All Through the Night (film)

All Through the Night

theatrical release poster
Directed by Vincent Sherman
Produced by Hal B. Wallis
Jerry Wald
Screenplay by Leonard Spigelgass
Edwin Gilbert
Story by Leo Rosten
Leonard Spigelgass
Starring Humphrey Bogart
Conrad Veidt
Kaaren Verne
Music by Adolph Deutsch (score)
Song: "All Through the Night"
Arthur Schwartz (music)
Johnny Mercer (lyrics)
Cinematography Sidney Hickox
Edited by Rudi Fehr
Production
company
Release dates
  • January 10, 1942 (1942-01-10) (US)[1]
Running time
 107 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $600,000[2]
Box office $1.1 million (US rentals)[3]

All Through the Night is a light-hearted thriller film released by Warner Brothers in 1942, starring Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt and Kaaren Verne, and featuring many of the Warner Bros. company of character actors. It was directed by Vincent Sherman.

Plot

Alfred "Gloves" Donahue (Humphrey Bogart), a big-shot Broadway gambler, is alerted by his mother, 'Ma' Donahue (Jane Darwell), that her neighbor, Mr. Miller (Ludwig Stossel), a baker who makes Gloves' favorite cheesecake, is missing. Upon searching the bakery, Gloves finds Miller's dead body. A young singer, Leda Hamilton (Kaaren Verne), quickly leaves the shop upon hearing about Miller's demise. Mrs. Donahue believes that the girl knows something and tracks her down to a night club, where she creates a racket by "crabbing" about Miller's death. Co-partner of the Duchess Club, Marty Callahan (Barton MacLane), calls Gloves, insisting that he come down and take care of the situation. While at the club, Gloves has a drink with Leda that is interrupted by her piano player, Pepi (Peter Lorre), who takes her away to a back room, where he shoots Marty's partner, Joe Denning (Edward Brophy). Lena and Pepi then disappear in a taxi as Gloves stumbles upon Joe. Before dying, Joe raises up five fingers to indicate who took Leda. Gloves quickly leaves to search for Leda, inadvertently leaving one of his gloves at the murder scene.

While being suspected of Joe's murder by Marty and the police, Gloves traces the taxi to an antique/auction house, named I.J. Madison, Inc. Importers and Exporters, operated by Hall Ebbing (Conrad Veidt) and his assistant, Madame (Judith Anderson). While posing as a bidder in the successful acquisition of a desk, Gloves is recognized by Pepi. He subsequently gets knocked-out by Leda, tied up, and left in a storage room with one of his boys, Sunshine (William Demarest), who was earlier captured. Later, Leta visits them, enabling them to break free from their ropes before they are packed up in crates and shipped out. Before escaping, Gloves and Sunshine walk into a room with maps, charts, a short-wave radio, and a portrait of Adolf Hitler, now knowing that their captors are "fivers" or Nazi fifth columnists, which is what Joe was indicating before he died. Gloves finds a notebook and reads Miller's name in it as well as that of "Leda Hamilton", her Jewish name "Uda Hammel", and the death of her father "Ludwig Hammel" at the Dachau concentration camp.

With Leda in tow, they escape the building by climbing down from a balcony. They are chased by Ebbing and his cronies into Central Park. It is here that Leda explains that she is working with Ebbing only to save her father's life at Dachau. While Gloves fights with a Nazi, Leda reads the torn-out page that states her father is already dead. Gloves and Leda go to the police, who search the antique house but find it empty. Disbelieving Glove's story, they attempt to arrest him, but he escapes by diving into the East River. He arrives at his lawyer's (Wallace Ford) apartment, only to have Marty and his mob break in, eager to avenge Joe's murder. After Gloves convinces them of his innocence, the two gangs join forces against the Nazi spies.

Gloves, Sunshine, and Barney (Frank McHugh) go to the police station where Leda is being held. Ebbing, however, has bailed her out, and they arrive as she is being forced into a car. They chase the car to a shop named Madison Novelty Co., where an underground Nazi meeting is being held. Gloves and Sunshine pose as Nazi cronies to get into the meeting, which eventually gets broken up by the combined gangs. Ebbing escapes, shooting Pepi to death, as he refused to take part in a two-man suicide mission. Ebbing intends to proceed on the plan to blow up a battleship in New York harbor. Gloves follows him to the docks, where Ebbing surprises him and forces him into a motorboat containing high explosives. At gunpoint, Ebbing forces Gloves to steer the boat in the direction of the battleship. Gloves suddenly veers the boat off its course, and he jumps into the water, while the boat with Ebbing on board crashes into a barge and explodes.

Back at the police station, Gloves and Leda find out that all charges have been dropped against them and that the mayor is going to honor him at city hall. Ma Donahue enters complaining that the milkman has disappeared, and she is afraid something has happened to him. Gloves asks: "What makes you think that?" Ma states, "Well, son, I've got a feeling", as the movie ends.

Cast

Cast notes

Production

Producer Hal Wallis made All Through the Night as a "companion piece" to his earlier anti-Nazi melodrama, Underground, despite the poor box office of the prior film.[2]

Humphrey Bogart was not the first person considered for the lead in the film: it was originally supposed to be played by Walter Winchell, the noted gossip columnist who would later be the narrator for the TV series The Untouchables. When Winchell could not get the time off to make the film, Wallis offered it to George Raft, and then, when Raft turned it down, to Bogart.[2] Olivia De Havilland and Marlene Dietrich were considered for the female lead.[4]

The scene in which Bogart and William Demarest confuse a room full of Nazi sympathizers with doubletalk was not part of the original script, but was invented by director Sherman, who filmed it despite the objections of producer Wallis. Wallis ordered it removed from the film, but Sherman left a small segment of it in, and when preview audiences reacted positively to it, Wallis backed down and told Sherman to put the entire scene back in.[2]

Reception

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave the film a mostly positive review, writing: "In spite of its slap-bang construction and its hour-and-three-quarters length, the picture does move with precision and steadily maintained suspense ... 'All Through the Night' is not exactly a melodrama out of the top drawer, but it is a super-duper action picture — mostly duper, when you stop to think."[5] Variety wrote: "Somewhat on the lurid side and with the Nazi menace motif of familiar timber, shortcomings are compensated for by fast-moving continuity which smartly builds suspense and hold (sic) attention."[6] Film Daily called it a "fast-moving and exciting melodrama."[7] Russell Maloney of The New Yorker panned the film, writing that "Hitchcock himself couldn't have asked for a better plot," but claiming that it was brought down by "the feebleness of invention, the wordiness of the dialogue, [and] the sluggishly paced direction."[8]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Hanson, Patricia King, ed. (1999). The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1941-1950. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 55. ISBN 0-520-21521-4.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Frankel, Mark. "All Through the Night" (article) on TCM.com
  3. ↑ "101 Pix Gross in Millions" Variety 6 Jan 1943 p 58
  4. ↑ "Notes" on TCM.com
  5. ↑ Crowther, Bosley (January 24, 1942). "Movie Review - All Through the Night". The New York Times. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Film Reviews". Variety. New York: Variety, Inc. December 3, 1941. p. 8.
  7. ↑ "Reviews of the New Films". Film Daily. New York: Wid's Films and Film Folk, Inc.: 7 January 28, 1942.
  8. ↑ Maloney, Russell (January 31, 1942). "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker. New York: F-R Publishing Corp. p. 49.

External links


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/16/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.