If you think you've seen this one before you have. I Walk Alone takes the plot premise of Warner Brothers Angels With Dirty Faces and refines it quite a bit with far more character development than James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were allowed to do with their characters in that other film.
This was the first co-starring film of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the salad days as Paramount contract players. Of course they would do better collaborative films in the future, but I Walk Alone was a pretty good way to start the team identification. Lancaster is an old time prohibition bootlegger who has just finished a fourteen year stretch in prison. Like Cagney he took the fall and like Cagney he wants his share of the business just like he left off.
But in the intervening years which also included the Great Depression and World War II, Kirk Douglas in the Bogart part no longer runs a cheap speakeasy. He's the proprietor of a successful Stork Club like nightclub with Lizabeth Scott singing there nightly. He's got Scott on the side, but he's also putting the moves on society mover and shaker Kristine Miller. There's no place in his set up for an old time Twenties hood like Lancaster.
Lancaster doesn't take the hint easily until he's left beaten and unconscious in an alley. After that he's framed for Wendell Corey's murder who ran the books then and now for Douglas.
The film really belongs to Kirk Douglas. He does a variation on the part he did Out Of The Past, a rather elegant and fastidious man, whom you don't have to scratch too hard or too deep to see the menace come out. Blended of course with the Bogart role in Angels With Dirty Face in which quite more depth is given. Kirk just thinks he's the smartest guy around and everyone else is dumb, that's his downfall.
I Walk Alone is a nice noir thriller from Paramount and the beginning of the partnership of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas of whom columnist Hedda Hopper labeled the Terrible Twins.
This was the first co-starring film of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the salad days as Paramount contract players. Of course they would do better collaborative films in the future, but I Walk Alone was a pretty good way to start the team identification. Lancaster is an old time prohibition bootlegger who has just finished a fourteen year stretch in prison. Like Cagney he took the fall and like Cagney he wants his share of the business just like he left off.
But in the intervening years which also included the Great Depression and World War II, Kirk Douglas in the Bogart part no longer runs a cheap speakeasy. He's the proprietor of a successful Stork Club like nightclub with Lizabeth Scott singing there nightly. He's got Scott on the side, but he's also putting the moves on society mover and shaker Kristine Miller. There's no place in his set up for an old time Twenties hood like Lancaster.
Lancaster doesn't take the hint easily until he's left beaten and unconscious in an alley. After that he's framed for Wendell Corey's murder who ran the books then and now for Douglas.
The film really belongs to Kirk Douglas. He does a variation on the part he did Out Of The Past, a rather elegant and fastidious man, whom you don't have to scratch too hard or too deep to see the menace come out. Blended of course with the Bogart role in Angels With Dirty Face in which quite more depth is given. Kirk just thinks he's the smartest guy around and everyone else is dumb, that's his downfall.
I Walk Alone is a nice noir thriller from Paramount and the beginning of the partnership of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas of whom columnist Hedda Hopper labeled the Terrible Twins.