by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s film was Night
After Night, a 1932 Paramount
production that was a weird combination of gangster movie and soap opera that
would probably be totally forgotten if it didn’t contain the screen debut of
Mae West. Paramount signed her for a supporting role — she’s billed fourth,
after George Raft, Constance Cummings and the virtually forgotten but quite
impressive Wynne Gibson, and just ahead of the marvelous comedienne Alison
Skipworth — and she doesn’t appear until the 37th minute of this
76-minute film, but as George Raft rather disgustedly put it later, “She stole
everything but the cameras.” I’d seen Night After Night only once before, on the old Channel 36 in San
José which by some freak of the UHF signals back when virtually everyone still
watched TV over-the-air instead of on cable came in beautifully and clearly in
Marin County just north of San Francisco and gave me my first glimpse of quite
a few great old movies. For a while they were doing a weekly comedy showing
that basically alternated between the Paramount films of the Marx Brothers, W.
C. Fields and Mae West, and one night for some reason they showed this film in
that time slot because West was in it.
The film — directed with more moxie than
usual by Archie Mayo from a script by Kathryn Scola, with additional dialogue
by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Vincent Lawrence and Mae West (who, blessed be, was
allowed to write the scenes in which she appears), all derived from a story
called “Single Night” by the sporadically interesting writer Louis Bromfield —
opens with a clever montage sequence showing first the construction of a house
at number 55 in New York City. We’re never told what street number 55 is the
address of, but it’s clearly a house
that’s built as a mansion in an upper-class neighborhood and thereafter is
turned over under less and less ritzy terms as the neighborhood goes downhill.
When it reaches the 1932 present it’s been bought at auction by ex-prizefighter
Joe Anton (George Raft) — whose last name is pronounced “Antone,” by the way —
who’s turned it into a speakeasy that’s become a huge success. Anton has also
racked up an impressive number of female conquests, including edgy mistress
Iris Dawn (Wynne Gibson) — Charles joked at the phoniness of that name and I,
reflecting on blues legend Howlin’ Wolf’s real name, said, “Her real name was Mabel Kling Harding Burnett” —
good-time girl Maudie Triplett (a really awkward name for a Mae West character!) and the one he’s currently
after, classy woman Jerry Healy (Constance Cummings). Jerry comes to number 55
(like the later Studio 54, it’s been named after its address) and spends her
evenings drinking alone because — as we learn about one-third of the way
through the film — her family used to own the house and she was born and raised
there before they lost all their money and had to sell it.
Our Joe is becoming
disgusted with himself and his success; when we first see him (with tousled
hair instead of Raft’s usual greasy pomade, and showing off quite a lot of
upper-body male flesh — and even a tuft of chest hair — unusual for an
early-1930’s movie) he’s in bed reading a story about Albert Einstein having
given an interview in which he says it’s both personally and socially
destructive to have too much money. Like Edward G. Robinson in the next year’s The
Little Giant — also about a gangster
who’s disgusted with his lifestyle and is looking to develop better manners and
classier English so he can crash society — Joe has hired a teacher, Mabel
Jellyman (Alison Skipworth), to improve his English and make his overall affect
more suitable for “society.” A further complication Joe has to deal with is a
rival gang, headed by Frankie Guard (Bradley Page), who resent Joe’s success
because it’s cutting into the profits of their own illegal boîtes. In classic gangster-movie fashion Guard and his
men first attempt to buy Joe out, offering him $50,000 for the place — Joe
counteroffers to sell it for $250,000 — and in the meantime Joe tries to
romance Jerry, including virtually raping her when she resists too much (and in
the bizarre misogyny of many films in this genre, his vicious sexual assault on her is what finally
makes her decide she loves him!), deals with her rich suitor Dick Bolton (Louis
Calhern), and ultimately sells the place for $200,000 after a gang of Guard’s
thugs comes in and starts wrecking the place — which we don’t see; we merely hear what’s going on while Joe and Jerry are enacting
their rape-into-romance drama in one of the house’s upstairs rooms. Joe and
Jerry end up together, though heaven knows where doing heaven knows what, and
the final shot is of the building at number 55, now with a neon sign in front
announcing Guard’s ownership, and instead of the usual criss-crossing
searchlights Paramount generally used for their end credits in the 1930’s and
1940’s the final credits come up in front of a shot of the house.
Critics and
audiences in 1932 basically thought Mae West’s electrifying and audacious
appearance was the best thing in the film. Unexpectedly, instead of setting her sights on one of the males in
the movie, she puts the moves on (of all people) Alison Skipworth, including
sleeping in the same bed with her and ending up arm-in-arm at the end, a pretty
audacious Lesbian implication even by the loose standards of the so-called
“pre-Code” era in which West did her best work. It’s when Skipworth’s character
asks her if she believes in love at first sight that West replies with her
second-most-famous line from this film: “Well, it sure saves a lot of time!” Though
the original trailer (included as a bonus item on the DVD) focused almost
exclusively on George Raft as the star attraction (it did include West’s famous early line; when she shows
up at number 55 and the hat-check girl marvels at her jewels — “Goodness, what
beautiful diamonds” — West snaps back, “Goodness had nothing to do with it,
honey”: the diamonds were real, not glass or paste imitations, and they were
West’s own property, not something from the Paramount costume or props departments),
West’s scenes were so electrifying Paramount signed her to a star contract and
gave her virtually everything she wanted. She sold them the rights to her stage
hit Diamond Lil as her next film (though
they retitled it She Done Him Wrong), she demanded the right not only to write the scripts for all her
films but to be credited as writer in type 75 percent the size of her credit as
star, and she got to pick her own leading man (she picked Cary Grant). Night
After Night takes off and flies when
Mae West is on the screen, but even when she isn’t it’s an oddly compelling
melodrama, creaky at times but still a lot of fun and a much better film overall than its reputation.
