All Through The Night

An excellent Warner Brothers actioner from 1942--completely inconsequential, but so what? It uses nearly every member of the Warner stock company as goodhearted gangster Humphrey Bogart leads his boys (Frank McHugh, Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers) against a band of Nazi spies (Judith Anderson, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre). The director, Vincent Sherman, never amounted to much, but he does a bang-up job here--a fine example of what studio support could do.

Bogart in All Through The Night

Humphrey Bogart plays Gloves Donahue, a rough-hewn but essentially decent New York gambler. The Runyonesque plot gets moving when Gloves tries to find out what's holding up his favorite restaurant's daily shipment of cheesecake. Paying a call on the bakery, Gloves stumbles into a Nazi spy ring, masterminded by Conrad Veidt. Mixed up in all this is nightclub singer Kaaren Verne, whose loyalties are in question in her early scenes but who turns out to be as true-blue as the patriotic Gloves. Combining a quick wit with quicker fists, Gloves and his "mob" thwart the Nazis before they're able to skip the country. The cast is a movie buff's dream, ranging from Jane Darwell as Bogart's mom to Peter Lorre as a cynical Nazi flunkey to William Demarest, Frank McHugh, Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason as Bogie's favorite cohorts. The film's best scene would have us believe that Bogart could confound a gang of erudite Nazis with a steady stream of Manhattan slang.

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