Anatomia di un delitto

Two great film noir actors - Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame - star in this movie. Hayden is excellent as a tough cop bound-and-determined to get a killer than has been turned free (Gene Barry).

Barry is very good as the criminal who falsely claims "police brutality." In that respect, this movie was ahead of its day as that term became widely used two decades later.

Overall, this a good film noir that's a bit different from the normal fare, but certainly not different when it comes to great noir photography and good suspense.

Where is the DVD of this film? (In fact, where was the VHS, in the first place?)

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.

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

The title "Naked Alibi" is a very strange one, as back in the day you'd never see naked people in mainstream Hollywood films and there is nothing naked whatsoever in the movie. Don't let that stop you from watching it, as it's an excellent and gritty film noir story.

When the film begins, police captain Joe Conroy (Sterling Hayden) is investigating a case where a lieutenant was brutally murdered. He thinks Al Willis (Gene Barry) is responsible--after all, he's a HUGE hot-head and he had a grudge against this dead cop. Soon, two more cops are brutally murdered and Willis appears to be the likely suspect. But, when Conroy is fired for police brutality, he's determined to follow Willis into Mexico and prove he's a psycho killer. However, he's no longer a cop and has no jurisdiction...and Willis has a gang waiting for him. All Conroy has is a dame (Gloria Graham) and her kid!

The film works well because Sterling Hayden (as usual) is excellent in these sorts of tough-guy roles. Additionally, Barry is very good as a scum-bag and the script keeps you on edge. Not a great film but certainly a good one worth your time.

I'm not sure how Universal slipped this one past the Bureau of Consumer Protection, but they did. Despite the title's bold claim, this 1954 crime drama features absolutely no nudity or alibis - clothed or unclothed. On the plus side, it does co-star the deliciously sexy Gloria Grahame, but on the minus side it's a very poorly written part which does nothing to showcase her particular talents. She plays Marianna, a saloon singer in a sleazy town on the US side of the Mexican border, who manages to get herself involved with both an ex-cop (Sterling Hayden) and the suspected cop-killer (Gene Barry) he is obsessively pursuing. Even by the often convoluted standards of film noir (which this movie aspires to be) plotting, the story makes little sense, but there's little else to distract the attention. Hayden sleepwalks through his part with the air of an actor focusing on his paycheck rather than the script's obvious flaws, while Barry struggles unsuccessfully to create some sort of plausible whole out of the many inconsistencies in his character. In one scene he's a baker and family man wrongly accused by bullying detectives of murdering an officer, and in the next he's a big shot gangster (without a gang or criminal purpose) on the Mexican border, splashing the cash, roughing up the locals, and inflicting his particularly aggressive brand of lovin' on Miss Grahame. Quite how or why he leads this double life doesn't trouble director Jerry Hopper. In fact, very little seems to bother Mr Hopper. Not the implausible plot, the waste of talent (Grahame and Hayden) or the film's slapped-together-on-a-shoestring feel. NAKED ALIBI was shot in large part on the Universal back-lot and it looks it. The town square will be instantly recognizable from countless other movies made by the studio, while the border town's back alleys and loading docks are littered with those empty wooden crates one only ever sees in such large numbers in low budget movies where they're trying to fill in the space without spending money on props. Production values are so low that NAKED ALIBI plays more like a lackluster 1950s TV drama than a big screen entertainment. If Hopper thought he was contributing to the often stylish and memorable canon of low-budget film noir thrillers which many studios turned out in the early 1950s he was wrong. The confused plot, unimaginative camera-work and cast going through the motions put paid to that. For the Gloria Grahame completists among us this is a must-see, for everyone else there's plenty of other, much more rewarding things, you could be doing with your time. Check out more of my reviews at http://thefilmivejustseen.blogspot.com/