Strange Alibi

Often ridiculous but breathlessly paced and mostly entertaining. It's got all of the Warner Brothers staples: quick pace, lots of gun play, average looking leading man with above average acting ability (in this case a very young Arthur Kennedy) and a convincing rough and tumble feel. (You sometimes fear for the actors' safety.) It also has the great Howard Da Silva stealing every scene he's in as a sadistic prison guard.

Sacrifices logic for speed. Hey, plausibility slows things down. A standard undercover-cop-stuck-in-prison flick, though a bit more interesting because of its cast.

Arthur Kennedy stars in this film from Warner Brothers B picture unit where he plays a cop gone undercover to get the goods on a gambling syndicate. What he doesn't know is that the top cop brass Stanley Andrews and Cliff Clark are the head of the syndicate. After testifying in court Kennedy's framed for murder and sent to prison.

What a predicament, to the crooks he's a stool pigeon and he's now a criminal as well.

In only 63 minutes running time this B film goes at a rapid pace as Kennedy works out a situation that even Franz Kafka couldn't conceive.

Some mighty good performances characterize this film besides those mentioned. Florence Bates as the owner of a lakeside roadhouse, Howard DaSilva as a sadistic prison guard, Jonathan Hale as the governor, and John Ridgely as one of the few convict friends Kennedy makes in the joint.

There's a slam bang chicken run with a freight train during Kennedy's prison break. And his gimmick for clearing himself with the governor, absolutely inspired.

Good product from the Brothers Warner.

Arthur Kennedy is a police sergeant who goes undercover to root out crooked cops, only to get framed by those very cops for the murder of the police chief he was working for, and winds up being sent to prison. Kennedy, in an early role, is quite good and the film is chock full of the great character actors that pop up in these neat old Warners "B"s--guys like Jonathan Hale, Dick Rich, John Ridgely, Ben Welden and, in a scene-stealing role, Howard Da Silva as a sadistic prison guard. Director D. Ross Lederman, an old hand at these kinds of pictures, keeps things moving at lightning speed, and it has the sneering thugs, tough cops, gun molls with a heart of gold, screaming sirens, screeching tires, breakneck car chases and everything else that made so many of the Warners "B" pictures of the '40s worthwhile. Check it out.

Detective Arthur Kennedy hits chief of police Jonathan Hale and gets booted from the force. But don't worry; it's a frame-up so Kennedy can go undercover to investigate who killed an important witness. When Hale is killed, Kennedy is framed and winds up in prison. Can he escape? And how can a corpse prove his innocence?

This Warner Brothers B movie sure packs a lot of plot switches into its 62 minutes, something that's possible because it's Kennedy in the lead, one of the premier character actors of the movies, given a rare lead because it is, after all, a cheapie. That's probably why they got away with so much police corruption on view, and even Howard Da Silva as a brutal prison guard. With Joan Perry, Florence Bates, and Stanley Andrews.

Strange Alibi harks back to the quick, crude Warners crime-and-corruption movies of the 1930s, showing none of the more nuanced, ambiguous style that started to coalesce in the early 40s. It's a rough and ready programmer, just watchable because of a few of its cast members.

Arthur Kennedy, in one of his earliest roles, plays a cop who stages a dishonorable discharge from the force in order to work the shady side of the street. But, framed for the murder of the one man who can vouch for his honesty, he ends up in the Big House, a target both of other cons (since he was a cop) and the guards (since they think he was a dishonest one; Howard Da Silva plays a particularly sadistic screw). He's in for life, which promises to be nasty, brutish and short, but a few fast friends on the outside are trying to get him exonerated. Chief among them is gold-hearted vice queen Florence Bates, one of the movies' most formidable old battleaxes (before taking to acting, she was the first woman to practice law in Texas).

The plot races and bumps along but manages to work itself out with passable cleverness: Kennedy contrives a scheme in which his innocence is proved by the "testimony" of a corpse.