All Through the Night

Here’s Humphrey Bogart tracking Nazi saboteurs through wartime New York because his cheesecake baker got murdered. Yes, you read that right. Warner Bros. took a Runyonesque gangster comedy, threw in some Fifth Column villains, and somehow made it work.

Bogie plays “Gloves” Donahue, a Broadway gambler who stumbles from a murder investigation straight into an espionage ring. He plays it straight, while his crew—natural comedians including Frank McHugh and Jackie Gleason—crack wise.

McHugh in particular gets some of the best lines. When wisecracking over an ornery nightclub owner’s corpse, he’s reprimanded—“Shaddup, the guy is dead”—and retorts without missing a beat: “Well, I’m reasonably sorry.” Later, when the crew is on the lam, he wonders aloud, “How many years do you get if they give you life?”

These aren’t throwaway gags. They’re perfectly timed punctuation marks that keep the film from drowning in its own plot mechanics.

Like Bogart, the villains play it straight. Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt—future Casablanca alumni—bring genuine menace to their roles, giving the film its emotional weight. Without them, this would be just another screwball romp.

Director Vincent Sherman knows what he’s doing. The wet pavement gleams in the night shots. The car chase through Central Park crackles with energy. And that scene where one of Bogart’s boys uses a fire hose as a makeshift bungee cord to escape from an upper floor? Die Hard didn’t invent that. This movie did. In 1942.

The first two acts move at breakneck speed. Bogart uncovers the murder, traces it to a warehouse, discovers an auction house front, gets captured, and escapes in that spectacular car chase. The movie should end right there. Instead, it stalls out for what amounts to a propaganda intermission before sending everyone back to the warehouse for a second climax.

Not fatal, but frustrating. A very good movie pulling up short of greatness.

Still, that finale delivers. The scene where Bogart’s crew has to double-talk their way through a Nazi meeting is laugh-out-loud funny. I particularly loved the fingers-crossed “Heils”—a perfect encapsulation of the film’s irreverent spirit.

All Through the Night may not be perfect, but it’s close. It gets the tone exactly right—serious enough to matter, funny enough to remember. Bogart’s in his prime and backed by an excellent supporting cast. And for two-thirds of its runtime, it’s gangbusters entertainment.