Alimony

"Alimony" from 1949 is a low budget film that nevertheless sports a good cast: John Beal, Hillary Brooke, Martha Vickers, and Leonid Kinsky.

Beal is a composer, Dan, who narrates his story in flashback when he is visited by Kitty (Vickers) father, who is trying to find her. Dan admits that he hasn't seen Kitty in a couple of years.

Dan lives in a convivial rooming house along with his fiancee Linda (Brooke) though they don't share a room. It's 1949 after all. Dan stays up until all hours of the night playing his piano, but no one ever complains.

Kitty comes along, and, once she hears Dan's compositions are going to be used in a new Broadway musical, decides that he's all hers. And Dan falls for her. He breaks up with a heartbroken Linda.

The musical falls through, and Kitty is out the door. Dan is left to try to win Linda back. No problem. She succumbs in no time. Dan, however, in the throes of amore, has written a song for Kitty. It becomes a big hit, and now the two are inextricably linked, even touring together, to Linda's disgust. But she decides to fight for her man and get him back. Again.

Not much point to this. I met John Beal some years ago. He was a lovely man and better than this!

If you can get past the sappy ending and a few plot stretches, this is a pretty good programmer. Seems Dan's (Beal) a struggling songwriter who takes inspiration from Kitty (Vickers) such that he comes up with a popular hit. Trouble is he's had a long relationship with good girl Linda (Brooke) that now comes unglued as Kitty schemes to get a share of the windfall. Thus the narrative follows the romantic and calculating travails of the boardinghouse trio.

It's a cheap production. However, the acting is good even if the story seldom leaves movie sets. This is a chance to catch two of the 40's premier vixens in the same frame. Brooke is cast against type, all sweetness and light, yet managing to bridge the strained abruptness of Linda's romantic turnarounds. At the same time, Vickers hides her scheming under a pretty face that's hard to resist. To me, the non-handsome Beal is perfect for the beleaguered composer, his disheveled appearance quite appropriate to the role. And too bad this was the only screen appearance of Laurie Lind (Helen) whose mop of hair and distinctive looks are career worthy. Then too, it's a colorful touch casting the so-called mad-Russian, Leonid Kinskey, as the harried music producer. He lends an exotic contrast to the more conventional others.

It's also worth noting how radio dominates the movie's entertainment scene. However, 1949 was a year when TV was making inroads into the popular media including film, but no hint of that here. Anyway, the distinctive cast makes this contrived story worth a look-see.

Alimony is a cheapie from the short lived Eagle-Lion Studios and it has some shoddy editing and a cop out ending. But the story is not a bad one and some interesting players give some nice performances.

The whole thing is narrated by John Beal who is now a successful composer telling Paul Guilfoyle, the father of Martha Vickers about his daughter who was just released from prison. It's not stuff a father wants to hear about his daughter.

Beal is married to Hillary Brooke and at one time all three were boarders at Marie Blake's rooming house. Brooke is the good girl and Vickers who was best known for being Lauren Bacall's sister in The Big Sleep is the bad one.

Vickers is the inspiration for a hit song that Beal wrote for his first big break. She latches on to him, but this is a girl who keeps her options open.

One of those options is an Alimony racket. She's the come on in staging phony situations for bottom feeding divorce attorney Douglass Dumbrille. It's what leads to her downfall.

Dumbrille really does this part with relish. He's the poster child for shyster attorneys. Clearly the best one in the film. There's also a nice performance by Leonid Kinskey who is Beal's agent.

This one considering its defects is not too bad. Maybe at Warner Brothers with Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland in the parts that Vickers and Brooke have this might have been a good film. Certainly a major studio might have corrected the defects present here.

The film begins with Dan talking to Mr. Klinger about the exploits of Klinger's daughter, Kitty. What follows is a very lengthy flashback. It seems that Kitte was interested in getting rich fast. She worked for a while as a girl who would help blackmailers. When a mark came into the room with her along, she'd strip off much of her clothes and grab the guy...while her partner snapped incriminating photos! Tired of this racket, she now set her mind to bigger game and eventually this meant Dan. While Dan was happily dating Linda, Kitty schemed to seduce him away from her...all because she thought Dan was destined for riches. And, when this didn't pan out and Dan's musical career didn't appear to be paying off, she dropped him and was on to the next scheme.

In many ways, this is like the great Pre-Code film, "Red-Headed Woman"...but more sanitized and without the great style of this earlier film. Now I am not saying it's bad...but "Red-Headed Woman" is so amazing and entertaining that it's no disgrace to not be as good as this scandalous film. Overall, a decent low-budget film...enjoyable because Kitty is so darn awful!

By the way, the landlady in the film is Marie Blake (also known by the stage name 'Blossom Rock'). That's Jeanette MacDonald's older sister...and Grandmama from the TV show "The Addams Family".

Sadly, it's only the musical career of "Dan" (John Beal) that is very promising in this rather disappointing, run-of-the-mill, marital melodrama. He has the misfortune to meet the money-grabbing "Kitty" (Martha Vickers) who has one goal, and one goal only - to get rich quick. She inspires him to write one hit and things look set fair. Except, well it seems that might be his only flirtation with success and pretty soon she has dumped him and moved onto a wealthy businessman. "Dan", meantime, returns to his decent fiancée "Linda" (Hillary Brooke) and that might have been the end of it. Thing is, "Kitty" only married "Burt" (Douglass Dumbrille) for his money and when she starts to make noises about divorce and substantial alimony, he discovers a litany of corrupt activities from his venally motivated wife that drags poor old "Dan" back into a toxic mix of greed and duplicity. The cast actually delivers adequately here, but the story is thin and over-scripted and at times it comes across as a radio play with pictures - and not very inspired pictures either. The characterisations are all too shallow and, to be honest, Vickers makes for a rather unlikely seductress. They do their own singing, to be fair, but otherwise there's very little here to recommend it, sorry.