Alias Jimmy Valentine is a 1928 American crime drama film directed by Jack Conway and starring William Haines, Leila Hyams, Lionel Barrymore, and Karl Dane. The film is based on the 1903 O. Henry story "A Retrieved Reformation", which was turned into the 1910 play Alias Jimmy Valentine by Paul Armstrong. The play toured in travelling production companies making it extremely popular. It was revived on Broadway in 1921. Two previous film adaptations had been produced at the old Metro Studios. A 1915 film version was directed by Maurice Tourneur and a 1920 version starring Bert Lytell was directed by Edmund Mortimer and Arthur Ripley. Released on November 15, 1928, the film was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first partially talking film. It was completed as a silent film before Irving Thalberg sent back Lionel Barrymore and William Haines to repeat their performances for the last two reels with sound. The film was shot in the middle of the night to avoid ambient noise infiltrating the soundtrack. Haines described the discomfort of working with sound: "You are confined to working quarters... that are almost airtight. You can hardly breathe, and in the hot weather it's like working in a boiler room... The sweat rolled off me until I could hardly stand it, and once I nearly felt like fainting". Plot Jimmy Valentine is the alias of an infamous safe cracker who has just been sentenced to prison for four years for his crimes. He does not stay locked up for long, though, as he is released after ten months. When he is released, he packs his state of the art, custom robbery tools and commits several more robberies. Ben Price, the detective who put him away the first time is called to the case, but although he knows it is Jimmy (because of the style the crimes were committed with) he cannot find him. Jimmy has actually fled and he is currently in the small town of Elmore, Arkansas, with plans to rob the local bank there. However, he finds himself love-struck by the banker's beautiful daughter, Annabel Adams, and begins to fall in love with her. In order to get such a beautiful girl, he decides to turn over a new leaf and give up his criminal career and take another alias, Ralph D. Spencer. "Ralph" opens a shoe-making store and is very successful in doing so. He even begins to like his