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

An elderly baker named Miller (Ludwig Stössel) is murdered by a sinister stranger (Peter Lorre). A trail leads on to a nightclub singer, Leda Hamilton (Kaaren Verne) who reveals that she and Miller have been in thrall to an organization of Nazi fifth columnists led by Ebbing (Conrad Veidt). She is helped by a well-meaning sports promoter, Alfred "Gloves" Donahue (Humphrey Bogart), who himself is suspected of murdering a nightclub owner (Edward Brophy), and has to track down those responsible to prove his innocence.

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


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