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This film starts out as Gabe Jordan, a New Orleans columnist, prepares to retire, and talks about all of the interesting people in New Orleans that he has written about over the years. But he settles on one person of interest that sticks out prominently in his mind - Socks Barbarosa (Ralph Meeker). Now the name is interesting enough as he neither wears socks differently from anybody else, nor does he have a red beard, but I digress.

So the story of Socks is the plot, and oh what a tangled mess it is. First, Socks is supposed to be heading for the championship in the ring, but one night he just runs away before the fight even starts. He says he is quitting, and will not say why. This is apparently enough for his blind backer, the Judge (Kurt Kasnar), to turn from friend to enemy. Every time he sees the guy he practically hisses and spits on him Come to think of it, I think he does spit on him. Socks is in love with Angie, the Judge's daughter (Leslie Caron), and she wisely postpones their wedding because married women can't work burlesque, which is what she has been doing and Socks is not trained to do anything but fight.

So Socks hits the skids for awhile, drinking his troubles away, and then joins the army and goes to Korea where he wins the Congressional medal of honor. He comes back, feted by military brass and the political elite of New Orleans, but after awhile he is forgotten again. So he picks up where he left off before Korea, whining endlessly about how bad he has it. I think he was going for the Frank Sinatra, "I'd-have-no-luck-if-it-wasn't-bad" vibe, but Meeker just plays this like a 20-something that never grew up. He lacks Sinatra's ability to project an interesting melancholy mystique.

I'll let you see how this film meanders to its confusing conclusion. It is probably worth a look for a few reasons that have nothing to do with the main character or the plot. For one you have musical interludes featuring the musical talent of the great Louis Armstrong and the dancing of Leslie Caron who does the best she can with a part in which she is completely miscast. Also, the film does have great atmosphere. You feel like you are on the gritty rain soaked streets of New Orleans back before it became riddled with crime and was just full of characters. You can almost hear Marlon Brando tear his tee shirt while crying "Stella!" somewhere out there in the French quarter.

Thus it's a 50/50 proposition as to whether it is worth your time.

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 ****

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.

A thrown-together gumbo from, of all directors, Raoul Walsh, Glory Alley (named for a raffish stretch of Bourbon Street) can't decide what flavor should dominate: the sweet, the piquant, the bitter. It seems to have been assembled from ingredients on hand at MGM in 1952. They were:

Ralph Meeker. Best remembered as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly, he caught the studio's eye when he replaced Marlon Brando on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. On the off-chance that the N'Awlins setting might work its voodoo once more, the brawny Meeker was cast as a prizefighter called Socks Barbarossa.

Leslie Caron. Fresh from An American in Paris, she was at best a dancer with a Gallic accent and gamine charm. Here, she supports her blind father (Kurt Kaszner) by kicking (en point, no less) in hoochie-koochie numbers in a dive called Chez Bozo; it's a cross between Harriet Hoctor and Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, dancing in Capris.

Louis Armstrong. Instead of turning him into a jazz-joint headliner, he's relegated to the part of a philosophizing guide for the sightless old grump; thankfully, he sings a few songs and blows his horn now and again.

All in all, Glory Alley is a Runyonesque slice of life set among the poor people of the Big Easy. Meeker, in love with Caron but hated by her father, sustains a none-too-plausible run of ups and downs (there's even an excursion to Korea). It's a pot-luck special, made (it seems) to clear out the studio's larders.

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.