All Night Long

The film, based on Othello, is neatly positioned as a vehicle to showcase some of the best Jazz musicians of the period -- including Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus.

What is most interesting about this film is how it handles racial relations. That was an important part of "Othello", but really defined the 1960s. I love how 1963 was the year of the "I Have a Dream" speech, but already in England films like this had blacks and whites mingling without any sort of trouble. How much more mature they were...

The film was released by The Criterion Collection in January 2011, and it deserved to be. Criterion has done a great job of finding lost classics and cleaning them up -- the beautiful black and white cinematography deserves to be seen, and the jazz soundtrack deserves to be heard.

Just imagine: That Shakespearian bigger-than-life plot line, a sixties touch of psychoanalysis, a movie set entirely inside a party of swingers, great interludes featuring amazing jazz performances from some great artists such as Charlie Mingus(music scenes that also explain story line and characters), a slight bit of over-acting in colorful black and white, good filmmaking, interracial couples and drug taking in a 1961 movie, love, hate and, of course, jealousy. Who could possible miss out on these ingredients?

Just beautiful.

About 20 to 30 minutes into the film, I felt like I was watching a play--a familiar play, at that. Thanks to IMDb, I learned it's inspired by Shakespeare's Othello. I haven't read it in 40 years, but at least that mystery was solved.

The mystery that's not solved for me is the actual genesis of this project. Whose idea was it to fashion a script loosely based on Othello against the backdrop of the late 1960s British jazz scene? The producer? The script's co-authors? Honestly, that's a head-scratcher, in my book.

As far as the music, it's never truly "featured" in this film. It's either used as a transition from one scene to the next or as a background element. Make no mistake: what performances we do get are high-end, time capsule-like delights; but they are often interrupted with storyline.

If you're a diehard fan of the jazz artists featured in this film or of some members of the cast, like Betsy Blair, Richard Attenborough, or Patrick McGoohan, you'll probably like this movie. And if you are into older movies that test the boundaries regarding interracial relationships, this one may interest you. It's good but definitely an oddity.

"All Night Long" takes "Othello" and transposes it to a jazz setting in contemporary London, or at least the London of the early sixties. It's a great idea, has a terrific cast and how could any jazz aficianado not like any movie that features this much jazz and a cast that includes Charlie Mingus, Johnny Dankworth and Dave Brubeck all playing themselves but there is a but... In place of Shakespeare we get jive and nothing dates as badly as the kind of hip dialogue that jazz musicians are reputed to have used back then. Cool just isn't cool anymore.

On the plus side, it's a Basil Dearden picture so as well as great jazz, and lots of it, we also get intelligence. Dearden knows the pedigree he has here and treats it with due respect and Patrick McGoohan is superb as the Iago figure. Others in the cast include Richard Attenborough, Betsy Blair, Keith Michell and in the Othello/Desdemona roles, Paul Harris and Marti Stevens. Unfortunately Harris and Stevens are the weakest things about the film; their lack of acting experience shows.

It is, however, a brilliant looking picture. Producer Michael Relph designed it along with Art Director Ray Sim and Edward Scaife supplied the superb black and white cinematography and, as I said, the jazz is terrific. However, it wasn't really successful and is among the least revived of all the Dearden/Relph movies but it's certainly worth seeking out and if you love jazz it is simply unmissable.

All Night Long (1962)

If you love jazz, you might want to check out this low budget, offbeat film about the fringes of the jazz scene as the Bob era was devolving into smaller commercial and (frankly) white audiences. It's set in Mod England, but the idea is quite American—the music, above all, but also the script and production.

If you liked the television series "The Prisoner" you might also like checking out that show's star, Patrick McGoohan, who stars here. And then, if you appreciate very loose adaptations of Shakespeare (like the nearly concurrent "West Side Story") you might see the strains of Othello at work here.

I liked it, but I know that it's largely just a curiosity, as a movie. Well, it's been deemed an "important" film by Criterion, which has released one of their spiffy (gorgeous) versions on DVD, and I think that's accurate, even if the dramatics (and a couple of plot tricks using a tape recorder) are sometimes strained. The whole enterprise feels like an art film, with a weird layer of pretension that I suppose comes from the Shakespearean overlay.

As for the jazz? Well, Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck should be enough for you. Great stuff that you just wish lasted longer. What else? There is a liberal acceptance of the mixing of cultures and races that's great (and you have to remember how weird this was in movies back then)—the two leads beyond McGoohan are a mixed-race couple. And then there is the set itself, a single spacious club with a stairway at one end, where the camera moves with crisp authority.

Like lots of director Basil Dearden's movies, this one is different and fascinating and not quite as brilliant or insightful as it needs to be. But yeah, watch it. It's a subculture classic, for sure. With great music.