All Through the Night

A wonderful, funny B movie with an A cast. Bogart made this one between THE MALTESE FALCON and CASABLANCA. Lorre and Veidt and Dame Judith Anderson are wonderfully villainous, and a couple of future superstars -- Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason -- make their debuts as members of Bogart's gang. This has everything Warner Brothers films loved: a murky waterfront, an old abandoned warehouse, a sinister auction gallery run by foreigners, a swanky nightclub that seems to be inhabited exclusively by gangsters (the Good Guys) and Nazis (the Bad Guys). Puns galore. Probably audiences didn't want to see a comedy about the Third Reich back in 1942, but it gets better (and given the cast, historically more important) with age.

The discovery that your cheesecake vendors gone, leads to a caper that you wouldn't gamble on, in a club someone's rid of, and in error you leave a glove, as five fingers point to what you've stumbled on. With help you make it to an auctioneers, after wandering around a place in rears, but you're captured and you're bound, not long after you are found, then discover there are fascists in the gears. There's some toing and some froing that leads to, a vipers nest of Nazis who review, plans to set off an explosion, causing chaos and commotion, can you stop the saboteurs, what can you do?

An of its time, not particularly funny, propaganda promotion.

A very funny war era movie. Bogart had played a gangster in comedies (Brother Orchid with Edward J. Robinson), but played it straight as a tough guy. This movie highlighted Bogart's great comedic timing which was also evident in harder edged movies from the same period: The Big Sleep, Casablanca, and the Maltese Falcon. All Through the Night makes a fun companion piece to these movies and like the others, has a great supporting cast.

A neat little comic thriller out of Warner Brothers with Bogart as Gloves Donahue and a great supporting cast filled with names that run on and on. Two particular scenes stand out. Bogart, a lowbrow New Yorker, finds himself stuck at a fancy auction and in an attempt to get backstage begins making outrageous bids -- a woman bids two thousand and Bogart tops her with, "I'll see da lady and raise her five." He gets backstage but is conked unconscious. Recovering, he finds the warehouse filled with incriminating Nazi junk. He spills all this to the dubious police. "I can't grasp it," says the Lieutenant, "maybe I'm not big enough mentally." But finally the cops agree to investigate the warehouse, only for Bogart to discover that everything has been rearranged or removed in such a way as to make his tale sound like a fantasy. (Does any of this sound familiar? You might have seen it in Sam Taylor's screenplay for "North by Northwest.") Great snappy lines -- Bogart to a girl singer: "Sister, I like da way you sling dem obligattos around." While digging around for evidence with his friend Sunshine, "Da police are frequently skeptical." Not as tightly wound as the best comic thrillers, including "North by Northwest" and "The Thirty-Nine Steps," but well worth wasting time on.

Actually, this movie is better than most, with a good deal of the credit going to the myriad cast of star-quality actors. I suspect it was part of the Hollywood WWII propaganda stable but the story still resonates today and, just maybe, provides a cautionary tale as well.

Interesting seeing a young and slim Jackie Gleason (billed as Jackie C. Gleason) and noting this was just one of seven movies he was in in 1942! Bogart had perfected his small-town crook role by the time this movie came out. He unwittingly gets involved in a Nazi spy ring and it all begins with his love of a cheesecake made by an old man who is found murdered. The chase for the killer(s) is on...

You cannot watch this movie without smiling at the antics of Frank McHugh, the character actor who endeared himself to many during the 30s and 40s.

Conrad Veidt is phenomenally evil as the Nazi spy and it's important to remember this man actually fled from Germany to reside in England and America, giving all of his monies and salaries to the British Government to fight the Nazi menace. He is always good in the Nazi genre but it surely must have galled him to play these roles on so many occasions when he despised the very people he portrayed. His interaction with the imperious Judith Anderson (later, Dame Judith Anderson) is actually a la film noir at its best.

Excellent cast brings this movie up a notch from the formulaic movies during WWII and this one is well worth watching.