Vintage Pulp | Jun 7 2021 |
All Through the Night is Bogart at his best.
There's no single movie that made Humphrey Bogart a superstar—he built his brand with each outing. But surely All Through the Night was one of his most important pre-icon roles. You see its Italian promo poster above, which was painted by the great artist Luigi Martinati. We've featured Martinati often, and you can see his work here and here. After originally opening in the U.S. in 1942, All Through the Night premiered in Italy as Sesta colonna today in 1949. You can read more about the film here.
Femmes Fatales | Apr 8 2020 |
Verne does a great impersonation of a woman putting her own interests first.
It's a femme shoot dog world out there, but German actress Kaaren Verne seems ready for whatever comes. We last saw her taking care of Humphrey Bogart in All Through the Night, and in this photo made as a promo for her 1942 war drama The Great Impersonation, she's ready to take care of herself. Verne did another great impersonation, that of someone with a beautiful name, a role required by the fact that she was born Ingeborg Klinkerfuss. Owwwwwch, that's a bad one. No offense to any Klinkerfusses out there, but that name sounds like it belongs to the sadistic head nurse of a lunatic asylum, the one who whacks patients on the pee-pee with a yardstick. It gives us an idea, though—maybe we'll put together a post of all-time worst real names of actors. That should kill some quarantine time.
Vintage Pulp | Jan 10 2016 |
Fast talking Bogart wisecracks his way into Nazi trouble.
The Humphrey Bogart vehicle All Through the Night is sometimes overlooked thanks to Bogie's array of top notch films, but it's one vintage cinema fans should make the time to see. It's a wartime thriller and mild propaganda piece dealing with a self-interested NYC gambler who discovers his inner patriot.
This is a character evolution Bogart made several times, for example in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. It all begins begins when the beloved old neighborhood baker who makes Bogart's favorite cheesecake is murdered. Bogie is compelled to find out who did it, and what develops is an amazing hard boiled thriller-cum-comedy, a visually dynamic, fast-paced flick that starts a mile a minute and picks up speed from there.
But there's even more to it than meets the eye (to quote Bogart), something that will dawn on you as you notice the preponderance of foreign accents from Conrad Veidt, Kaaren Verne, Peter Lorre, et al. Hmm. What the heck are all these continental types doing in Bogie's neck of the woods? Later one of the great reveals in vintage cinema history involves a painting of a highly newsworthy character and brings everything into sharp focus. That a film of such broad subtext begins when Bogart can't get a piece of cheesecake is one of the many quirks of All Through the Night. Entertainment with a message isn't always easy to accomplish. This film makes it look easy.
We'd be remiss if we didn't also note that, due to a scattershot script that seeks laughs everywhere, you'll get to see one of the more infamous racist gags of the era, one that's even been included in documentaries on the subject. Everyone in the film is a caricature except Bogart, but in early cinema, white characters were portrayed as a vast array of personalities, while the few-and-far-between black characters were never explored with more than superficial interest. This is still something of a problem today, in our opinion. All Through the Night takes the bigoted route, but thankfully it's brief, and we'd argue that it remains a movie to be seen. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1942.