All Through the Night was started almost the day after the Pearl Harbor attack and rushed as fast as Warner Brothers could get it out to the movie going public. It's a curiosity today, but for different reasons.
Humphrey Bogart is one of those characters who straddles between the legal and illegal. When his mom, Jane Darwell, asks him to find out what happened to her baker of German ancestry, Bogey starts his own investigation. Along the way the partner of Barton MacLane who is a rival of Bogey's, gets murdered and now the police are looking for him as well as MacLane's mob.
But Bogey persists and finds a nasty nest of Nazi fifth columnists using an antique auction as a cover.
I've often wondered whether films like All Through the Night weren't a double edged sword in terms of propaganda. For audiences in 1942 I suppose it was good to see an All-American hero like Humphrey Bogart besting the Germans. Yet the Germans in so many of these films are portrayed as incredibly stupid, I do wonder if a whole lot of our draftees didn't go in the armed services with some bad pre-conceived notions.
But All Through the Night does have is an incredible cast of some of the finest character actors ever assembled. The Germans are played by Conrad Veidt, Judith Anderson, and Peter Lorre and they play it completely straight. They'd have to or the film wouldn't work on any level. Kaaren Verne is the heroine who the Nazis are using to entice Bogey, she's working for them because she believes this will save her father still in the fatherland.
Bogey has such people working for him as William Demarest, Frank McHugh, Wallace Ford, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers. With Gleason and Silvers who were pretty far down on the cast list, you had two people who would make their major breakthroughs in the next decade in television. Add this entire cast up and it's pretty impressive, all these wonderful movie people doing their own particular shtick at the top of their game.
For that reason All Through the Night should be seen and enjoyed even if you might wince at the over the top propaganda.
Humphrey Bogart is one of those characters who straddles between the legal and illegal. When his mom, Jane Darwell, asks him to find out what happened to her baker of German ancestry, Bogey starts his own investigation. Along the way the partner of Barton MacLane who is a rival of Bogey's, gets murdered and now the police are looking for him as well as MacLane's mob.
But Bogey persists and finds a nasty nest of Nazi fifth columnists using an antique auction as a cover.
I've often wondered whether films like All Through the Night weren't a double edged sword in terms of propaganda. For audiences in 1942 I suppose it was good to see an All-American hero like Humphrey Bogart besting the Germans. Yet the Germans in so many of these films are portrayed as incredibly stupid, I do wonder if a whole lot of our draftees didn't go in the armed services with some bad pre-conceived notions.
But All Through the Night does have is an incredible cast of some of the finest character actors ever assembled. The Germans are played by Conrad Veidt, Judith Anderson, and Peter Lorre and they play it completely straight. They'd have to or the film wouldn't work on any level. Kaaren Verne is the heroine who the Nazis are using to entice Bogey, she's working for them because she believes this will save her father still in the fatherland.
Bogey has such people working for him as William Demarest, Frank McHugh, Wallace Ford, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers. With Gleason and Silvers who were pretty far down on the cast list, you had two people who would make their major breakthroughs in the next decade in television. Add this entire cast up and it's pretty impressive, all these wonderful movie people doing their own particular shtick at the top of their game.
For that reason All Through the Night should be seen and enjoyed even if you might wince at the over the top propaganda.