User Reviews

Three former convicts have served time in States Prison together. At one time or another, each has been convicted of bank robbery based on fingerprints found at the crime scene. Charlie Chan's hunch is that the fingerprints were forgeries, and the victims were all set up by the real thief. Only one of the three is still alive, and he's just been arrested for the latest bank heist.

If you're keeping score, "Dark Alibi" is the eighth installment in the Monogram Studios series of Sidney Toler Charlie Chan films. Benson Fong is Number #3 Son Tommy; and after a one film hiatus (Red Dragon), Mantan Moreland is back, this time sharing equal billing with Ben Carter. The two reprise their "Pidgin" English escapades from "The Scarlet Clue" with three different conversations that are the comedic highlights of the film.

As usual, there is a lot of misdirection with the introduction of the suspects, but one good clue comes with the identity of States Prison inmate #8251 - Jimmy Slade, a fingerprint file clerk. But rather than being the master criminal, he winds up being a victim, as does his wife, known to us as Miss Petrie.

It's interesting how many times the same gimmicks are repeated in the Chan movies. Back in the 1940 film "Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise", Chan throws a coin to test the response of a man who claims he's hard of hearing. He does it here as well, and again uncovers the subterfuge.

As we've seen before, the mastermind behind the bank robberies and the murders is revealed at the end with no fanfare or buildup, only the convincing explanation by Charlie Chan himself. The film almost had me though, I thought the warden was in on it!

For a Monogram, this is a fast paced fun film, made even more enjoyable by the Moreland/Carter dialog. It's a good enough reason by itself to watch "Dark Alibi".

While the quality of this Charlie Chan film isn't quite up to the exceptional quality of most of the Twentieth-Century Fox Chan films, it does rank among the better films of the series produced by Monogram Pictures. Most of this is because the mystery itself is more interesting--more of a real mystery than you find in most of the films.

As usual, one of the Chan clan is on hand to provide help for their father. Tommy Chan (Benson Fong) actually is a bit more helpful and resourceful than usual. However, the acerbic tongue of Sidney Toler (as Charlie) is as cutting as ever as he makes many amusing comments about the "help" usually provided by Tommy and their driver, Birmingham.

This film begins with a man being convicted of robbery and murder. However, the man swears he didn't do it. Charlie is called in my the family to try to sort out how the man's finger prints could be at the crime scene and yet he be an innocent man. While the technology to fake prints isn't apparently possible, how Chan is able to piece it all together is pretty interesting and makes for an excellent plot.

By the way, Mantan Moreland and his old stage partner Ben Carter do a couple old comedy routines together throughout the film. They also did a similar scene in another Chan film, SCARLET CLUE. Many might find this and the antics of Moreland throughout the film an offensive Black stereotype in film, though they are pretty entertaining despite their political incorrectness.

This one is the movie with the warehouse, the inmates and the mysterious truck, and with the proverbs and one-liners, also one of Toler's livelier performances; as always, a neat production. Sometimes the comedy gives the viewer the impression which Birmingham and the younger Chan must have, that the case is almost like a business of the grownups, and meantime there is, for now, the fun. Good timeless comedy, because the detecting tends to be average, the '40s equivalent of something like later TV series, or perhaps crime teleplays, but the comedy in it is delightful, and Toler's acting looks more dynamic than in other movies, it was cool to have a duo for the comic relief, a comic team (like O'Brian and Kerr), but the puzzle plot is good too, a puzzling mystery, how were the fingerprints forged, if they were, Wong visited people, but Chan does more than that, he visits milieus, here he has a lot of proverbs to offer, advices, some or funny, most are really useful, the scenes in the warehouse were effective, and there are the occasional bursts of violence (a girl is killed, an inmate shots himself), but there's also the characters' insouciance regardless of the body count, Chan's cases are about pretty ingenious means of crime and murder, and give a good sense of the places, the sets.

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.

I own 20 Charlie Chan movies and have watched more than that, and this is the absolute worst one I've ever seen. With about 5 or 10 minutes of actual plot, the bulk of the movie is mostly talk talk talk talk about nothing at all, several extremely annoying "comedy" sequences between Mantan Moreland and his vaudeville partner Ben Carter, and, most ridiculous of all, "assistants" Mantan Moreland and Benson Fong finding every possible way to ignore Chan's instructions, get in the way, and generally act stupid. Evidently Monogram decided to forget about producing an actual whodunit and instead make a sort of Three Stooges comedy (almost everything the Three Stooges did was better). POSSIBLE SPOILER -- I enjoy humor in whodunits, but this isn't a whodunit (the entire plot consists of Chan asking a lab to experiment with fingerprints), just a series of jokes padded with boring filler. Awful.

Review - Dark Alibi, Released 5-25-46 This Monogram Charlie Chan movie was maybe the last in the series where Sidney Toler was on camera frequently, i.e. most of the scenes, after the initial setup murder-robbery. Considering the actor was 73 years old at the release date, and lived less than a year afterward, kudos should be given just for showing up at the studio. As a fan of the entire Warner Oland-Sidney Toler series, there was not a dissatisfying movie of the entire lot; buy the premise, buy the program.

The story centers on the framing of certain convicts' fingerprints appearing at the scenes of bank robberies and at least one murder to start our movie. The guilty party is sentenced for execution, convicted of the murder of a bank guard and the robbery of a bank vault. It is for Charlie Chan to work the odds of determining the real perpetrators, bring them to justice while freeing the doomed man framed for the crime. The warden of the prison asks Charlie how is it possible to exonerate the condemned man. Charlie's reply, the man dies without his efforts to save him.

Questioning each and every person possibly involved leads to an entertaining hour of tracking the guilty parties, and there are a few, this is not isolated to one killer and robber. Each person living at a hotel has a story connected in some way to the resident innocent victim. Charlie works the crowd of suspects knowing the real guilt falls in part upon the hotel residents and a third person located in the prison, but not a convict. Charlie has multiple scenes among the hotel, the prison and the police lab; all are important in solving the crime. The ending occurs in the prison with the warden arresting the third party, responsible for masterminding the felony-robbery.

Watch Chan work his clues finding the guilty while freeing the convicted. There is relief found in the son offering his hand in solving the crimes, and the vaudeville routine breaks the detective work, only to provide comical pause.

DARK ALIBI is one of many B-movies of the 1940s starring intrepid Chinese sleuth Charlie Chan, played by Sidney Toler with a dodgy accent and no attempt at even looking remotely Chinese. This time around he's tasked with aiding a criminal due to execution; the problem is that the man didn't do it, so Chan has nine days before an innocent man goes to the chair.

At least half of the running time is made up of likeable but dated comedy featuring genre regular Mantan Moreland, at his shivering, OTT best. Benson Fong as Chan's kid also plays it up for laughs, and indeed the humour is more pronounced than the mystery. I wouldn't describe this as unmissable, but Chan fans should enjoy it.