Opening with a small crowd of zombie-like vagrants (“Where’d you dig up these corpses?”) seeking employment against a gray outdoor circus landscape, Alfred Travers’s
Dual Alibi is a strange concoction of sensationalism and loss wrapped in a neat noir package: flashback, femme fatale, bleak ending. Sharing some elements with
The Great Flamarion (1945) and
Nightmare Alley (1947), the film features Herbert Lom in a dual role as identical twin acrobats who let a devious cigarette girl named Penny (Phyllis Dixey) come between them. Lom’s dual role is shot convincingly: the trapeze performances are cleverly crafted, as is Lom’s fistfight with himself. Narrated as an extended flashback by the unidentified surviving twin, the film dabbles in love, malice, betrayal, and murder, concluding with a stunning image of the dejected clown, head lowered, holding a tired-looking sign marked “Thrills!”
