Il a suffi d'une nuit

While on vacation in Palm Beach, a research analyst from New York City saves a drunk from drowning--in doing so, she ruins her new dress and is seen sneaking out of a millionaire's hotel room wearing only a towel. The rich guy, a publishing magnate (whom the girl works for!), never even sees her--he's dead in his bed. When his nephew (Dean Martin) takes over the magazine empire, he's made aware that his womanizing uncle was seen with a tootsie on the night of his demise who might be tempted to blackmail the company (how they come to that conclusion is anyone's guess). Anemic sex-and-big business comedy is a big step down from "The Apartment" just one year before. "Apartment" co-star Shirley MacLaine (who received an Oscar nom for her work in that film) is back doing the same kind of scatterbrained, breathlessly 'adorable' work she did in all her pictures leading up to "The Apartment". The comic situations are desperately juvenile, such as MacLaine's beau (Cliff Robertson, acting the stiff) coming across the mink coat Shirley acquired after her good deed and embarrassing her in front of his stuffy parents. The screenwriters (Edmund Beloin, Maurice Richlin and Sidney Sheldon, adapting Owen Elford's play) frantically iron and re-iron their story wrinkles, substituting wit with groaning one-liners. It takes one tipsy scene from MacLaine to get an honest laugh, the rest being ham-handed and overplayed. ** from ****

No where near as funny as I was expecting but it was maybe intended as being a "sophisticated comedy" at the time it was made. An amusing plot which the script failed to make the best of with the performances of the two leading actors being a bit lacklustre. Still worth a watch however.

All in a nights work shows everything I love to watch in a movie. Its fun, sassy and has the great one liner, Oh Mr Ryder. Dean Martin and Shirley Maclaine have obvious chemistry in this flick and its just a classic example of how romance used to exist. Although it is a typical mistaken Identity plot for a film of its age it has more wit than others seen at that time. Dean Martin really shows in this film his sophistication as an actor and is at all times Mr Cool. Shirley Maclaine is an actress I have never really watched in the past but she sparkles in this. The ending would have to be my favourite scene, I love this movie and its a classic I can watch again and again.

This is one of the funniest films ever made (in my opinion). To not give away too much for those who have not seen it, this mistaken identity farce has Dean Martin, various character actors, and especially, Shirley MacLaine, in fine form. It is one of those rare films that one can watch time after time, and never get bored with. And don't forget, 'Oh Mr Ryder!'

Shirley MacLaine was at her most fresh and unaffected when she went straight from 'The Apartment' to this breezily amoral piece of fluff (set in New York but never actually leaving the studio) which features familiar faces old and new (Charles Ruggles plays Cliff Robertson's father, for example), and reunites her with her fellow Rat Packer and co-star from 'Some Came Running' Dean Martin (there's even a joke about Frank Sinatra); in which she's seen sprinting from a hotel bedroom wearing only a turkish towl for the most innocent but unlikely of reasons.

The image and likeness of Charles Evans as Martin's uncle the late Colonel Ryder - author of the immortal lines "Love is like a wild volcano, seething with dark desire" - dominates the entire film but he's as usual uncredited (although since he begins the film as a corpse he admittedly doesn't have a speaking part).

(At the film's conclusion yet again a bugging device produced clearer sound over sixty years ago than 21st century technology would be capable of today.)