everything you have heard about this movie is true.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Usually films with this much activity are cluttered and over- plotted, but it all works reasonably well in "Dark Alibi". It needed padding but rather than slow it down, the producers wisely just kept adding filler bits, so there is a lot going on. The film's basic frame-up concept is good. The police, warden, prosecutor are blended and balanced expertly by the director to advance the plot.Teala Loring is attractive and a good actress, well suited for this b-movie. The old gent who portrays her father does a good job, too. I can live without the Birmingham and Benjamin corny old vaudeville bit but it was popular in the 1940's era and it is a better filler for padding purposes than most routines (filler was probably necessary due to Toler's health). Benson Fong is inconsequential, he just moves along and tries to keep up with the pace. Janet Shaw delivers one of her insouciant tough girl performances that always keep her watchable in films.Sidney Toler gets the job done but he really looks ill at times. He manages valiantly to stay active enough to stride across a room now and then, but he is sitting down in some scenes, obviously for health reasons.Good work by the director, good red herrings, and lots of somewhat overloaded activity provide us with an OK low budget b-movie in "Dark Alibi".

Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) is asked to prove the innocence of a man already convicted of murder and scheduled to be executed. So Charlie tries to get to the bottom of how the man's fingerprints could have been at the scene of the crime if he was innocent. He's got help from incompetent son Tommy (Benson Fong) and trite comic relief Birmingham Brown (Mantan Moreland). There's a moronic scene where Tommy and Birmingham wander around a prison with no guards even noticing. It's a typically cheap Monogram movie with shoddy writing. Moreland's old vaudeville partner Ben Carter returns for the second time in the series to do one of their old vaudeville routines. It's amusing but essentially the same bit they did the last time. Janet Shaw, Joyce Compton, Teala Loring and Chan regulars Milton Parsons and John Eldredge also appear. The script is particularly weak. One of the biggest flaws in the Monogram series versus the Fox one is that the scripts are so bad. Often Sidney Toler seems to be padding his lines in an effort to make the scene work. In the older series, particularly throughout the Warner Oland years, Charlie seemed wise beyond his years. In the Monogram films he just seems smug. Don't even get me started on the lack of good aphorisms that Charlie Chan is known for. Here he spouts nonsense about "if tooth is missing, gap will tell us much" or some such baloney. If you've seen some of the Monogram Chans and liked them, you will probably enjoy this more than I did. If you're new to Charlie Chan movies, do yourself a favor and start with the Fox films. Don't let your first Chan film be from Monogram or you might never want to try another.

This one has Sidney Toler in the lead and was made at Monogram. I understand the quality of the series took a turn for the worse after it went from Fox to Poverty Row, but I kind of enjoyed this.The plot is ridiculous. A pretty young woman's father has been framed for a felony murder, his fingerprints having been found at the scene of the crime. It's the job of Charlie Chan to prove those fingerprints were somehow forged and that someone is masterminding a series of robberies using the same method.It doesn't begin too promisingly, with Toler interviewing all the members of the boarding house in which the framed man lived. Hercule Poirot would have done as much. But it livens up with Toler and his two assistants -- African-American Mantan Moreland and Enumerated Son Benson Fong -- visit San Quentin and then wind up in a climactic chase in a warehouse full of stuffed animals and other assorted junk.The film is full of the stereotypes of the period -- the frightened black chauffeur, the ambitious but dumb Chinese kid, the pinched and spinsterish social worker. And when a truck tries to run the investigative trio over, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and Fong remarks, "Must have been a woman driver." But I don't care. The comedy scenes add some sparkle to what would otherwise be a dull and plodding B mystery. Moreland has some good scenes with Ben Carter in which each anticipates what the other is about to say. And, in that dark and scary warehouse full of stuffed leopards and crocodiles, Moreland has one of those "feets, don't fail me now" moments, when his legs quiver with terror and he addresses them -- "Okay. Stay with me now. This is the time." None of this, of course, is to be taken seriously but one scene had me thinking. As Toler says at one point, "Even small wind raise dust." Fong and Moreland have gotten themselves locked up in a cell with two convicts. The convicts are pretty jolly fellows but Fong and Moreland are scared to death and bang on the bars until they're released. When they're gone, the two convicts look at each other then sit down silently.It occurred to me that this is an evocative and convincing vision of hell itself. As in a Kafka parable, hell is going to consist of sitting in some bureaucratic waiting room. Someone will have made an office appointment for you, about something important -- an interview or a medical procedure -- and you must wait until your name comes up. But it never does. You sit in one of the empty, functional, uncomfortable chairs that line the waiting room wall. They are the kinds of chairs with hard plastic seats and stainless steel tubes for arm rests. You fiddle and watch the receptionist behind her desk. You see people you presume to be employees come and go, but they ignore you. Everybody ignores you. For all eternity, they ignore you.Sorry. Must have been carried away. This movie won't carry you away in the same way but it ought to entertain you for its sixty-one minutes of running time.

A bank is robbed, and a guard is shot to death. Clues lead the police to the Foss Family Hotel where we meet a varied group of unsavory suspects.Thomas Harley, who resides at the hotel along with his beautiful daughter June, is the one that the police are after-- it was his fingerprints left on the safe that led the police to the hotel.He claims that he was locked up in a theatrical warehouse, but he has no witnesses. Even more suspicious is his story that he had received a letter from a man he hadn't seen for many years, asking him to a meeting at the warehouse; but the prosecutor can prove that the man had been dead for eight years.Chan thinks the set-up is much too pat, and he doesn't give up on Mr. Harley when Harley's daughter June makes an appeal to him to help free her innocent dad. But how can he account for those fingerprints?