Night World (Universal, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I ran a movie I’d wanted to see again for quite some time: Night World, a quirky hour-long 1932 “B” movie from Universal about Happy’s Club, a New York nightspot run by “Happy” McDonald (Boris Karloff, in an odd choice for his first Universal film after Frankenstein, speaking in an oddly chipper voice that seemed to be his attempt to do an American accent), and the doings and misdoings of the patrons and staff around the place. One of the quirky reasons I like this movie is it’s the only film on which Boris Karloff and Busby Berkeley both worked; Berkeley was brought in to choreograph the nightclub’s floor show, and while he was restricted to just 12 chorus girls (wearing hand-me-down costumes from the “Happy Feet” number in King of Jazz), a small set and an old song (“Who’s Your Little Whosis?” by Ben Bernie, Al Goering – presumably no relation – and Walter Hirsch), he was still able to get in both his trademark shots: the overhead kaleidoscope formation and the “tunnel of legs” tracking shot in which the camera pans through the chorines with their legs spread apart and their crotches visibly the focal point. (One male customer is shot hunching over so he can look lasciviously at the display of scantily clad female sex organs.) Night World is blessed with a marvelously cynical script by P. J. Wolfson, Allen Rivkin and Richard Schayer, and was directed by Hobart Henley – who was usually a hack but outdid himself here, starting with the Walther Ruttmann-esque montage of New York City night life and picking up a lot of oddball camera angles that emphasize the anything-goes nature of the goings-on at Happy’s.

It’s also very much a product of the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement; just about everyone at Happy’s Club seems to be either a rich sugar daddy with their gold-digging mistress or an older woman with her gigolo. We eventually discover the stars of the film, Lew Ayres and Mae Clarke; Mae is one of the 12 choristers in Berkeley’s formation and Lew is Michael Rand, whose father tracked down his mom (Hedda Hopper) at the home of the man she was having an affair with, with fatal results. (Ayres and Hopper have one scene together, and her delivery is so ponderous and dull one doesn’t question the wisdom of her career change to writing a gossip column.) In addition to their loose sexual morals, the people in Night World seem to pass around guns like party favors: they always seem to be packing iron (this film is a National Rifle Association member’s wet dream!), and “Happy” meets his demise when a group of gangsters comes to the club intending to kill him. He thinks he’s armed, but what he doesn’t know is that his wife Jill (Dorothy Revier) is having an affair with one of the gangsters, so to save her lover’s life at the expense of her husband’s she’s unloaded Happy’s gun and pocketed the bullets. (Henley and his writers make sure we know that ahead of time, but of course Happy doesn’t, and Karloff’s best acting in the film comes when he fires the empty gun and realizes he’s defenseless.)

Only the gangster shoots her, too, because he says he can’t afford to leave behind any witnesses – one wonders how he’ll explain away all the dead bodies (earlier he’s shot the nightclub doorman, played by the fine Black actor Clarence Muse, though since he’s just been told his wife has died in a hospital we’re not all that sorry to see him join her in death like the hero of a 19th century romance) – and he’s just about to shoot Lew Ayres and Mae Clarke, who have paired off after he’s been spending night after night in the club drinking to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder from his dad’s death, when the cop on the beat patrolling the club, played by Robert Emmet O’Connor (a large actor who made a specialty of playing Irish cops), comes in and shoots the gangster instead. The final shot is of an obnoxious comic-relief drunk who’s been pestering the other customers looking for someone from Schenectady coming out from behind the bar and witnessing the remnants of the closing bloodbath, followed by a sign advertising Happy’s Club, whose fate now that its principal owner is dead is uncertain but unlikely to remain a going concern. Along the way there are barbed references to Prohibition, which was still in effect but on its way out – at one point Clarke even tells Ayres that if he wants to be an alcoholic he should at least wait until Repeal so he can do it with good-quality booze (to which I joked that he would respond, “I can still see, and that means it’s good stuff” – a lot of movies around this time, including Puttin’ On the Ritz with Harry Richman and Young Man of Manhattan with Chaudette Colbert, Norman Foster and Ginger Rogers, featured storylines of characters being blinded by bootleg liquor, often because the U.S. government and the bootleggers’ chemists were fighting an arms race, with the government chemists seeking ways to spike legal industrial alcohol with toxic ingredients and the bootleggers’ chemists figuring out ways to remove these adulterants).

Universal intended this film at least in part as a follow-up to Broadway, their 1929 mega-production which had a similar story line (a nightclub owner is caught in a gang war between rival bootleggers, each demanding he buy his booze from them … or else), but this is an enviable example of the economy of classic-era Hollywood storytelling that the writers and director were able to cram so many plot lines and themes into a running time of less than an hour. It’s also a film in which Boris Karloff got to work with a number of people he’d done other movies with in the last two years: Dorothy Revier in Graft (the 1930 Universal film he made before Frankenstein and which, at least according to the legend, got him on the lot where James Whale was preparing the monster movie and saw Karloff eating in the studio commissary; he got a look at Karloff’s lanky body and rather boxy head and decided to test him for the Monster – though Whale biographer James Curtis says it didn’t happen that way: Whale was visiting his family in Britain when Graft was filmed and it was actually Whale’s partner, David Lewis, who spotted Karloff and suggested him for the role), Mae Clarke in Frankenstein and George Raft (who has a small but unmistakable role as one of the gangsters; he even flips a coin, though it’s a two-headed coin and he uses it to try to trick Mae Clarke’s character into dating him) in the original Scarface (filmed in 1931 before Frankenstein but released afterwards due to producer Howard Hughes’ battles with the censors). There’s also an odd “Trivia” item on the imdb.com page for Night World that claims “Mae Clarke was sick during most of the production of The Impatient Maiden (1932) (directed by James Whale, and also co-starring her with Lew Ayres) and this film, which were made back-to-back. At the end of this film, she was so sick that her face swelled up and she was having hallucinations. She was able to go for detox treatments in Palm Springs and Pasadena.” That conceals more than it reveals: just what was she detoxing from? Obviously something more serious than simple exhaustion!