Gleason, McDaniel, Bogart, Sully, Ford, Darwell
All Through the Night has more journeymen character actors in its cast than any other Hollywood movie I can think of– most of them with faces as familiar as your grandparents. One of the striking things about the cast is how many of them turned up one year later (1942) in an immeasurably superior and more famous World War II movie, Casablanca. At least four actors (three of them stars) are in both movies– Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, and Ludwig Stössel. The cast also includes Jane Darwell, Judith Anderson, Kaaren Verne (a.k.a. Mrs. Lorre), Frank McHugh, William Demarest, Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Wallace Ford, Barton MacLane, Frank Sully, Chester Gan(!), and, all too briefly, Sam McDaniel (Hattie’s brother).
Mr. and Mrs. Lorre ready for the nightclub scene
McDaniel has just one scene as Bogart’s butler, in which the two are given a tired old vaudeville routine (not worth repeating), which McDaniel finishes with the very unfortunate riposte, “Things ain’t always as black as they looks.” The scene serves as a microcosm of what’s wrong with the movie, which is plenty, going well beyond the under-use of a raft of gifted performers, most of whom have mere minutes of screen time. Bogart carries the film; he’s in nearly every scene, even the painfully long one (4 or 5 minutes) where he’s trying to pretend he’s a Nazi as he’s called upon to report during a Fifth Column meeting in NYC. (As far as I can tell, there was no clandestine force of German supporters in the U.S. during WWII, so All Through the Night wasn’t just propaganda, it was fear-mongering fiction.)
Veidt, Lorre, Anderson
As to the plot, imagine Guys and Dolls if Nazis had infiltrated the Times Square. Bogart plays a dapper Broadway gambler with a motley, middle-aged gang. They stumble on a terrorist cell– led by Veidt, Lorre, Anderson– and the story plays out like a David vs Goliath gang war: Bogart’s little group of all-American rascals against a ruthless mob of Nazi thugs. Many chase scenes, shoot-outs, and patriotic messages ensue, punctuated by salty 1940s slang. The ending is predictable, but given a slapstick twist: Bogart’s gang breaks up the Fifth Column meeting with all-American weapons like baseball bats and craftiness (Phil Silvers identifies victims by giving the sieg heil salute and any guy who replies in kind gets sapped). Ultimately, again predictably, we end up with Veidt and Bogart going mano-a -mano on a boat full of explosives in a textbook example of how not to use miniatures and rear-screen projection. Yadda, yadda, Veidt does something stupid, Bogart takes advantage, big explosion, the end.
Lorre again (I can't get enough of that face)
Even the trailer is weighted with propaganda, but the movie is effectively relieved with humor– granted, All Through the Night is infinitely worse than Casablanca, but it’s also infinitely better than similar anti-Nazi dreck like Cary Grant’s Once Upon a Honeymoon, which also attempted to have it both ways, using Hitler’s hordes as comic fodder and as dramatic villains. The ultimate message, of course, is that American decency and stout-heartedness will overwhelm evil every time.
One last note: Released in 1941, 60 years before 9/11, All Through the Night foreshadows that event in interesting ways, alluding to terrorist cells in the city, and giving Veidt some juicy speeches about how easy it is to divide the people in the United States and tear the country apart. I might have agreed with him, except for one thing: I can’t imagine why he thinks differences of opinion among citizens are unique to the United States.
Game of Consequences 