WALK ALONE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 24

WALK ALONE

(Paramount) URT LANCASTER and Lizabeth Scott, who I had hoped were safely and obscurely settled down in the wildly technicolourful West (see Desert Fury, Listener, 16/1/48), have turned up together again-this time "Way Down East among the penthouses and nightclubs. Mr. Lancaster-as Frankie, a strong-armed but simple-minded type with a permanent five o’clock shadowhas just completed a 14-year stretch in the pen for an unspecified offence not unconnected with the running of bootleg whisky. A lot of liquor has, however, flowed under the bridge since the early ‘thirties and Frankie’s one-time associates have now achieved a specious respectability as proprietors of a swanky nightclub in which Miss Scott is the principal entertainer. In spite of much backslapping, and similar ostentatious conviviality, the homecoming atmosphere is gravid with intimations of impending skullduggery . and it soon becomes apparent that while the boys are ready to rélinquish their claims on Miss Scott’s attentions they are not prepared to cut their old buddy in on the nightclub profit-and-loss account. This irks Frankie, who rounds up a small group of old-time trigger-men and tries to get himself elected to the board of directors. Of course, only a chryselephantine character like Franksolid ivory from the neck up, solid gold from the neck down-would believe that the gordian knot ef interlocking directorates could be cut in so simple and straightforward a fashion. The upshot is that Frank gets thrown out on his ear and thoroughly beaten up. This piece of unalloyed — brutality-pgins-takingly filmed-shows Miss Scott where both her duty and her affections lie. "A man without a woman is like a ship without a rudder," she cries, as she shakes the dust of the cabaret from her pumps and prepares to set Frank (continued on next page)

bn a fresh course. From there to the final showdown it’s plain sailing and the ultimate discomfiture of the bad oys serves to remind us once more that there’s no ‘harm in being a gangster so long as one remains true to one’s pals. _ There is, in fact, nothing elevating about ZI Walk Alone and its moral atmosphere leaves a good deal to be desired, but it has one or two slickly handled scenes. If Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott could act it would be, gccording to its lights, almost a passable how. As it is, it hardly makes the prade.