ALIBI (1929)

‘The Talkies’ arrived not as you’ve been told in 1927 with THE JAZZ SINGER, but in 1929 when films with some sort of synch-sound capacity flipped from 1928's 20% sound/80% silent to 80% sound/20% silent.  (These figures about as rough as the recording quality at the time.)  Audiences, studios and critics picked up on the shift and knew things would never go back.  But much woe amongst film intelligencia who saw the change as either bad canned theater or canned bad theater; an art form immobilized.  Yet even in 1929, signs of life were appearing if you only looked.  Visually imaginative, fluidly shot, still enjoyable today.  Standouts holding on to camera mobility and personal style included Ernst Lubitsch’s THE LOVE PARADE (next year he’d invent the Music Videos in MONTE CARLO);  F. Richard Jones’s BULLDOG DRUMMOND (alas dead of T.B. the next year); and this film’s Roland West* who’d inexplicably fall out of the biz two films/two years later at 47.  Here, after a quick-step opening to get wise-guy mob man Chester Morris out of jail, West films a big single-take thru art director William Cameron Menzies’ Art Deco nightclub to establish antihero Chester Morris’s character with a tracking shot Martin Scorsese might envy.  And while the visual pizzazz comes & goes, it also leads to the film’s climax with a penthouse escape that can still cause a gasp or two.  The plot gimmick involves a five-minute gap in Morris’s alibi that would have given him time to kill a cop.  And it’s trusting fiancé Mae Busch, a cop’s daughter, no less, who trips him up.  Other than West’s sure hand, it’s Morris who makes the pic.  The ruthless gangster kept in reserve behind the romantic lead Busch falls for still packing a wallop.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Morris would slip to formula programmers, hamming it up in BOSTON BLACKIEs and the like.  But seen here, in THE BIG HOUSE/’30 and in RED-HEADED WOMAN/’32, he’s the real deal.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-big-house-1930.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/red-headed-woman-1932.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The uptick in ‘Talkie’ quality so apparent, even Oscar® knew it, with these three films collecting eleven nominations.