Blues in the Night

Interesting film by director Anatole Litvak creating film-noir with a musical.

Two future excellent directors, Richard Whorf, who bore a strong resemblance to Robert Taylor, and Elia Kazan star. Kazan was also in Litvak's 1940 film "City for Conquest."

The picture has an excellent cast. A group of musicians led by Jigger (Whorf) meet up with gangster Lloyd Nolan while hitching a ride on a train. Nolan likes them when they don't turn him in despite the fact that he holds them up for $5.00!

He brings them to a Road House where the group perform. We have some great musical settings here and the various montage depiction is excellent.

The film is extremely well paced. There is never a dull moment. He moves beautifully from film noir to musical and back to film noir again.

In addition, there is a terrific performance by Bette Field as a Road House girl in love with Nolan, who spurns her. Whorf is hopelessly in love with her and her rejection of him leads to his mental breakdown. How ironic that 16 years after this film, Nolan and Field both appeared in the 1957 film "Peyton Place" but had no scenes together. Field is both catty and quite vicious in this film. It's her viciousness that shall prove to be her undoing.

Jack Carson toots his horn and is wed in the film to Priscilla Lane. One major flaw of the film is their lack of emotional outburst when it is revealed that their baby boy has died.

This film took me by surprise because it is a musical black and white film with fast movement of the camera and goes from Jazz and Blues music smack into a drama and murder. The film starts out with a piano player named Jugger, (Richard Whorf) who wants to organize a band and he has as his female singer, Ginger Powell, (Priscilla Lane) and her husband, Leo Powell, (Jack Carson) his trumpet player. Kay Grant, (Betty Field) plays the role of a gal who meets men and leaves them as quick as she meets them. Del Davis, (Lloyd Nolan) is an escaped convict who runs into this jazz band in a box car and decides to hold them up for all their money. There are many old time actors in this film and it really is a gem of a 1941 Classic. You could also call this film, riding the railroad through out the United States.

Everybody's heard of this movie because of the famous title song, but almost nobody's ever seen it. It defies genre classification -- both a musical drama and a sort of missing link between the Warners gangster movies of the 1930s (mugs, molls, and rat-a-tat dialogue) and 1940s film noir (femme fatale, dark shadows, smoky atmosphere, seamy underside of life). It's a genuine one-of-a-kind movie that deserves to be much better remembered than it is.

However, one commenter here needs to refresh his memory; BLUES IN THE NIGHT has nothing whatever to do with the career of Jimmy Lunceford or any other famous musician of the period. It's about a small jazz combo, not a big band, and they begin and end the movie as obscure journeymen living from hand to mouth between gigs.

This movie was a bit unusual because it starts off strictly like a musical the first 20 minutes. It had me puzzled; I didn't think I had rented a musical. Well, it wasn't, as it turned out, even though music was a central element in the story. The rest of the film was a combination of drama, film noir and melodrama. At least that's the way I saw it and, yeah, I was glad to see IMDb confirm my description when I got to the title page here to post the review.

The only time the movie bogged down was when it became a little too melodramatic in a few spots. Betty Field ("Kay" )was usually in those scenes, playing a woman with a chip on her shoulder. As I watched her, I thought, "Wow, this woman is tailor-made for film noirs. She could have been another Marie Windsor." Sadly, she wasn't, but she was in a good number of movie and television shows. Still, I think noir would have been the best vehicle for her.

Priscilla Lane plays the female opposite: the wholesome-looking good gal ("Character") who just wants the band to click and for everybody to be happy. Heck, that's what the band in general wants, but "Jigger" is the guy who keeps putting a monkey-wrench into the deal and seems to be the band member whom everyone looks to for leadership.

Richard Worf plays "Jigger," and he's so-so as an actor. The fact he never made it big is understandable. There's a smoothness to his delivery that's missing. His changed his career from acting to directing in 1945 and did better at that. Obviously the same can be said for another member of the band in this story: "Nickie," played by Elia Kazan, who classic film fans know as a very famous director.

When all is said-and-done, actors Lane and Lloyd Nolan ("Del") seemed to be the most "real" in this film, and those two were the ones who had the best careers of this cast, particularly Nolan. Jack Carson and Howard da Silva are also in this movie and they're "known" actors, too.

My favorite part of the movie was a very short scene with about 15 minutes left with "Jigger" was in the hospital and he was hallucinating. The innovative camera-work was terrific, right out of Dali painting. Kudos to director Anatole Litvak for some good closeup shots and interesting camera angles and use of light, in that scene and others in the film. This movie is very well photographed. Ernie Haller was the cinematographer. Haller's resume includes some very famous films.

The odd mix of genres makes this intriguing movie I'm glad I checked out, and I recommended to fellow classic film fans.

This film stars mostly second and third-tier actors from Warner Brothers. Familiar actors like Jack Carson, Priscilla Lane, Lloyd Nolan and Wallace Ford are here, but there is also a starring role by the relatively unknown Richard Whorf as well as a supporting role by Elia Kazan--before he made a REAL name for himself as a director. And while none of these folks are huge stars, they do a fine job and the film has the usual high quality and polish you'd expect from the studio.

This film is sort of like a fairy tale about a group of musicians who love Blues, though it's NOT exactly the same style you'd find in Black America--it's more like a big-band/Hollywood idea of the Blues! It's filled with various clichés (such as the BAD girl who might break up the band) but because it's made so well and the music quite enjoyable, it's still worth seeing. Just be sure you aren't looking for THE Blues! Not great but for old movie fans (like myself), it's worth seeing.