Erich von Stroheim’s film noir characters tended to exist in the ghettos of show business (vaudeville marksman in 1945’s The Great Flamarion, circus performer’s husband in 1946’s Devil and the Angel, hypnotist in 1946’s The Mask of Diijon), and Pierre Chenal’s L’alibi (US: The Alibi) is no exception. Here von Stroheim plays Professor Winckler, a fake nightclub hypnotist who one night spies in the audience the man who cuckolded him years earlier; out for revenge, he follows the man home after the show and shoots him dead from his car. Winckler later bribes another club performer, Hélène Ardouin (Jany Holt), to tell police that he was at her apartment all night; Hélène later regrets agreeing to the fake alibi but is too frightened to back out, even when pressured by police inspector Calas (Louis Jouvet), who makes it his mission to prove Winckler is the killer, even assigning a handsome colleague (Albert Préjean) to seduce Hélène into telling the truth. The film’s epicenter is the nightclub where denizens dressed to the nines drink and smoke and socialize, entertained by not just Winckler but an all-black band, a thriving dance floor, and a nightly release of balloons; it’s a spectacular set, undone only by Winckler’s out-of-this-world office which features dozens of sculpted hands, crystal globes, a steaming cauldron, etc. Released two years before The Last Turning (1939), the film widely considered Chenal’s greatest, The Alibi is a bit homeless in the grand noir cycle, not quite in the style of its contemporaneous French poetic realism, but not nearly as dark or biting as noir would soon become.