Perfect cast and a good story

Fantastic!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Naked Alibi is directed by Jerry Hopper and adapted to screenplay by Lawrence Roman from the story "Cry Copper" by Gladys Atwater and J. Robert Bren. It stars Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame, Gene Barry and Marcia Henderson. Music is by Joseph Gershenson and cinematography by Russell Metty.Urgh! It's one of those lesser grade film noir movies from the classic cycle that should have been super, but isn't. It's also a Sterling Hayden film that gives his knockers ammunition to call him wooden, yet the tedious direction of Hooper and all round over staging of the production is what's at fault here.Plot has Barry (over acting) as a suspected cop killer who walks free to apparently wreak more misery on the police force. Hayden's stoic and robust detective is not having a bit of it and becomes obsessed with bringing Barry's edgy character to justice. Grahame slinks into view in shapely fashion after half hour of film, to naturally stir the hornet's nest still further.The potential is there for a hot-to-trot noir of psychological substance, a peek under the skin of men teetering on the thin line separating good and bad. Sadly it's all so laborious and fake, the male actors indulging in what I call auto-cue acting as they act out badly staged scenes. Grahame comes out of it relatively unscathed, while Metty gives the production an atmosphere it doesn't deserve with some slats and shads dalliances. But really it's average at best and the cast are wasted. 5/10

Director Jerry Hopper with Stars: Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame, Gene Barry, Max Showalter, Marcia Henderson and Chuck Connors. Story is Al Willis (Barry) is picked up for drunk & disorderly conduct without ID and is in an interrogation room at the local Police Station being questioned about some robberies. A detective lieutenant (Showalter) is questioning the belligerent Willis. A scuffle results in Barry smacking Showalter in the head with an ashtray and threatening the cops that he will get even, the two other cops in the room subdue him just as Chief of Detectives Conroy (Hayden) walks into the room. Willis is identified as a good citizen and owner of a bakery, he apologizes for being drunk and is let go. Sometime later Showalter is gunned down in the street at a police call box. Conroy remembers Willis's threat and hauls in him in after a brief chase. Conroy (who has a reputation for brutality) develops a hard-on for Willis convinced that he is the killer, but Willis and his lawyer pull strings and Willis is released. All hell breaks loose when the other two cops in the interrogation room are killed by a car bomb and Conroy is photographed attacking Willis. Conroy looses his job but becomes obsessed with "getting" Willis stalking him around town. Willis getting un-nerved decides to leave town and his wife (Henderson) and child to take a vacation away from Conroy. Up to this point the film effectively has you sympathizing with Willis against loose cannon Conroy, but when Willis ends up in "Border Town" and assumes a new identity and joins gal pal B-Girl chanteuse Marianna (Grahame) our perceptions change drastically. It would have helped if this film would have been shot more on actual locations as it is its almost all Universal back-lot, it picks up when it moves to "Border Town" (Tijuana) and Barry is revealed, but that location looks minimally used at best, it pales in comparison to say "Touch of Evil". Its also one of those quasi Noirs that take place way too much in the sunshine for the first 3rd of the film (but hell they didn't know we'd be debating Film Noir 60 years later). Barry is way better than I was expecting (showing a lot of range that I never saw in TV's "Bat Masterson" or "Burke's Law"), and Grahame & Hayden are great as usual, Connors plays Conroy's second in command adequately, but the budget lets this film linger in the second tier of Noirs. Graham sings a song at the bar obviously a lip-sync, but she shakes that thing a bit doing it so who cares, lol. I'm a Gloria & Sterling fan so its an essential for me. 7/10

The Naked Alibi wastes some potentially terrific talents by forcing them into last-ditch, half-hearted retreads of characters and situations that had already, by 1954 and halfway down the leeward slope of the noir cycle, been done to death – often, in fact, done by these very same actors. That Nordic giant Sterling Hayden, never easy to cast, gives a reprise of a role – the angry cop – that suited him so well he encored it several times, taking his final bow in 1972 in The Godfather. (And, as nasty cops go, maybe only Robert Ryan played it nastier.) Gloria Grahame's kittenish victim had become by this time a staple of the cycle, but it's almost always good to watch her anyway. But so hot on the heels of Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, her role in The Naked Alibi looks very much like the larcenous knock-off that it is, right down to the final, poignant fadeout (and it doesn't help when she makes her entrance – as a nightclub canary – using a dubbed voice).The plot, which loses more credibility every time it takes a new turn, concerns the murder of police officers a smallish California city. Hayden's prime suspect is Gene Barry, but this church-going baker with a submissive wifey fools everybody else. Dogging him relentlessly, Hayden gets thrown off the force and, free-lancing, follows Barry to a wide-open town on the Mexican border where the suspect leads a double life, involving Grahame. Inevitably, Hayden gets involved with her too. Barry finally flashes his true colors and he joins Hayden in pursuing their mutual vendetta. But the working out is perfunctory and predictable, and it goes to show that even marquee stars can't salvage a tired, derivative piece of filmmaking.

Finally caught up with this on AMC. I wish Sterling Hayden had focused more on his Hollywood career, instead of returning to the sea from time-to-time. He's easily in the league of the Noir "Roberts" (Taylor, Ryan, Mitchum)...with a little JohnWayne to boot. Good picture....not *really* Film Noire....and not Gloria Grahame's best.doc