Alimony (1949)

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The film begins with Dan talking to Mr. Klinger about the exploits of Klinger's daughter, Kitty. What follows is a very lengthy flashback. It seems that Kitte was interested in getting rich fast. She worked for a while as a girl who would help blackmailers. When a mark came into the room with her along, she'd strip off much of her clothes and grab the guy...while her partner snapped incriminating photos! Tired of this racket, she now set her mind to bigger game and eventually this meant Dan. While Dan was happily dating Linda, Kitty schemed to seduce him away from her...all because she thought Dan was destined for riches. And, when this didn't pan out and Dan's musical career didn't appear to be paying off, she dropped him and was on to the next scheme. In many ways, this is like the great Pre-Code film, "Red-Headed Woman"...but more sanitized and without the great style of this earlier film. Now I am not saying it's bad...but "Red-Headed Woman" is so amazing and entertaining that it's no disgrace to not be as good as this scandalous film. Overall, a decent low-budget film...enjoyable because Kitty is so darn awful!By the way, the landlady in the film is Marie Blake (also known by the stage name 'Blossom Rock'). That's Jeanette MacDonald's older sister...and Grandmama from the TV show "The Addams Family".

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.

This sensationalist, almost sleazy, certainly cheap cautionary tale has been offered a good cast: Martha Vickers plays the adventuress, Hillary Brooke the endearing wife, Dumbrille has a supporting part, Leonid Kinskey plays the kind impresario, Beal is the hesitant songwriter, whose switch to the temptress comes mostly from his habituation with the concubine he knew from their childhood; conveniently, the script skips Linda's fight for her husband, who only comes back to her a 2nd time because his muse Kitty kicks him again. If the facts seem plausible, the script is meager. Genuine tenderness inspires songs less good than those given by infatuation. Anyway, the songwriter's breakthrough should of been the show that got canceled (while he was celebrating with his newfound muse).Martha plays convincingly a seductress, who's not heartless, wicked or mean, but shallow, groundless, misguided, more of a deluded girl, the shapely Hillary Brooke plays a dependable, reliable woman, the domestic muse, who won't inspire hits, but songs that earn a modest living.Kitty makes an attempt at good living: 1st by trying modeling, where she resents being manhandled, etc., then by taking part briefly in a frame-up business, with a crooked lawyer, afterward she shares in the songwriter's sudden fame; she even claims being fond of the tycoon she married, the industrialist, and it was a leading role for the actress, though the script offers no one a good role. The script is obviously interested mainly in the social trend, not in the characters or drama.The storyline for an exploitation movie was ready; with a good script and a better director, this one could of been a drama.

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.