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The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of (Special Baseball Edition): “Alibi Ike” (1935)

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

In one of those cosmic ironies that occur so often in show business, if it wasn’t for his supporting role in Billy Wilder’s classic Some Like It Hot, comedian Joe E. Brown would be almost entirely forgotten nowadays by the general public. The irony lies in the fact that Brown was one of the three Hollywood comedians who were the most popular with movie audiences during the Depression. (The other two were Will Rogers and Eddie Cantor.)

A natural-born clown with the face of a leprechaun, Brown’s abilities as an acrobat and physical comedian were second only to those of Buster Keaton. Another thing that Brown and Keaton had in common was a passion for baseball.[1] Unlike Keaton, however, Brown actually played professional baseball and even turned down an opportunity to sign up with the New York Yankees to pursue a career in show business. Not surprisingly, Brown made an unofficial trilogy of comedies about the National Pastime when he was Warner Bros.’ top comedian in the early 1930s: Fireman, Save My Child (1932), Elmer the Great (1933), and Alibi Ike (1935). The last of these, Alibi Ike, is not only the funniest of the trio, but is arguably the best damn baseball movie ever made as well.

Like Elmer the Great, Alibi Ike was based on a short story by the dean of baseball scribes, Ring Lardner. In fact, as directed by Ray Enright and scripted by William Wister Haines, Alibi Ike is a very faithful adaptation of Lardner’s story with much of the dialogue taken verbatim from its source. The main deviation from the original, which was a brief “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” tale, is a subplot involving game-fixing gangsters added to pad the story to feature length. (For Alibi Ike, the feature length in question was a brief 72 minutes. Those were the days.) Another deviation was changing the title character from a batting sensation to an ace pitcher. (Pitching offering more opportunities for visual humor, particularly Brown’s elaborate, exaggerated, corkscrew-pitch.)

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Alibi Ike boasted some authenticity rarely seen in sports movies. The game sequences were shot at Wrigley Field; no, not the one in Chicago, but at Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field, the ballpark that hosted minor league teams for about three decades and which served as a backdrop to numerous films (such as Damn Yankees) and television episodes. In addition, the majority of the non-speaking baseball player roles in the film were played not by extras, but rather by professional ball players of the period, including Herman Bell, Ray French, Wally Hebert, Wes Kingdon, Jim Levy, Frank Shellenback, Guy Cantrell, Dick Cox, Cedric Durst, Mike Gazella, Wally Hood, Don Hurst, Smead Jolley, Lou Koupal, Bob Meusel, Wally Rehg, Ed Wells, and Jim Thorpe. (Which explains why they moved around the field like professional ballplayers and not extras pretending to be professional ballplayers.) Another notable member of the cast was an actress making her film debut, Olivia de Havilland, who played Brown’s love interest.[2] (Many up-and-coming young actresses appeared with Brown in his movies for Warners, including Ginger Rogers, Joan Bennett, Thelma Todd, Dorothy Lee, and Alice White.)

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“Alibi Ike” is the nickname bestowed on the main character for the reason explained in the first paragraph of Lardner’s story: “His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the X stood for ‘Excuse me.’ Because he never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field, without apologizin’ for it.” In the film, Farrell is a bushleague player traded to the Chicago Cubs. In the opening scene, Johnson (Joseph King), the team’s owner, discusses the chances for the season with crusty, middle-aged manager Cap (William Frawley).

Johnson: “I know you had nothing to work with last year but—“

Cap: “Nothing? I had the finest-trained butch of rookies you ever saw with one ball player among ‘em, Pennick. All he did was keep us from fallin’ out of the league. But Pennick, it now appears, has been sold!”

Johnson: “Oh, snap out of it, Cap. We’ve still got the rest of the club.”

Cap: “Yeah, cut off Max Baer’s right arm and you’ve still got the rest of a heavyweight champion, too.”

Johnson: “It’s not as bad as all that. Pennick was good, yes, but it’s not every year you can get a hundred thousand dollars for one man.”

Cap: “Who’s gonna pitch for us, them hundred thousand dollars?”

Johnson: “You’re sure to find something good among those new players. That boy Farrell alone struck out twenty men in one game last year.”

Cap: “Yeah, in Sauk Centre, wasn’t it? Did they claim Babe Ruth was playin’ against him in Sauk Centre? I bet I’ll have to ring a cow bell to get him in off the field.”

Johnson: “Well, at that, you can buy a lotta cow bells for a hundred grand.”

While being interviewed by a sports reporter (Jack Norton playing sober for a change), Cap receives a telegram from Farrell: “Reporting tomorrow. Sorry I was late but my calendar was wrong.” “His ‘calendar was wrong!’” fumes Cap, “Now there’s an alibi for ya!” As it turns out, Farrell does show up on that day, making a spectacular entrance while he’s at it: crashing through the fence and plowing around the field in an out-of-control jalopy, sending the players scrambling to get out of his way.

Cap forgets his anger when Farrell turns out to be the pitching phenom his rep promised. He’s even willing to excuse Farrell’s endless alibis for all occasions. His teammates, on the other hand, aren’t about to ignore Farrell’s habitual mendacity, especially a pair of jokers, Jack Mack (Eddie Shubert) and catcher Bob Carey (Roscoe Karns), who go out of their way to try catching him in a fib. Farrell’s alibis even extend to totally innocuous situations, like when, after a night of playing pool, Farrell tells the boys that he’s calling it a night and going to bed. “Don’t feel a bit sleepy” he says, “but got gravel in my shoes and my feet hurt like the dickens.” (“I should think they’d take them gravel pits outta this pool room,” cracks Carey.)

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Eventually, Farrell’s alibi habit gets him in hot water when he meets Dolly Stevens (de Havilland), the sister of Cap’s wife Bess (Ruth Donnelly). Farrell and Dolly are immediately smitten with each other and he soon asks her to marry him. When Bess tells Carey about the engagement, he and Jack can’t resist the temptation to razz Farrell about it, not knowing that Dolly is within earshot on the other side of the hotel lounge door, a scene that’s taken directly from Lardner’s story.

Carey: “Now wait a minute, Ike, I got a bet here with Mack and it’s up to you to settle it.”

Farrell: “Well, make it snappy.”

Carey: “Well, I bet that you and Dolly were engaged to be married.”

Farrell: (sheepishly) “Well… well, no, we’re not exactly engaged—”

Carey: “Now, listen, no alibis! This costs me real dough if I lose, so give it to us straight. Cap’s wife said you were engaged, right?”

Farrell: “Well, I… I don’t want it to cost you any money, Bob. You win.”

Carey: “What did I tell ya? Congratulations, Ike!”

Mack: “Ike, you gotta swell gal!”

Carey: “She’s a peach! You’re a lucky guy, Ike!”

Farrell: “Yeah, she’s all right, I guess, but I never cared much for girls.”

Mack: “That is, not until you met this one?”

Farrell: “Well… she’s okay, I guess, but I didn’t want to get married yet a while.”

Carey: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s get this straight. Who done the asking? Her?”

Farrell: “No, not exactly her, but… but… but sometimes a fella don’t know just exactly what he’s gettin’ into. You… you take a good-lookin’ girl and a fella does just about what she wants him to. When a fella gets to feelin’ sorry for a girl, it’s all off.”

It isn’t until Farrell steps out of the lounge and sees Dolly glaring daggers at him that he realizes he’s been caught in the act. He tries to explain his remarks away as just joking around, but she won’t have any of it. Dolly angrily gives Farrell his ring back and leaves town, swearing never to see him again.

The timing couldn’t be worse; Farrell’s already in hot water, having gotten inadvertently involved with a gang of crooked gamblers. The day before he proposed to Dolly, Farrell was approached by a shady character named Lefty Crawford (Paul Harvey), who claimed to be the president of The Young Man’s High Ideals Club. Crawford asked Farrell to speak to the boys about clean living and he agreed to go with him. (Yeah, Farrell’s that naïve.) He didn’t even suspect anything when the “boys” turned out to be bunch of obviously adult hoods gathered in a seedy, smoke-filled hotel room.

Crawford: (with mock disapproval) “Now, boys, what did I tell you about that smoking? You know it’s not allowed. Put out those cigarettes and don’t let it happen again.”

Farrell: “Your president is right, boys. Where would I have been today if I had smoked?”

Thug: (deadpan) “All right, I’ll bite. Where?”

It wasn’t until Crawford made it clear that they wanted Farrell to lose a couple of games for them that light began to dawn. Farrell, of course, refused, but when Crawford literally twisted his arm, he was forced to pretend to go along with them in order to get out of there in one piece.

Farrell’s depression over the break-up with Dolly causes him to lose the next game, the first game he was supposed to “throw” for Crawford and his goons. Seeing as Farrell has never lost a game before, Johnson and Cap smell a rat and go to question him in his room. Their suspicions are seemingly confirmed when a known hoodlum, Kelly (Cliff Saum), delivers an envelope full of cash to Farrell while they’re there. Now, in addition to losing his girl, Farrell is believed to be on the take.

Per sports movie tradition, there’s always a big game that the good guys absolutely have to win in order to provide the story with a happy ending and a plot complication that threatens that happy ending. In this case, the big game is a night game that will determine if the Cubs make it to the pennant and the complication is Farrell being kidnapped by the gamblers. (Farrell offered to clear himself by setting up the gang for the cops, but the hoods got wise to his double-cross.) Farrell escapes from his kidnappers, leading to a wild chase in a stolen ambulance as he’s pursued by gang members, shooting at him from their car. At one point, Farrell accidentally drives the ambulance onto a car carrier truck and, when he realizes his mistake, he simply steals the truck, too, and resumes speeding toward the ballpark.

Coming full circle, Farrell arrives during the ninth inning by crashing the truck through the fence. Hastily outfitted in an oversized uniform, Farrell succeeds in striking out the opposing team, keeping the game tied as they go into the bottom of the ninth. Now it’s up to the Cubs to break that tie. Normally, in sports comedies, the way the heroes win the big game involves bending the rules a little (or breaking them outright). Not in Alibi Ike, though. Keeping with the film’s authenticity, Farrell manages to make the game-winning run in a legitimate (if unlikely) manner by using his acrobatic skills to avoid being tagged out at home. It hardly counts as a spoiler to mention that Dolly forgives Farrell and, in the final scene, they get married, giving the movie its promised Hollywood ending.

An underrated specialist in action films and comedies, Enright’s direction keeps Alibi Ike moving at a breathless clip and successfully guides Brown through one of his most amusing performances. Nineteen-year-old de Havilland makes a most charming and fetching young romantic lead for Brown. (Later that year, she would be teamed for the first time with her most notable cinematic partner, Errol Flynn, in Captain Blood.) And invaluable support is provided by Warners stock company members Donnelly, Karns, and, especially, Frawley, hilarious as always embodying his standard lovable old grouch persona. (Was Frawley ever young?)

Alibi Ike is currently available on DVD from Warner Archives. Like most Warner Archive releases, the DVD is short on extras (just the original theatrical trailer), but the film’s print is absolutely pristine and flawless. So far, Warner Archives has issued only four of the twenty comedies that Brown starred in for Warners, but, hopefully, there will be more forthcoming in the near future.


[1] Supposedly, when Keaton had his own production company in the 1920s, his employment application consisted of two questions: “Can you act?” and “Can you play baseball?” 50% was a passing score.

[2] De Havilland had already completed two movies before filming on Alibi Ike began, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Irish in Us, but they were both released after Alibi Ike. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream required extensive post-production work.)

Bigamist Featured

DVD Review: “The Bigamist” (1953)

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Seeing how much the movie industry and the media outlets covering it love to pay lipservice to women in film, it’s a mystery why they actually give so little coverage to pioneering female filmmakers, particularly Ida Lupino. Lupino was Hollywood’s first female producer-director, and she even co-wrote some of her films as well. (Director Dorothy Arzner preceded Lupino, but Arzner wasn’t a producer.) And, more to the point, Lupino was a damn good filmmaker whose work in movies and television has stood the test of time very well. And now, one of her best films The Bigamist (1953) has been remastered by Film Chest and is being released on DVD.

Outside of a 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Lupino’s achievements behind the camera have largely been ignored in favor of her work as an actress, particularly her performances at Warner Bros. in the 1940s as tough, hard-boiled dames in melodramas like They Drive by Night, High Sierra, The Hard Way, and The Man I Love. (Occasionally, Warners cast her in more conventional ingénue roles in films such as The Sea Wolf, Out of the Fog, and Deep Valley, her last for the studio.) “The poor man’s Bette Davis” was Lupino’s own self-depreciating description of her standing at Warners. (Her first film for the studio, They Drive by Night, was a semi-remake of Bordertown, with Lupino in the role that Davis played in the original.)

When her contract at Warners ran out in the late 40s, rather than renewing it, Lupino decided to try freelancing, like so many other actors did at a time when the “studio system” first began to unravel. Lupino had spent a great deal of her time at Warners on “suspension,” the studio’s notorious punishment for “rebellious” actors, something she had in common with Davis, James Cagney, and Olivia de Havilland. (It was de Havilland who successfully sued Warners over the practice, with the Supreme Court of California ruling it to be illegal, the first nail in the coffin of the aforementioned studio system. The US Supreme Court’s anti-trust ruling forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains and the growing popularity of television were the next two major setbacks to the studios.) It was during these “suspension” periods that Lupino first became interested in the behind-the-scenes aspects of filmmaking, hanging out with directors and writers and learning the tricks of the trade from them. She was also motivated by wanting to have total control over her film work.

As a result, in addition to acting in other studios’ movies, Lupino and her second husband Collier Young formed an independent production company called The Filmakers, after first producing Not Wanted (1949), in which Lupino made her directorial debut unintentionally. Elmer Clifton, the director contracted for Not Wanted (about an out-of-wedlock pregnancy) suffered a heart attack before filming began and Lupino took over (uncredited). Lupino’s subsequent directorial efforts for the Filmakers included Never Fear, Outrage (dealing with rape, another feminist-oriented subject that was considered taboo by the Production Code), and Hard, Fast and Beautiful. In 1953, Lupino made her two most notable directing efforts, The Hitch-Hiker (her only out-and-out film noir) and The Bigamist. At this point in her career, Lupino amended her self-description to “the poor man’s Don Siegel.” (A filmmaker who could work wonders on meager budgets, Siegel directed The Filmakers’ 1954 production of Private Hell 36.) After The Bigamist, Lupino’s directing career continued mainly on television, with the exception of the last theatrical film (and only comedy) she ever directed The Trouble with Angels in 1966. (Much of Lupino’s work for the small screen also revealed a flair for the macabre, particularly in the episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, and The Twilight Zone that she directed.)

As the title makes obvious, The Bigamist dealt with another taboo subject. Originally, as was the case with Not Wanted, Lupino was not supposed to direct The Bigamist; she was only going to act in the film, which was co-produced (with Robert Eggenweiler) and co-written (with Larry Marcus) by Lupino’s then ex-husband Young. (Soon after the divorce, both Lupino and Young had remarried, she to Howard Duff and he to Joan Fontaine.) That game plan changed when Jane Greer, who was set to play the other female lead, dropped out. Fontaine offered to take Greer’s place, but only if Lupino would direct The Bigamist as well. Lupino never wanted to direct herself, but she agreed in order to get the film underway. Which is how the two Mrs. Youngs ending up playing the two wives of the title character Harry Graham (Edmond O’Brien, previously the lead in The Hitch-Hiker), a San Francisco-based small business owner who doubles as his own traveling salesman.

We first meet Harry and Wife #1, Eve (Fontaine), when they’re being interviewed by kindly child welfare official Mr. Jordan (Edmund Gwenn) as part of their adoption application. (Eve is unable to have a child.) For the most part, the interview goes well… until Harry betrays a momentary discomfort at signing the required form that gives Jordan permission to investigate their backgrounds to determine their suitability as adoptive parents, a hesitation that does not go unnoticed by Jordan. After the Grahams leave, Jordan expresses his doubts for the record in the Dictaphone recording of his notes: “From a preliminary interview, in my opinion, they would make fit parents, but something bothers me about Mr. Graham. He seemed impatient during the interview, a chip-on-the-shoulder sort of attitude. He… he behaved rather strangely when signing the… the permission to investigate form. Perhaps it is my imagination. I’ll report further when I visit the Grahams’ home for the customary inspection next week.”

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From this point, The Bigamist follows a traditional “three-act” structure of storytelling. Act One is in the form of a miniature mystery in which Jordan acts as a sleuth determined to unearth Harry’s secret, even to the extent of trailing him to Los Angeles, where he conducts most of his out-of-town business. Eventually, Jordan stumbles onto the fact that, rather than staying in a hotel, Graham owns a home in the LA suburbs. Turning up on Harry’s doorstep one night, Jordan discovers what the audience already knows, thanks to the film’s title and advertising, that there’s a second Mrs. Graham. Not only that, but Harry and Wife #2, Phyllis (Lupino), have an infant son as well.

Act Two is a lengthy flashback that takes up about half the movie as Harry tells Jordan the story of how he came to have two households. It seems that Harry and Phyllis “met cute” (to use the old screenwriters’ term) when, out of sheer boredom, Harry took an LA  bus tour of the stars’ homes and struck up a conversation with Phyllis, a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. They had a one-night stand that resulted in Phyllis’ pregnancy. Too weak-willed to divorce Eve (who’s also his business partner), but wanting to do the right thing by Phyllis, Harry proposed marriage to Phyllis and started the family that Eve couldn’t give him.

The sequences dealing with Harry and Phyllis’ brief fling and her subsequent pregnancy are a prime example of the absurdities imposed by the then-weakened but still enforced Code. Thanks to the Code’s infantile restrictions, there’s no hint of Harry and Phyllis enjoying a night of intimacy, nor is the word “pregnant” ever uttered in the scene where Harry learns that Phyllis is carrying his child, which is couched in the most evasively suggested terms possible. The Code was also responsible for the abrupt, unsatisfying resolution of the film’s third act, which conformed to the demand that all lawbreakers must face legal retribution.

The Bigamist’s script, Lupino’s direction, Leith Stevens’s music score, and George Diskant’s black-and-white cinematography waver between domestic drama and noir (particularly in the first two acts) before settling on the former. (Although the seedy restaurant Phyllis works in and the scarred, scowling face of its owner seemingly promise that noir will be the film’s dominant mood.) Despite the somberness of the subject matter and the sober approach taken to the material, the script does indulge in some playful Hollywood in-jokes. There are not one but two references to Gwenn’s most famous role, his Oscar-winning performance as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. Eve tells Harry that she thinks Jordan “looks like Santa Claus.” And during the bus tour, the driver/guide points out Gwenn’s home, referring to the actor as “the little man who is Santa Claus to the whole world.” The homes of Lupino’s former Warners colleagues Barbara Stanwyck and Jane Wyman are also name-checked in this scene.

As she always did, Lupino got excellent performances from her cast, including herself.  She and Fontaine both contribute subtle, understated acting turns as the two Mrs. Grahams. Gwenn gives a charming, low-key performance as a dedicated public servant who is torn between duty and pity when confronting Harry about his deceit. O’Brien manages to make Harry an ultimately sympathetic (and rather pathetic) character, while still imbuing him with the sweaty neuroticism that was typical of his roles in the late 40s and early 50s.

Although Film Chest’s press release says that this version of The Bigamist was “restored from original 35mm materials,” the state of those materials obviously were not as well preserved as Film Chest’s previous remastered film release Hollow Triumph. For most of the film, the visual quality of Film Chest’s The Bigamist DVD is sharp and crisp, but noticeable scratching appears periodically and there is a little jumpiness in the opening credits. Still, the overall quality of this version of The Bigamist is light years ahead of Alpha Video’s earlier DVD version with its murky print and muddy soundtrack.