Incident in an Alley

Low budget cop movie which pops up on Showtime now and then concerns a cop who shoots and kills a young juvenile delinquent and how he deals with it. The most amusing part is the big city 'precinct' set which looks like the receptionist area at a dentist office.

"Incident in an Alley" is a very simply made film. The budget was small and the actors are mostly faces you won't recognize. However, because it has good writing and surprisingly good writing and direction, it's well worth your time.

The film begins with a burglary in progress. The police show up and suddenly teen delinquents are running about everywhere. In the confusion, one cop, Bill Joddy (Chris Warfield) repeatedly tells one of the gang to halt. Eventually, he fires warning shots and somehow a younger teen is hit and killed. Almost immediately, there is a huge uproar and folks are calling for the cop's head. The case goes to court but he is found innocent of responsibility in the death. But, he cannot live with himself and is stuck--alternately blaming himself and searching for more answers. See the film and see where this goes.

One of the only folks you probably would recognize if you grew up in the 40s, 50s or 60s is Virginia Christine (the dead boy's mother). She played a lot of characters on TV (such as in the original "Dragnet") and was also the spokesperson for Folger's Coffee for many years. Yup...she's Mrs. Olsen. Another familiar presence is Rod Serling--who wrote the original story. All in all, surprisingly good and worth your time.

A bunch of five young hoodlums break into a music shop to steal some precious instruments, they are surprised by the owner who is an old lady who is knocked down and never recovers consciousness before she dies, the five young scoundrels escape but the alarm is ringing, they just have time to hide their loot in an old deserted department store, when the police catches up with them, four manage to get away, but the fifth, a mere kid, runs into a lady who happens to go out at that moment, she screams, the boy continues running, the police shouts a warning that he will shoot if the boy doesn't stop, he doesn't stop, the police takes careful aim at his legs, but instead the boy is hit in his back and is instantly dead. The police officer is indicted for homicide, but all this is just the beginning.

The trial is very interesting, Virginia Christine as the mother of the dead boy giving a very sensitive and unforgettable performance, and she will return later in the film. Naturally Chris Warfield as the police officer can't stop worrying and brooding about the case, feeling guilty although he was acquitted, the trauma of his father's death, also a police officer shot by hoodlums, haunting him, until gradually the sky clears by a meticulous reconstruction of the entire incident, the fact that Chris Warfield's character as a very honest officer playing an important part. This is a jewel in the gutter of the asphalt jungle of the big city, tortured constantly to death by innumerable crimes all around the clock. A film like this, although a B-feature, is worth watching carefully indeed.

This unsung little movie released over 60 years ago by United Artists manages to be both an intelligent, very convincing crime film as well as delivering the pleasures of a traditional B-movie. Its Rod Serling story delivers psychological motivations that hold up well, while low-budget expert Edward L. Cahn wraps it all up0 neatly in a whirlwind final reel of sheer pleasure.

With an outstanding performance by Virgina Christine as the mother of a young teen shot dead fleeing by our hero, a soulful, neurotic cop,the script smoothly shows both sides of a deadly situation: the difficulty of the police to make split second decisions, and the sentiment accorded the victims. Our hero clearly did the best he could but almost everyone turns against him because he shot a 14-year-old in the back.

He's feeling pags of guilt, even though acquitted in a trial for manslaughter that makes both sides of the case equally defensible. Only gimmick that the film relies on is his yeoman efforts to solve an adjacent robbery/homicide which explains and ties up all loose ends.

To manipulate an audience, both B-movies and increasingly Hollywood blockbusters strain credulity with arbitrary motivation and weird plot twists to maximize thrills. This sober little picture goes the opposite route, treating the viewer fairly and giving one something to think about by movie's end.

An usual sidelight here helps bolster my theory about the continuum represented in the entertainment industry. Made by a B-movie team with extremely low-budget, this film was nevertheless released by United Artists, one of the major film distributors, not an exploitation company. And the star giving a sensitive performance playing the cop was Chris Warfield, who several years later became a sexploitation movie producer and director, starting in softcore and graduating to XXX porn, with several excellent Adult movies in his resume. It's all part of showbiz.

The talents of up & coming TV scriptwriter Rod Serling and veteran 'B' director Edward L. Cahn made for pretty strange bedfellows in this Allied Artists quickie made with effective and low-keyed intelligence.

The title is really a misnomer as there (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) are in fact two incidents in the same alley that bookend the film, which actually devotes over half of it's running time to a courtroom drama in which the incident that gives the film its title - in which a trio of hoodlums rob a musical goods store with violence - which although in screen time is all over in less than five minutes is thereafter the subject of painstaking forensic analysis.

Bearing a passing resemblance to the case of Craig & Bentley this time its the policeman who pulled the trigger and has to deal with the consequences. To anyone familiar with Serling the depiction of office politics within the police department is characteristically sardonic.