Glory Alley

Rarely have I seen such uniformly bad reviews for a studio production with name stars as this one. No need to repeat many of the negative points already made. I am curious, nonetheless, how such a misfire not only got released but also how it got made in the first place. Director Raoul Walsh was one of Hollywood's most respected filmmakers, and deservedly so. Yet his direction of Meeker suggests that neither of them had a clear concept of the character of Socks who comes across like a grinning doofus instead of a tough-guy boxer (compare with Meeker's genuine tough guy in Kiss Me Deadly). In fact, Walsh's direction really comes alive only during the crowd scenes which do show some sparkle. My guess is he took one look at the screenplay and went for the payday. And who was it, I wonder, who gave final approval to a script (Art Cohn) that has all the coherence and plausibility of an Ed Wood creation. To me, the movie has too many earmarks of a rush-job that ended up doing nobody any favors. Cable should do viewers a favor and give this sorry concoction a belated burial, decent or otherwise.

GLORY ALLEY is one of the films that signaled the end of the golden age of MGM. Set in a silly back-lot New Orleans, the drama centers on a prizefighter who inexplicably flees a championship bout just as it is about to begin. We have to wait the whole movie to find out why - and when we do the reason is so silly that it makes the whole movie seem like a complete waste of time. Ralph Meeker, a good-looking but rather genteel actor, struggles to play the street-wise boxer. It's the sort of part John Garfield played so well, but Meeker, lovingly filmed by William Daniels, just seems too pretty. The ludicrous 'on-the-skids' montage hardly helps - nor does the fact that his character is called "Socks"!

Then we have Leslie Caron as his love interest. It looks like this part was hurriedly re-written for her after her triumph in AN American IN Paris. She performs ridiculous ballet routines in a seedy bar (you know the patrons would have booed her off immediately). You see she wanted to be a ballerina, but she gave it all up to support her blind father. He's played by Kurt Kaszner - an actor still in his thirties but donned with silly silver hair to make him look ancient and wise.

Then there's Louis Armstrong, sadly named "Shadow", and seemingly the only African-American in New Orleans. He's supposed to be Meeker's trainer, but he spends the whole movie playing his trumpet and leading absurd sing-a-longs at the local bar. He does have a couple of good acting scenes though. The excellent Gilbert Roland floats around the film's edges with nothing to do, while John McIntire adds pseudo profound narration to the story - told in flashback like a film noir.

Probably the worst sequence in the film, and that's saying something, is the ludicrous Korean War scene, with some stock footage, four soldiers, some sort of pine forest and a rear projected bridge deemed sufficient to portray a major world conflict.

So we have a boxing picture, a musical, a film noir, a war film, and a pseudo-Freudian psychological study all rolled into one! What more could you ask for?

It's hard to believe a fine hard-boiled director like Raoul Walsh oversaw this mess - he probably wanted to run straight back to Warner Bros afterwards.

Would-be 'hard-bitten' product from MGM suffers from too many disparate ingredients. A retiring newspaperman in New Orleans reflects on his best subject: a prize-fighter named Socks (!) who infamously deserted a boxing match at the eleventh hour; after stints as both a huckster and a soldier in the Korean War, he makes a celebrated comeback. This may be revered director Raoul Walsh's worst film--but really, no director could segue smoothly between these slabs of superficial melodrama (including a fighter with neuroses, his ballet-dancing girlfriend, her blind father the Judge, and a jazz-singing, trumpet-playing member of the troupe). As an early vehicle for Ralph Meeker and Leslie Caron, it's a wash-out; neither star is shown to a good advantage, although Caron's jerky choreography is an odd hoot and Meeker does look great in boxing gloves. Louis Armstrong's final musical number in a barroom is rousing--and his general good will is infectious--yet the music, the milieu, and the material never quite come together. * from ****

Not a total loss: Louis Armstrong sings, Leslie Caron dances, some very good actors try to do something with this turkey of a script, but good directors cannot make good movies with bad material and Raoul Walsh was always a man in a hurry. Kurt Kasznar plays a pompous blind man, a good warmup for his greatest role, Pozzo in "Waiting for Godot." Screenwriter Art Cohn hit the jackpot three years earlier with a much better boxing yarn, "The Set-Up" and wrote some good scripts before getting in a plane with Mike Todd. In bit parts, we see Barrie Chase, Joi Lansing, Emile Meyer, Kid Chissell, and King Donovan. TV was just starting in 1952, so it was still possible to get away with fanciful, farfetched fluff like this.

This is one of the few movies I consider so bad they're interesting. The champion in this category is "The Guilt Of Janet Ames." "Glory Alley" is not that awful but it is a real mess. Yet, it is intriguing.

Ralph Meeker, the brilliant star of "Kiss Me Deadly" who did way too few movies, plays a boxer named Socks Barbarosa. Maybe Bill Clinton named his cat after this character.

Meeker is also very good in "Show In The Sky." He was generally underused ion movies, though.

"Glory Alley" is a kind of faux-Damon Runyon. Runyon gone South to New Orleans. We have Socks. We have a blind man called the Judge. His helper, played by Louis Armstrong, is named Shadow.

The Judge has an Italian accent; yet his daughter has a French accent. And no wonder: She is Leslie Caron. Caron and Meeker could have been a fantastic combination. She's appealing. It's hard, though, to believe that she is doing music hall numbers at a dive called Chez Bozo and her father doesn't know it. He seems to know everything else that's going on.

The movie is narrated by newspaper reporter John McIntire. It's a voice-over narration, looking back on the vents we're seeing. But this is no noir. McIntire tells us it's the most fascinating story he ever covered -- and he's never told the truth till now -- is that of Socks Barbarosa.

Well, it could have been a fascinating story. It's peopled with fine actors and a superb leading man. But it doesn't hold together. This is not to mention its preaching: Much of the dialogue, especially toward the end, sounds as if it came from a sampler on a wall. Nor what sounds like the MGM Chorale that accompanies some of Armstrong's trumpet playing and is sort of an uplifting Greek chorus.