Alimony (1949)

Good concept, poorly executed.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Alimony is a cheapie from the short lived Eagle-Lion Studios and it has some shoddy editing and a cop out ending. But the story is not a bad one and some interesting players give some nice performances. The whole thing is narrated by John Beal who is now a successful composer telling Paul Guilfoyle, the father of Martha Vickers about his daughter who was just released from prison. It's not stuff a father wants to hear about his daughter.Beal is married to Hillary Brooke and at one time all three were boarders at Marie Blake's rooming house. Brooke is the good girl and Vickers who was best known for being Lauren Bacall's sister in The Big Sleep is the bad one.Vickers is the inspiration for a hit song that Beal wrote for his first big break. She latches on to him, but this is a girl who keeps her options open.One of those options is an Alimony racket. She's the come on in staging phony situations for bottom feeding divorce attorney Douglass Dumbrille. It's what leads to her downfall.Dumbrille really does this part with relish. He's the poster child for shyster attorneys. Clearly the best one in the film. There's also a nice performance by Leonid Kinskey who is Beal's agent.This one considering its defects is not too bad. Maybe at Warner Brothers with Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland in the parts that Vickers and Brooke have this might have been a good film. Certainly a major studio might have corrected the defects present here.

If you can get past the sappy ending and a few plot stretches, this is a pretty good programmer. Seems Dan's (Beal) a struggling songwriter who takes inspiration from Kitty (Vickers) such that he comes up with a popular hit. Trouble is he's had a long relationship with good girl Linda (Brooke) that now comes unglued as Kitty schemes to get a share of the windfall. Thus the narrative follows the romantic and calculating travails of the boardinghouse trio.It's a cheap production. However, the acting is good even if the story seldom leaves movie sets. This is a chance to catch two of the 40's premier vixens in the same frame. Brooke is cast against type, all sweetness and light, yet managing to bridge the strained abruptness of Linda's romantic turnarounds. At the same time, Vickers hides her scheming under a pretty face that's hard to resist. To me, the non-handsome Beal is perfect for the beleaguered composer, his disheveled appearance quite appropriate to the role. And too bad this was the only screen appearance of Laurie Lind (Helen) whose mop of hair and distinctive looks are career worthy. Then too, it's a colorful touch casting the so-called mad-Russian, Leonid Kinskey, as the harried music producer. He lends an exotic contrast to the more conventional others. It's also worth noting how radio dominates the movie's entertainment scene. However, 1949 was a year when TV was making inroads into the popular media including film, but no hint of that here. Anyway, the distinctive cast makes this contrived story worth a look-see.

A young songwriter (John Beal) tells his story of his relationship with a missing young woman (Martha Vickers) who was part of a shady alimony racket where young women marry men they don't love and manipulate the husband into divorcing them so they can share the alimony with the shyster lawyer (Douglas Dumbrille) representing them. Vickers is a tough cookie who claims she influenced Beal into writing the song that made him a success, stealing him away from his girlfriend (Hillary Brooke) with the intention of fleecing him.This fast-moving "B" film ranks slightly higher than an exploitation movie, yet is actually very entertaining. The future "Blossom Rock" (Marie Blake) is extremely amusing as Beal's and Vickers' advice-giving landlady with Dumbrille appropriately smarmy as a lawyer using young women to meet his own ends. Vickers goes over-dramatically ballistic in one scene with Brooke but for the most part, she is a cool cat with claws sharpened for that waiting pounce. It is easy to see why Beal could be manipulated by her. While Brooke isn't necessarily naive enough to see through Vickers, she isn't given the opportunity to stand up to Vickers beyond a simple warning. Still, she's believable, and her nobility isn't played as stupidity or wimpiness. The result is a fun scam-related noir drama that may not be classic but is a step above the usual poverty row pot-boilers.

Produced by the obscure Equity Pictures, this tale of woe features a decidedly third-string cast, and a disjointed, unfocused and under-motivated script -- possibly the result of avoiding the wrath of the Breen office, or possibly plain incompetence. Zeisler was one of the more interesting directors working on Poverty Row, and manages to keep the story moving, instilling it with his usual arid fatalism. However, he fails to emphasize some of the key plot developments, and a clever last-minute twist is pretty much wasted. Many of the background details are patently ridiculous; e.g., Beal's overenthusiastic songwriter thumps on the piano all night in his boarding house's salon without eliciting complaint from his fellow boarders, and his girlfriend is absurdly forgiving of his two-timing indiscretions. Martha Vickers, dolled up like a waxworks, makes one of the least alluring femmes fatales in history, Beal must have been a desperation choice for a leading man, and the original songs are incredibly verbose. Despite its shortcomings, B-movie aficionados will be intrigued by the surprisingly overt depiction of unscrupulous women luring unsuspecting husbands into compromising positions to extract alimony. There's some good support from Laurie Lind as the cynical golddigger friend of the lead character, and from Hollywood's favourite stereotype East European eccentric, Leonid Kinskey, as a song plugger.