The Man Who Walked Alone (1945)

“Willie” (Kay Aldridge) is in the process of jilting her stuffy fiancé “Alvin” (Smith Ballew) - using his own car, when she encounters a hitchhiker to whom she offers a lift. They barely get half a mile down the road when they are apprehended by the cops for pinching the car and are promptly shoved in jail. It’s an easy mix-up for her to clear up, but her passenger “Marion” (Dave “Dex” O’Brien) seems to be having more difficulty on that front and so she assumes he has something to hide. To find out more, she takes him to her home where she pretends to be the secretary to it’s owner - really her mother, and sets about getting to the bottom of things where, of course, romance is only ever going to be just round the corner. With the fiancé on one side, the suspicious “Willie” and her disapproving mum all getting involved in her investigation, this amiably silly drama sets off down a path we’ve seen loads of time before. It’s a bit as if auteur Christy Cabanne took the first part of one old script he found in the attic and put it together with another he found at the bottom of the gerbil’s cage and so at times the plot overlaps and jars here. After the initial shenanigans settle down, it becomes a rather messy affair and the fairly lacklustre writing creates a story the cast can’t really make too much headway with. That said, though, there is a decent rapport between O’Brien and Aldridge and the scene stealing Nancy June Robinson raises the whole spirit of the thing as the younger sibling “Patricia” who certainly has the best of the quips. It’s a perfectly watchable afternoon comedy, but you’ll never recall it.