anwarul210 Dire. When the first scene of the movie is a tracking shot to a line of chorus girls and eventually focuses on the most inept dancer you have ever seen, you know it's downhill from here. This talentless, ham-fisted, frumpy cow actually has a supporting role, which sets the bar very low for everyone else. However, they still manage to demolish any semblance of good acting. Chester Morris, who plays the gangster, is horrendous. As cardboard as the stage sets, he alternates between smugness and a perpetual scowl for most of the movie. At the end when his alibi is disproven, his personality completely changes unbelievably and he turns into a whimpering sap. The scene where he thinks he has been shot by the police and collapses on the floor is hysterical, as well as his actual death scene. On the topic of death scenes, a shout out has to go to Regis Toomey. Irritating throughout, his death scene has to be the longest ever put to film that I ended up shouting, "just die, already!" at him.The story itself may have been interesting for an easily-entertained 1929 audience, but with so many coincidences and implausible moments, as well as being boring, clichéd and dull, I was wishing this 91 minute masterpiece of crap was only 91 seconds long. This was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor for Chester Morris. I despair.

evanston_dad "Alibi" starts out promisingly enough, with a sort of sound symphony set to an expressionist montage of a man being released from prison. We hear the tread of wardens' boots, the clank of truncheons against metal bars, steel doors rasping and clanging -- it's almost like a musical number and pays homage to the new technology that had so recently hit screens and changed films for ever in the late 20s.But then "Alibi" starts talking, and things go quickly downhill from there. This Best Picture nominee from 1929 does manage to capture a striking visual style, which is something I can't say for the film that won the second Academy Award for Best Picture, "The Broadway Melody." But it's clear that the team behind "Alibi" didn't have much more of an idea of what to do with sound than the creators of that other film did.As with "The Broadway Melody," "Alibi" is more interesting as a blueprint for films that would spring from the same genre than it is on its own terms. In this case, that genre is the seedy gangster film that Warner Bros. would turn into an art form only a few years later.Chester Morris received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance as the reformed gangster who's not really reformed, but his mugging is nearly uncomfortable to watch -- he would prove himself to be a quick learner in the sound medium and deliver a very good performance in "The Divorcée" only a year later. The abstract art direction by William Cameron Menzies was also recognized by the Academy with a nomination."Alibi" tricks a viewer into thinking that it's going to go to some rather interesting places that it ultimately doesn't. There's some attempts at obscuring the boundaries between the criminals and the cops that a more heavily enforced production code wouldn't allow in movies from a decade later, but it doesn't take that juxtaposition very far, and we always pretty much know whose side we're supposed to be on.As with "The Broadway Melody," "Alibi" is interesting for people who want to see what some of the early Academy Award winning and nominated movies look like, but it's not very enjoyable for anything else.Grade: C

kidboots "Alibi" was a sensational talkie debut for Chester Morris who played Chick Williams, the first of the anti heroes who were to dominate Hollywood in the 1930s. Chester Morris was first noticed in the Broadway cast of "Crime" - in fact the whole cast was raided for the movies - Sylvia Sidney, Douglass Montgomery, Kay Johnson, James Rennie, Jack La Rue and Kay Francis, a cast Broadway producers nowadays could only dream about. The role of amoral Chick Williams bought him instant recognition and an Academy Award nomination and even though he lost to Warner Baxter for "In Old Arizona" (Chester should have won) studios were riveted to his performance and during 1929 Paramount, Warner Brothers/First National and RKO used him constantly. Even though Roland West produced, directed and wrote the screenplay for this trail blazing talkie, based on the Broadway play "Nightstick", his career faded soon after when he retired and went into the restaurant business with his current girlfriend Thelma Todd.Joan (Eleanor Griffith) is going out with recently released prisoner Chick Williams (Morris), she is a policeman's (Purnell Pratt) daughter who feels he only needs the love and support of a good woman to help him go straight. But behind Chick's pleasant exterior is a hardened criminal who is really the brains behind the gang who welcome him back to the fold. Another fixture at the almost futuristic nightclub (shades of "Broadway") is amiable drunk Danny (Regis Toomey) who has his eye on cute singer Toots but when Joan walks into her apartment one night she finds Danny with her father and realises he is a plain clothes policeman. They are trying to get the robbers of a fur heist in which a policeman was killed - they are convinced Chick was responsible. Even though she could betray Danny she doesn't, but she also has a bombshell of her own to drop - she is now married to Chick and can furnish him with an alibi for the night of the murder.Although Morris didn't have much to do during the first half of the movie once Chick's true colours are revealed he dominates every scene. There was a trifle bit of over acting and grimacing but for his first talkie he handled himself like a veteran. For an early talkie (April 1929) there was a lot of innovation and while a couple of things didn't come off the rest did - in the interrogation room as a prisoner is broken down into confessing to his part in the robbery, through having his face directly at the audience, they see his expressions and know he is guilty before the cops do. It may have been lifted from the stage production but it worked. The German expressionistic vogue hadn't entirely faded away and the Art Deco sets and lighting were used to great advantage, especially the chase sequence up on the roof top.Because 1929 was the height of the musical boom, action was often stopped for a musical number (they slowed the film down a bit). It even boasted a hit song "I"ve Never Seen a Smile Like Yours" sung by Irma Harrison (dubbed by Virginia Flohri, as reported in a Photoplay expose about dubbing in 1929). Harrison was cute but didn't make much of an impression, the same can be said of Eleanor Griffith who only made "Alibi" and another film back in 1922, but she did make an impression on movie suavey John Halliday whom she married in 1929.

mgmax This crime melodrama isn't terribly easy to sit through today, but you can see why it impressed everybody and got a Best Picture Oscar nomination in 1929-- director West is constantly experimenting with the possibilities of sound, dramatically raising and lowering voice volumes and playing with background noise, music (there's a not-bad dance number that foreshadows Busby Berkeley a little), etc.