WARNING: SPOILERS

Early in the film, our title character gets away with doing the wrong thing (robbing a bank) by doing the right thing (protecting a woman on a train). Near the end of the movie, it looks like doing the right thing (rescuing a child locked in a bank vault) will cause him to be punished for doing the wrong thing (robbing an earlier bank).

That’s not a bad structure. But is “Alias Jimmy Valentine” a good movie?

It’s a silent melodrama, so it’s hard to say. I’d call it historically interesting. A key plot point, for example, turns on a modern-day impossibility but one still plausible in 1915: pretending you’re not who you really are. It would be like a cop showing up at my place and saying, “You’re under arrest, Erik Lundegaard,” and I go, “I’m not Erik Lundegaard,” and the cop goes “Whaaa?” and leaves, scratching his head. Today, the official record of who we are is too overwhelming. We’re trapped as us. Less so then.

There are other improbabilities, too, but the main one was often-seen as the movie industry matured: All a bad man needs to reform himself is a good woman.

Jimmy, on the road to reform, looking a little Leonard Cohen-ish.

Mine is the way of the law
Its star, Robert Warwick, had a long career, acting into the 1960s (a bit part on the TV show “Dr. Kildare”), and along the way appearing in such classics as “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” and “In a Lonely Place.” But the movie’s biggest names are behind the scenes. 

“Alias Jimmy Valentine” is based upon a 1909 play, which was in turn based upon a 1903 short story, “A Retrieved Reformation,” by William Sidney Porter, AKA O. Henry. And its director was film pioneer Maurice Tourneur, father of Jacques. We see some of his pioneering work during a bank robbery when we get an extended overhead shot of several rooms in the bank, sans ceilings, with the gang moving from room to room, outwitting or outpunching security. Makes it look like a maze. And our guys are the rats? 

We get a Jekyll-Hyde vibe early on. We’re introduced to our protagonist (Warwick) and the intertitles tell us: “By day he is Mr. Lee Randall – respected citizen. By night he is Jimmy Valentine – enemy to society.” In this manner, he walks from his dull office job to his small apartment, where he gets into bed in his clothes, then wakes up and puts on a heavy seafaring jacket and Irish tam cap. Then he meets his boys in a sketchy part of town and off they go to rob a bank.

Here’s an early improbability: the cop on the case, Det. Doyle (Robert W. Cummings), finds a cufflink on the floor, and not only assumes it belongs to one of the crooks (rather than a bank employee), but he knows which one. And where he lives! Nice detectiving. Or is it? Because once Randall/Valentine realizes his cufflink is missing, he feels he’s done. He tells his men, via coded message, “Duck!” Meaning scram, get out of town. I guess they must’ve been some special cufflinks.

On the train out of town, Jimmy travels with a man named Cotton, who makes a drunken pass at a lady; Jimmy fends him off, apologizes. When Cotton tries it again, they fight, and Jimmy literally tosses him from the train. Then he jumps off the train himself to escape detection.

Except Cotton squeals and Jimmy is sent to Sing-Sing for 10 years. The good news? That girl on the train is the daughter of the lieutenant governor. The two of them, Lt. Gov. Fay and daughter Rose (Frederick Truesdell and Ruth Shepley), go to Sing-Sing accompanied by a society matron, Mrs. Webster, who is, she says, “anxious to see some of your prisoners in action.” Meaning doing what got them busted in the first place. Thus a forger forges a large check in the lt. governor’s name. When  Jimmy is called in to demonstrate his safecracking skills, he plays dumb. Or smart. “What safecracking skills?” he basically says.

That’s when the daughter recognizes him. And the Lt. Gov., based on no evidence, begins to think the confession that convicted him was false. He threatens the warden thus: “…and when Valentine secures his pardon—and I hope that will be soon—I am going to ask how he was treated. And if he tells me you ill-treated him in any way, I promise you a little polite hell!”

That gets him out of prison. It’s the good deed that covers the bad one.

When does Jimmy truly turn to the good? In the O. Henry short story, which doesn’t go into nearly the detail of the movie, it happens in a flash and without the stint in prison:

One afternoon Jimmy Valentine and his bag arrived in a small town named Elmore. Jimmy, looking as young as a college boy, walked down the street toward the hotel. A young lady walked across the street, passed him at the corner, and entered a door. Over the door was the sign, “The Elmore Bank.” Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man.

Takes a bit longer in the movie.

Outside the prison gates, he’s met by a colleague, Red (Johnny Hines), who shows him plans for the next bank job. Sure. But first Jimmy needs to thank the Lt. Gov. And when he does, the cute daughter is there, minding children. And then a job opens up, a cashier at a bank, and, wow, it’s offered to Jimmy. That’s what does it. “Red, I’ve got my chance,” he says. “We go straight from now on.”

But … didn’t he already have his chance? At the start, he already had the dull office job. And he did the bank jobs at night for the money/kicks, right? But I guess now there’s a cute girl.

Jimmy not only reforms himself but his gang. First, Red goes along reluctantly. Then when gangmember Avery (Alec B. Francis) gets released, they get him a job in a cigar-rolling factory. Except he’s no good at it and quits. So they test him. They leave him alone with a pile of bank money. And he sweats it, and he sweats it, and at one point he stuffs a whole bunch into his jacket pockets and begins to walk out. But no. He can’t. Good wins. Again.

All the while, Det. Doyle, like some middle-American Javert, is gunning for our man. After he gets the evidence of a crime committed in Boston, he confronts Jimmy, who pulls rank: “I am not Jimmy Valentine, and I don’t know what you mean. Furthermore, if you don’t desist from insinuating that I’m a criminal, I’ll have the watchmen eject you from the bank.” We get this exchange:

Doyle: You will have to prove that you are not Jimmy Valentine.
Jimmy: Pardon me, you will have to prove that I am Jimmy Valentine.

That made me smile. One hundred years later, there’s still idiots who want you to prove a negative. IMDb asked me to do this the other day.

Anyway, using doctored photos, Jimmy proves he couldn’t have done the Massachusetts job, but Doyle isn’t convinced and continues to lurk around. Which is when a little girl, one of Rose’s charges, gets locked in a new bank vault. And the Lt. Gov. with the combo is nowhere to be found! And she’ll suffocate before long! Oh whoa, can’t anyone crack this safe and save the girl?

Right, this is the good deed that may get Jimmy punished for his earlier bad deed. It’s been a while, so Jimmy asks for sandpaper to make his fingertips even more sensitive. His fingers begin to bleed but he gets her out. Which is when Doyle emerges from the shadows with a j’accuse finger pointed at him.

Pause.

Pause.

And then he takes out the evidence and tears it up. “But just to retain your respect,” he says, “don’t think I fell for that fake picture.”

The bank maze. Cufflink not included.

Be my Valentine
Fun fact: The little girl locked in the vault? Madge Evans, age 6, who became a leading lady in the 1930s, co-starring in “Dinner at Eight” (as Lionel Barrymore’s daughter), “The Greeks Had a Word for Them” (as the idealistic one), “Pennies from Heaven” (as Bing Crosby’s welfare dept. love interest), and “The Mayor of Hell” (as James Cagney’s social reformer love interest). She was often the good woman who reformed the bad man.

“Alias Jimmy Valentine” was a popular-enough story that they kept remaking it—both in 1920 (starring Bert Lytell, with Eugene Pallette as Red) and in 1928 (starring William Haines, with Lionel Barrymore as Doyle). In 1936, Republic Pictures released “The Return of Jimmy Valentine,” about a newspaper publicity stunt to find the once nefarious safecracker. (Interestingly, Jimmy turns up as Jimmy Davis—played by Robert Warwick.) This was remade in 1942 as “The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine.”

And then nothing. Why make “Alias Jimmy Valentine” three times within a 13-year span and never again? I assume because safecrackers became less interesting than gangsters—the real-life kind and the Warner Bros. kind. After feeling the force of an Al Capone or Tom Powers, Jimmy Valentine is a little forgettable.