WARNING: SPOILERS

This was just Burt Lancaster’s fifth film, and Kirk Douglas’ fourth, and their first of seven together, and though it’s from Paramount Pictures and based on a play (“Beggars Are Coming to Town” by Theodore Reeves), it feels very Warners Redux. The plot is basically “Angels with Dirty Faces” without the collar. During Prohibition, a guy takes the fall for his gang; years later, he comes out of prison with something owed to him and gets the runaround. 

Lancaster is in the Cagney role. He plays Frankie Madison, the loyal guy who lost 14 years. From the start he has a massive chip on his shoulder, so when he’s betrayed he has nowhere to go but bigger. He overacts. The character is a drag, to be honest. Lancaster may be in the Cagney role, but he’s not Cagney. We almost always like Cagney. I never much liked Frankie. 

Douglas is essentially a slicker, more corporate Bogart. He plays Noll Turner, the disloyal fink who killed guys trying to hijack their liquor run, for which Frankie takes the fall. During the 14 years, Noll never visits Frankie in prison—not once—but everything he touches turned to gold. His life got bigger, swankier, and more corporate, and he got harder to touch. Douglas is great. He's both greasy and clean, and supremely confident. We kind of like him in his awfulness.

There’s a dame, of course, Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott, sixth film, trying her throaty best to Bacall up the joint). She sings at Noll’s nightclub, has a thing for him, does his bidding, winds up with Frankie. Because movies.

“I Walk Alone” has a bad title, an unsympathetic lead, an uninspiring romance, and too many nightclub songs. Two things recommend it: Douglas’ performance and Regent, Inc. 

In which corporation?
That’s the moment Frankie makes his play but he’s operating from a bygone playbook. He gathers the few men he knows, and some he doesn’t, and takes them to Noll’s nightclub for a showdown to get his promised half. He thinks it’s still 1933.

Noll, whom Frankie calls “Dink,” knows better. He's nonchalant. Half of what? he says.

This isn’t the Four Kings—no hiding out behind a steel door and a peephole. This is big business. We deal with banks, lawyers, and a Dunn & Bradstreet rating. The world’s spun right past you, Frankie. In the ’20s, you were great. In the ’30s, you might have made the switch, but today you’re finished: as dead as the headlines the day you went into prison.

Flummoxed, Frankie keeps making his play, trying to strongarm his way in. So Noll brings in his accountant. Dave (Wendell Corey) is the guy Frankie trusts, the only one who visited him in prison, and he tries to explain the situation.

Dave: The Regent Club, Frankie, is controlled by three corporations: Regent Incorporated, Regent Enterprises, and Regent Associates.
Frankie: I don’t care what kind of Regent you call it. What’s Dink’s in?
Dave: Well, it’s not that easy to explain, Frankie. For instance, the fixtures and furniture, that’s the property of Regent Incorporated. The equipment, on the other hand, belongs to Regent Enterprises. Now, Regent Associates … I’ll diagram it for you.
Frankie [knocks pen away]: Stop trying to dizzy me up. Here! Now, I want simple answers, Dave. No diagrams. Dink’s got the full say around here, right?
Dave: Yes.
Frankie: Okay then!
Dave: Except that it’s revocable by a vote of the board of directors of Regent Associates.
Frankie: Stop the double-talk!
Dave: I’m sorry, Frankie.
Frankie: Just what Does dink own?!
Dave: In which corporation?

And it goes on in this manner. It’s so fucking good. Frankie barrels in there with muscle to take what’s his, and he’s basically told that what’s his doesn’t exist. Nothing is concrete anymore. Muscle—at least that muscle—doesn’t matter. It’s the giant step in the gangster genre between ’30s Warners and ’60s flicks like “Point Blank,” or epic tales like “The Godfather.” Martin Scorsese laid it all out in his great 1995 documentary for the BBC: “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” which, as always, is much, much recommended. It's Film 101 for anyone who gives a shit.

This scene is so brilliant—particularly compared with the tired tropes of the rest of it—that I wondered where it came from. Who it came from. One of the credited screenwriters is John Bright, part of the Chicago team behind “The Public Enemy.” Bright was a Marxist, a cynic, and a drunkard, and the scene feels right up his alley—the true gangsters are the white-collar capitalists—but in his memoir “Worms in the Winecup” (another bad title), he takes no credit. Mostly he complains that his writing partner, Robert Smith, didn’t get tough-guy understatement. He thought everyone should be over-the-top. But Bright makes no mention “Regent, Inc.”

Because it's from the play by Theodore Reeves. In The Boston Globe, Oct. 10, 1945, reviewer Cyrus Durgin says the play is absorbing in part “because of the thesis that Frankie is behind the times since force has been abandoned for the greater strength of business methods.” Not a bad cast, either. Paul Kelly as Frankie, Luther Adler (cf., this) plays Noll, E.G. Marshall is Dave. And look at that pub date. WWII had been over one month. And here was a play saying, “Hey, remember those ’30s gangsters before all this went down? Whatever happened to them?” But I guess not enough people were interested. The play got so-so reviews and didn’t last. 

Sadly, after the “Regent, Inc.” scene, the movie has nowhere to go, either. Or it goes in predictable places. 

Pen pal
As Frankie’s newly formed gang abandons him, Nolls abandons his true strength—the gossamer threads of corporate holdings—for the thing he mocked Frankie for bringing into his office in the first place: muscle. He has his goons beat up Frankie in a back alley. It’s so awful, it turns two of Noll’s minions into enemies: Kay, who takes Frankie home and nurses him back to health; and Dave, who knows Noll has cooked the books, and decides to betray him.

And how does he decide to betray him? By telling Noll he’s going to betray him. Cue face palm.

So of course Dave is killed, and, since Frankie had publicly threatened him, the murder is blamed on Frankie. And fast. From Noll fingering Frankie to the front-page headlines (GANGSTER KILLS PAL) is like, what, a half hour?

The problem with the second half is that everyone acts stupidly: Noll abandons his true strength, Dave tells Noll he’s going to betray him, and when Kay see the screaming headlines, she doesn't go to the cops and say, “Nah, Frankie was with me. People at his hotel can corroborate. Seriously, you might want to question Noll a little harder instead of taking his word on everything.” Instead, in the manner of thrillers, she and Frankie go after Noll themselves.

After a confrontation with Noll at his mansion in Jersey (no penthouse in NYC?), they all return to the nightclub. There, Frankie finally outsmarts Noll but it’s more sleight-of-hand than anything. Noll tells the cops Frankie forced his confession with a gun, but Frankie says “I’ve got no gun.” And he doesn't. The bulge in his pocket that seemed like a gun was just a pen—the pen he was going to give to Dave. And the cops stupidly fixate on this detail, then (way more stupidly) allow Noll to get one final drink from behind the bar before they cart him off to jail. How were they supposed to know he had a gun back there? So yes, he tries to shoot his way out, and yes, he’s killed by the cops. And yes, the end.

But that middle scene is brilliant. It lets me know that the world was lost to me decades before I arrived.