All Through the Night

While investigating the death of his favorite cheesecake baker, Runyonesque gambler Gloves Donahue (Humphrey Bogart) stumbles onto a secret cell of Nazis planning sabotage in New York.

All Through The Night may be flawed, but with its fun script, and great performance by Humphrey Bogart, you’ll easily overlook it’s shortcomings.

The script is littered with fast action and fast dialog, but never takes itself too seriously. There’s plenty of comedy (that’s actually funny), but also a real sense of tension that’s crucial to any action picture. Also, with the exception of a slight hiccup during the second act, the script moves like gangbusters, which is important since any slow moments could give the viewer a chance to realize how silly it all is.

The cast is fantastic. Bogart’s crew includes such comic greats as Frank McHugh, William Demarest, and Jackie Gleason. Opposite them are Bogart’s future Casablanca alums Conrad Veidt as the Nazi leader and Peter Lorre as his slimy enforcer. The importance of a good villain in an action picture cannot be overstated and All Through The Night has some of the best villains you could ask for.

Director Vincent Sherman does a good job capturing all the action and telling a very efficient story. With a running time of 107 minutes All Through The Night could perhaps stand to lose 4 or 5 minutes (mainly from the second act) but no more.

Special note should also be given to this movie for being the first to implement an action sequence later made famous in Die Hard. Midway through All Through the Night, a character is caught on the upper floors of a building and uses a fire-hose as a makeshift bungee cord to dive off, narrowly avoiding disaster. And you thought that was pretty clever in Die Hard didn’t you?