A Short by Elliot Lavine: Blind Alley (1981)

US / 11 minutes / bw / Detour Dir & Scr: Elliot Lavine Pr: Mary Kay DeLucco, Elliot Lavine Cine: Howard Dowell, Eddie Detour Cast: Gregory Pace, Ronald Gregoire

A splendid brief noir outing, shot in glorious black-and-white, that’s been completely overlooked by the compilers at the IMDB. You can, however, watch it for yourself here.

After robbing a meat-packing plant of close to $50,000 in payroll funds, Benny (Pace), his face masked by a stocking, leaps into the back of the getaway car behind driver Leo (Gregoire). After they’ve gone some distance, Benny pulls out a gun, puts two bullets into Leo, and flees with the sack of stolen loot to hide out in a slum room.

Gregory Pace as Benny

He’s just beginning to relax when the phone rings. Impossibly, he hears a voice he knows only too well:

Leo: “Everything about you stinks, especially your aim. You know you put two goddam slugs in me and still couldn’t find the mark?”

Yes, somehow Leo’s still alive, and he’s seriously pissed . . .

There’s a sort of double twist at the end of the story, although it’s quite possible you’ll see both elements of it coming. But that hardly matters. The strength of Blind Alley lies in the beauty of the tale’s presentation, from the pared-down screenplay to the spiky music soundtrack in the opening minutes to the wonderfully moody, quintessentially noirish cinematography.

Ronald Gregoire as Leo

There’s almost nothing on the intertubes about Blind Alley, and the movie isn’t listed on the IMDB. However, its director, Elliot Lavine, was generous enough of his time to answer at length my queries about in an interview with him that I posted here yesterday.