Her Alibi (1989)

good back-story, and good acting

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A Brilliant Conflict

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Phil Blackwood (Tom Selleck) is a successful crime mystery writer of Peter Swift novels but he's been blocked for four years. Her publisher Sam (William Daniels) suggests getting a woman. He hangs out at court with the regulars. One day, he comes across Romanian Nina Lonescu (Paulina Porizkova) accused of a stabbing murder. He pretends to be a priest to interview her and offers to be her alibi. The government reluctantly releases her. With agents from the communist Romanian government after her, she decides to stay with Phil in his country home.First, Phil is an idiot. He's the most naive crime writer in the world. Other than being beautiful, he has no reason to assume her innocence. In fact, she doesn't even exert her innocence before he volunteers to be her alibi. The whole premise falls apart right from the start. The rest of the movie struggles to create humor. Tom Selleck is capable but Porizkova is only a model. She has the beauty and the poise. She doesn't have the skills to play in a comedy. She could be a functional actor in something less demanding. This movie is bad right from the start.

Philip Blackwood is a depressed writer who's lost his spark and his passion for writing. His successful detective character is the subject of endless predictable stories and his agent is on his back trying to get him to turn it around. As he goes to court with the usual oldies who attend in order to have something to Gossip about up steps the beautiful Nina, an eastern European arrested for murdering a fellow countryman with a pair of scissors. Tom Selleck decides to act as her alibi (Hey it's the title of the film as well!) and invites her to live with him as he believes she is innocent. As the police detective that drops by to chat with Philip Blackwood informs him, if the alibi is made up then he is not only a perjurer, but more importantly, he is liable to be the next victim in order for the alibi to stand forever. What follows is a series of ridiculous escapades in which Philip's life is under threat at every stage of the day, never knowing if the lovely Nina is a cold blooded killer or just deadly unlucky.I had the fortune to get this film out of the video library on a whim and wound up falling in love with the film as much as Blackwood does with Nina, the parallels between his super-cool fictional world and the clumsy long suffering Blackwood are fantastic, and all the supporting cast do a great job.Don't get me wrong, this is not an Annie Hall or a when harry met sally, it's silly ridiculous and as Farantino says "I gotta say, Phil, You're works a little predictable!" but it's still a good watch and a very fun film.

It's true that this film is rather undeep and not particularly demanding. But still, in my opinion, it's charmy. From this point of view, the film is stylistically correct because the books Philip Blackwood writes are also romantic thrillers with exaggerated characters and no attempt to be serious or even world class. We're in the world of trash. Of course, the movie can be understood as kind of a parody on the book that's being written during the film. But on the other hand, it corresponds to it.Tom Selleck's humour or maybe only the humour around his role keeps the movie alive. Like in „Folks!`, he is the poor guy, damned to passiveness, who desperately tries to cope with what is happening to him. But here the humour doesn't arise only from his mishaps but also from the way he falsifies them when transferring them into his novel. Paulina Porizkova is not a convincing actress but in this movie this doesn't matter because her inflexible face makes her character unfathomable, unpredictable, unlike Philip Blackwood's stories.If you want to see a trashy little comedy about trashy little thrillers, this is the right one for you!

I saw this film long ago but i remember it fondly, especially because it never let me guess what was going to happen next. Not a clue.(Spoiler) I like the naive feel of the script. You keep expecting the worst but in the end everything is so okay. Definitely a change from the usual, and another reason why this film is so surprising.