Dark Alibi (1946)

“Skeletons in closets always speak loudest to police.”  10 December 2020

Charlie Chan agrees to help a man who has been wrongly convicted of murder during a bank robbery.  Even though his fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, he swears he’s never been in that particular bank.  In nine days, he faces a date with the executioner if Chan can’t prove his innocence. 

I’ve never been much of a fan of the Monogram Chan films.  In general, I find them too short on plot and too long on comedy.  And that’s the case with Dark Alibi.  The film runs about 61 minutes in length.  I didn’t pull out a stopwatch or anything, but I’d wager that no more than 20 minutes is spent on plot development.  One of my favorite bits in most Chan films are the suspect interrogations.  Here, Chan runs through all of them at breakneck speed.  So our one chance to get to know something . . . anything about the characters is gone.  Instead, we’re treated to multiple scenes of Benson Fong and Mantan Moreland creeping around in the dark or talking about nothing.  Admittedly, the scenes with Moreland and partner Ben Carter doing their vaudeville comedy bit are truly amazing and the film’s highlight, but after the third such scene (when Chan embarrassingly joins in), I realized that this too was just padding.  Overall, it’s just a weak, rushed story that offers little of what I enjoy about watching a Chan film.

Dark Alibi does feature a few familiar faces in the supporting cast – John Eldredge, Russell Hicks, and Milton Parsons.  At first glance, none of these names may mean much, but any fan of older movies will have undoubtedly seen their work.  Unfortunately, in the case of Parsons, he’s criminally underutilized here much to the movie’s detriment. 

 

4/10