Joseph Losey’s The Big Night could well stand alongside Nicholas Ray’s Knock on Any Door and They Live by Night (both 1949) in presenting a fascinating transition from film noir to Hollywood’s oncoming, grudging interest in social-realist filmmaking that would spawn works like On the Waterfront (1954) and Edge of the City (1957), and youth drama, including Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Young Stranger (1957). Losey, whose career had commenced on the stage, had found early movie work making noir films, but clearly had ambitions beyond genre demarcations, with his fascination for characters driven by dank obsessions and self-destructive streaks, and concept of the modern world as a Faustian pit. The Big Night, his virtually forgotten swan song in America before McCarthyism drove him to work in France and then Britain, represents a fascinating tipping point as one era gives way to another. Losey’s film follows Knock on Any Door in studying a young man’s response to a hostile and violent urban landscape, but anticipates later teenage dramas in emphasising the youth’s virulent attempts to define his personal honour and masculinity in the face of an uncomprehending adult world.
Losey found his generational avatar in John Barrymore Jr, 18-year-old son of the late acting legend John Barrymore and Dolores Costello, and future father of actress Drew, who would be named for John’s self-adopted middle name. Raw in talent and presence, Barrymore anticipates Brando and Dean in his commitment to expressing the tortured interior of young men who can’t stand a world that tells them what their limits should be. What he lacks is the the humour and charm they could swing, as well as the refined skill at leaping between poles of bravura and finesse, being rather an instinctual-seeming presence. But he persuasively portrays Losey’s young antihero George La Main, who starts off as a passive, bespectacled young man with an armful of books, what later slang would dub a nerd. This nerd is product of a working-class, big-city environment, glimpsed at the outset being mercilessly razzed by pals in black leather and their girlfriends. They, as other characters suggest in the film, sense something masochistic, even delighted in suffering in the young man, which his lack of manly desensitisation in such an environment seems to entail. George’s father Andy (Preston Foster) runs a small bar, and George has been raised without a mother and emotionally detached from his old man. Man Friday Flanagan (Howland Chamberlin) tends bar and mediates between father and son but also remains tight-lipped according to his role, never presuming to alter the dynamics of communication, or lack of it.
Celebration of George’s birthday, with birthday cake perched on the bar and one candle tauntingly left alight by his blowing, is interrupted by the sudden, ominous entrance of Al Judge (Howard St. John), George’s favourite sports columnist. Cane-wielding Judge enters with imperial force and is able, through some mysterious semaphore of adult power, to force Andy to strip his shirt and prostrate himself on the floor so that Judge can beat his back bloody with his walking stick. Andy picks himself up and limps up to his bed, leaving George distraught and consumed with rage at both his father’s apparent impotence and his own. George steals his father’s gun and heads out into the night to chase down Judge, planning to dominate and humiliate him at a boxing match George was going to attend with his father. His naiveté is quickly assaulted as he gets shaken down by a creep named Peckinpaugh (Emil Meyer) who pretends to be a cop after seeing George scalp his father’s ticket, and a tiny accident cheats him of the chance to confront Judge. George finds a Dante for his urban odyssey, however, in the man who bought his spare ticket, Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), a philosopher and academic and also a cartographer of nocturnal activities.
Losey’s work here is ripe with anticipations and connections. The theme of the night odyssey through a big city is a common and powerful one in noir film, from Ben Hecht’s spiritually similar progenitor Angels Over Broadway (1940), up to and including Eyes Wide Shut (1999), whilst also prefiguring Rebel Without a Cause’s dawn-to-dawn structure in depicting a crucial juncture in a young man’s life. The figure of the cane-wielding overlord who affects high-class but is actually very low-life is common in film noir, but here also interestingly prefigures a figure that crops up in Losey’s later work, Alexanger Knox’s scientist of The Damned (1962). That film also, crucially revolves around the motif of offended youth doomed by adult transgressions, a notion which also reappears, much distorted but still recognisable, in King & Country (1963) and Accident (1967). The Big Night also irresistibly predicts Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957) in its portrait of a journalist as master of two worlds butting heads with a young idealist. Losey’s film may even be the more complex in of the two works in its approach to the kingpin, in mirroring the man of power and the kid who challenges him, and the processes that can forge one into the other. Judge proves to be an immigrant kid who’s changed his name and achieved power and profile but still knows the roots of his strength on the street level, communing with lowly imps like Peckinpaugh and stooping to personally punish Andy for a transgression that remains mysterious for most of the film.
The business of manhood is still vague to George, who wants to claim the mantle but doesn’t yet know the forces that drive its sign language, the desires and responsibilities that can make men do things that seem illogical, even inhuman, such as Andy displays in prostrating himself before Judge. This incomprehension is cleverly portrayed in the enigmatic details offered in the first scene, ranging from seemingly throwaway – Andy’s unwillingness to talk about his girlfriend, as George asks why she’s not coming to the bout – to the inescapable, in whatever business is played out between Andy and Judge. Of course, these enigmas prove to be linked. The power games which Losey would later visit explicitly in his collaborations with Harold Pinter, The Servant (1964) and Accident, are present here in their least subtle parameters, as boy is desperate to prove himself as a man, and driven to commit an act of violence to prove his love for his father, whilst the seething underlying world of sexuality makes men do mad things and thus, ironically, makes them like children again.
Losey’s jittery, unusual scene grammar jumps from deep-focus surveys to intense, frame-filling close-ups, often with the camera trained on Barrymore’s face from just above or just below and at a slightly skewed angle. Frames are subdivided by columns and room layout, and familiar editing patterns avoided. Fragments of lucid surrealism abound, from Andy heaving himself up into the frame like a saurian beast trying to be reborn as a human being, his back mottled with bloody marks, to George tending a baby with fraternal solicitude with a gun in one hand. The visual patterns are cumulatively disorientating, elusive, mimicking George’s blinkered plunge into his mission. Losey’s Wellesian inspirations are borne out as much by his style with crane shot and deep-focus lensing as they are by casting Dorothy Comingore as Cooper’s girlfriend, nightclub denizen Julie Rostina, and the son of the star of The Magnificent Ambersons (1941).
The film’s most memorable and unique sequences come at a nightclub Cooper drags George to after he’s laid out Peckinpaugh. George, drinking for the first time and overwhelmed by alcohol and exhaustion-stoked emotion, has delirious visions of his birthday cake hovering amidst the nightclub, and then a jazz drummer’s thunderous soloing recalls Judge’s assault, his stick’s brutal, concussive rhythm like a metronome keeping the time to the drummer’s wild displays. A black chanteuse, Terry Angelus (Mauri Lynn), takes the stage and offers George a momentary salve as he loses himself in the song and singer, Losey cutting between their faces in startling close-ups where they threaten to merge in an ecstatic space of emotional expression. Losey here captures the raw emotional intensity of adolescence on the cusp of true adulthood, the protean, engulfing state of that time. Losey then immediately skewers it with a cruel coda: George meets the singer outside the club, and praises her for her singing before saying, “You’re so beautiful—even if you are a—.” He cuts himself off but the damage is immediately plain in the lady’s eyes, and George’s distraught pleas for forgiveness falling on deaf ears as she retreats into wounded, emotionally depleted distraction, leaning in bleak, poeticised solitude on a lamppost whilst George is dragged off by Cooper and his girlfriend in a taxi, gazing out the rear window as the vehicle slides off into the dark in desperate awareness of his fall from grace.
This moment is an islet of excellence in the film as a whole, but it serves a function in terms of that whole too, as it presages the theme of George’s discovery that his attempt at self-empowerment is actually bound by an unconscious inheritance that binds parents to children and individuals to communities, through values and prejudices, genes and experience alike. George’s confrontation with Judge sees the film’s moral impetus not exactly reversed – Judge is still a creep and a thug – but George is forced to face the reality that he had some real justification for his act, and to recognise a peculiar nobility as well as substantial guilt in his father’s submission. In spite of the interludes of greatness and prolific inventiveness, the flaws of The Big Night are significant, leaving it as a somewhat diffuse experience. The project as a whole feels caught between two modes, with Losey’s artistic impulses still forming as he wrestles studio-mandated compromises and generic expectation to an uneasy and anticlimactic draw, and the fact he had to abandon editing the film and flee the country ahead of HUAC subpoenas surely didn’t help his work’s ultimate lack of cohesion. The script, co-written by Losey and Stanley Ellin, who wrote the source novel, along with an uncredited Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner Jr, fails to develop much of the scenario’s potentially rich expanse, with a jumble of elements competing for attention in a running time that barely breaks the seventy minute mark. George’s encounters with Cooper and Julie don’t go anywhere particularly interesting, nor does George’s brief connection with Julie’s younger sister, the protective but stymied Marion (Joan Lorring), whose girlish face belies the fact she’s somewhat older than George, which doesn’t stop her from kissing him. This interlude wants to generate a pathos that doesn’t quite arrive.
The finale is awkward and overstated, too, as paternal sacrifice and filial anguish find new understandings amidst breathless revelations, and the film has a compromised conclusion that doesn’t quite offer a jarringly happy ending, but also notably backs off from the darkest inferences it seems to be making about love, guilt, and responsibility. But Losey’s striking vignettes and displays of directorial invention continue to nearly the end, as he tracks George in his nocturnal visits to a churning newspaper press, holds a taxi driver at gunpoint, and runs home in shame and fear through labyrinthine industrial streets where he’s rendered an ant scurrying lost in a steel forest. A soundless vignette filmed through fluttering curtains depicts a father’s quick, determined action to save his son, without any words needed. This gem of visual exposition intensifies the let-down of the subsequent, flimsy father-to-son talk that wraps up the film. Hal Mohr’s cinematography is all grimy surfaces and tar-dark shadows, rendering The Big Night thoroughly noir in its visual patterns if not in its thematic stresses, carving out woodblock print-ready galleries of gnarled and wearied proletarian faces, like the flotsam who sit at Andy’s bar. Mohr shifts into suggestions of incandescence and surrealism in Lynn’s sequences, echoing that most magic-realist of noir films, City That Never Sleeps (1953).
Young Barrymore, who would be destroyed by similar appetites to his father’s, had gifts that weren’t yet honed, and his constant affectation of boyish anguish borders on excessive (as would his subsequent overripe turn as a mad killer in Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps, 1953). But he does suggest a reservoir of talent and intensity waiting for a committed coach to mould, and his youth, unlike too many avatars for troubled teen experience in the following decade, is genuine and raw here, giving George and his quandaries palpable reality. Foster, long one of Hollywood’s least appreciated male leads and left sad-looking and heavy-set in middle-age, is excellent as Andy. Lorring is convincing as a young woman bruised by loss of the protective envelope that used to surround her, and now finds herself too naïve for life and too old to be sheltered, whilst Comingore, the former Susan Alexander Kane, looks the part of an aging lush who takes a few moments’ dreamy escape from time in George’s arms upon the dance floor.
