe, and they fall in love. However, her brother, Robert Barratt, is also a tough egg, and he orders Barthelmess off with guns. He takes refuge in Helen Lowell's house, where she tells him the story of the man she loved when she was eighteen, also played by Barthelmess.

It's a charming and sentimental movie based, on, of all things, a Damon Runyon story, and not only is Miss Lowell an absolute sweetheart, but so is Helen Chandler, playing her a half century earlier. But the movie is peculiarly brief.

It was the last movie Barthelmess made under his long-running contract with First National (now Warner Brothers). He had aged out of his youthful star image, his efforts to retain his looks had failed several years earlier due to unsuccessful plastic surgery, and he was aging into a stoop-shouldered man, who could star act up a storm..... but that's not what a star is. So Barthelmess would head out, receive fewer and less successful roles, and give one final great performance in Only Angels Have Wings. He would join the Naval Reserve in 1942, and after the War, retire to Long Island, a rich man. He died in 1965 at the age of 68.

Midnight Alibi is a contrived movie, but it is a chance to see Richard Barthelmess one last time as the star of a Warner Bros. movie. Midnight Alibi is the last of 23 movies (if the IMDb listing is correct) Richard Barthelmess starred in under his contract with First National Pictures. For his first movie under contract in 1927, the 150 minute long The Patent Leather Kid, Barthelmess earned an Oscar nomination. By 1934, Jack Warner was his boss, Warner Bros. having taken over First National and Barthelmess' contract.

In 1933, Hal Wallis was running First National as a separate production company with its own slate of movies. After Darryl Zanuck left as head of studio production in 1933, Wallis got Zanuck's job. Zanuck disagreed with how Warner was imposing "temporary" cuts of studio staff salaries while leaving the salaries of top executives untouched. Jack Warner combined First National with Warners Bros. in 1934, so all that remained of First National was just the name that followed, after a dash, Warner Bros. under the Warners logo.

During filming, Barthelmess must have known Jack Warner was not renewing his contract, a contract which expired in March 1934. Midnight Alibi is only 58 minutes long, made cheaply to get one more movie out of an actor who was still on salary. The movie's director, Alan Crosland, like Barthelmess, was on his way out. Warner seems to have let Crosland go within a year of cutting loose Barthelmess, a pretty shabby way to treat the director of The Jazz Singer and Don Juan. For that matter, Ann Dvorak, the co-star, was having problems, trying to avoid appearing in bad movies she thought would ruin her career, and going on suspension as a result. Until Jack Warner put her on permanent suspension.

Over 70 years later, it seems pretty incredible that Jack Warner would get rid of his stars, his production head (Zanuck) and much of the creative talent behind the camera while his studio was turning out about 48 movies a year in the pre-Code years of 1931-1933, movies made on shoe string budgets but with quality production values.

Richard Barthelmess movie fans did not figure into Jack Warners' equation. Barthelmess had a contract that paid him around $250,000 a year and allowed him to act like a producer in choosing the subject and script of his movies. His run of independence ran out when his contract was up. The same went for Ruth Chatterton, who was let go the same time as Barthelmess. William Powell, like Chatterton another actor Warners had raided from Paramount in 1931 (when Paramount was going into receivership), didn't renew his expiring contract, claiming he wanted to take roles on his own, at $60,000 per picture. Powell then signed with MGM, where he stayed on contract for 15 years. Warner Bros. was not a nice studio to work for, it was run like a sweatshop unless you had an ironclad contract like Barthelmess had.

The subject matter of Midnight Alibi, dealing in part with the old lady's dream of happiness lost, is an appropriate subject in one way. At Warners in the early 30s, the studio had a repertory company of actors turning out movies that have stood the test of time, directors Roy Del Ruth, Mervyn LeRoy and William Wellman were turning out 3 or 4 movies a year. Yet, in the space of year, from when Zanuck left Warners, Warners lost directors, actors (Loretta Young is another one who left) and writers. Much of the talent that left stopped working in Hollywood. Roy Del Ruth continued directing for 25 years but did not make movies again like those pre-Code classics he directed rapid fire at Warner Bros.

IMDb shows the release date of Midnight Alibi as July 15, 1934. From a recent article I read, Sunday, July 15, 1934 was the effective date when Production Code Administrator Joe Breen actually started censoring movies to conform with his rigid and puritanical views on life, completely detached from reality. One great movie career effectively ends at Warner Bros. with the release of Midnight Alibi, while the career of Joe Breen, an enemy of degenerate art (degenerate art is the term Nazis applied to art, especially from Jewish artists, not in conformance with Nazi beliefs), begins.

A real First National oddity, in that it's mostly a Damon Runyon comedy, part of a mini-Runyon wave then in Hollywood ("Lady for a Day," "Little Miss Marker"), but it's also a historical romance. There's a lengthy, sentimental flashback to 1880s New York, where the Sky Masterson-ish Barthelmess plays a different character altogether, a glum office boy romancing the boss's daughter. (He looks 30 years too old, and he's not the most natural Runyon hero in the modern sequences, either.) The screenwriter has the right ear for Runyonese, a mixture of modern '30s slang and fanciful preciousness, and it's certainly a handsome production, especially in the flashbacks. But the tone isn't consistent, the resolution is too pat (the title is something of a plot giveaway), and the always-interesting Ann Dvorak looks a little bored in a conventional-leading-lady role.