Watching nearly every film noir movie ever released is a monumental task. It all but guarantees that there will be a lot of very similar movies watched over the course of the endeavor. The good noir films and the bad ones alike are not exempt from this problem because there are really only a handful of stories that can be told. Therefore it becomes a matter of how well a given filmmaker takes those elements and makes a new film out of them. Take 1939’s Blind Alley for instance. This is a film about gangsters taking a household and their guests hostage while waiting for a getaway vehicle to arrive to take them safely away. This is very similar to a number of other films including the much-lauded Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. It also shares some similarities with another Bogart film, The Desperate Hours. These are two examples of this story being made well, a step above your average noir feature.
What makes Blind Alley also stand out as a better-than-average genre film is where this movie goes in the second half. What starts out as a hostage film goes off in a completely surprising direction. It opens with prison escapee Hal Wilson (Chester Morris) taking noted psychologist Dr. Shelby (Ralph Bellamy), his wife Doris (Rose Stradner), their son, and a handful of guests hostage. Hal brings with him his girl Mary (Ann Dvorak) and a few other goons. The police are on the lookout for Hal and are narrowing in on his location. All the while, the gang waits for reinforcements to arrive so they can make their escape.
What makes this film different from the others is the psychoanalyst angle it takes in the second half. Dr. Shelby uses his training to dig into Hal’s psyche, discovering that he has an Oedipus complex and that he murdered his own father. It has left the gang leader with nightmares for years, nightmares he would do just about anything to get rid of. Shelby breaks through his mental blocks, forces Hal to confront his repressed memories, and overcome them. Some of this is visualized in a highly stylized way and some of it is purely acting on the part of Chester Morris, who is hamming it up to great effect. It isn’t always accurate to real-world psychology but it is a treat to watch the once callous gangster slowly turn panicky and distraught.
It isn’t often we get a film that deconstructs the destructive nature of a killer in this way. It isn’t always convincing but it is surprisingly moving when we get into Hal’s backstory and his relationship with his father. How that all plays out in the inevitable shootout with the police is a bit hokey but at least it was well established. This is a surprisingly effective look at emotional trauma, despite it taking shortcuts with reality and how psychological breakthroughs really work. It’s not remotely accurate to real psychology but, for a piece of entertainment, it works well enough. 1939 - 69 minutes
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