Night World (1932)

From my favorite movies..

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Deliciously seedy, this hour long pre- code drama with music is a gem of writing, photography, prohibition era violence, slang and tough luck. It's filled with a vision of Times Square as it once was: delightfully seedy in that Damon Runyon way where guys and dolls traveled along the big street to forget their woes in alcohol soaked nightspots like this, rub shoulders with the rich, the poor, the notorious and the desperate. This takes several of the songs later used in "42nd Street" and the "Gold Diggers" films and gives a dramatic interpretation of what they were all about. A Busby Berkley choreographed musical number, "Who's your little who?" Features chorus girls gossiping while showing more than just a lot of leg, dealing with various types of customers, and introducing the film's troubled hero, Lew Ayres, and later introducing him to chorus girl Mae Clarke. Clarence Muse gets some of the best moments as the wise doorman, a rare opportunity to see a black character treated with respect, often smarter than the wealthy patrons and hard boiled gangsters and chorus girls.Then there are Boris Karloff and George Raft, co-stars in the same year's "Scarface", cast in the gangster parts, providing the crime element of the story. Future gossip legend Hedda Hooper is prevalent among the supporting cast as Ayres' husband killing mother This is a film students of the prohibition era should study, because it remains as fresh as it was 85 years ago. I'm surprise that this film didn't usher in the code era before 1932, although I'm glad they held out for a few more years.

The opening montage of this delirious slice of pre-Code life amounts virtually to a declaration of intent, as various New Yorkers hit the town in pursuit of sex, booze and violence. You can practically hear the scratch of pencils from the bluestockings in the audience whose increasingly persistent calls to put a stop to the depiction of just this sort of depravity would soon, alas, be calling the shots in Hollywood. In just 58 minutes, 'Night World' depicts illegal booze ("they can make it faster than you can drink it"), homosexuality (in the flouncing form of "MISTER Baby", played by a very young Byron Foulger before he grew his moustache) and adultery as facts of life; and comes dangerously close to condoning the latter in the scene in which Hedda Hopper appears as Lew Ayres' ghastly mother who shot his father for an improbably innocent dalliance with another woman. (It also takes a rather callously casual view of violent death when the bullets start seriously flying in the film's finale).A couple of previous reviewers have compared 'Night World' to a low rent 'Grand Hotel'; with Merritt Gerstad's extraordinarily mobile camera weaving it's way throughout the joint picking up one set of characters and then another rather as Robert Altman would later do. Presiding over 'Happy's Place' is a tall, lisping, English-accented proprietor called "Happy" MacDonald, played by - of all people - a third-billed and fascinatingly miscast Boris Karloff. The women all look magnificent - all that bobbed hair and bare shoulders! - and a sweet blonde Mae Clarke is permitted a sunnier characterisation than we are accustomed to seeing her get a chance to play. It's a blast to see her actually dancing in the lineup on the floor show (with appropriately lascivious choreography courtesy of Busby Berkeley himself)! The name of the prolific Hobart Henley often crops up in filmographies from the early thirties, but after 'Night World' he only directed one more film. On the strength of this I'd sure like to see some of his others.

Poor Mae Clark was in loads of films yet is most known for getting a grapefruit in the kisser from James Cagney in 'Public Enemy.' So it's nice to see her in a part with a few more brains. She is just part of an odd mixed-salad of a cast. Some, like Boris Karloff as an awkwardly gangly night-club owner, and Bert Roach as a silly drunk, seem to be in strange waters. Others, like Lew Ayers and George Raft, get roles typical of their young careers. Though she has only one scene in this very short film, Hedda Hopper steals the show as the world's worst mother.The only character to really warm to is The Doorman, Tim Washington (Clarence Muse). He is clearly in a horrible situation which those around pity at best and ignore at worst. So many African-American roles in the white films of the '30s are painful to watch, but Muse brings something special to this thankless part.Cinematographer Merritt Gerstad shows an inventive eye both in the opening montage and in scenes that would otherwise be nothing to look at. And of course, we get brief Busby Berkeley numbers, which would never really work in a night club, but allowances must be made for Hollywood.

"Happy" MacDonald (Boris Karloff) plays the owner of a night club and his wife "Mrs. Mac" (Dorothy Revier) works as a cashier at the same club. She has an affair with Klauss(Russell Hopton)the dance manager of the club's floor show. Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) is the club's leading dancer, and becomes friends with Michael Rand(Lew Ayres). A gangster tries to sell MacDonald bootleg liquor, but Karloff refuses. The bootlegger returns with a gunman who kills MacDonald(Karloff) and his wife,"Mrs. Mac". Karloff with his English accent does not sound like a gangster from New York and it was better he died quicky in this film along with his wife. This was a film with great actors and actresses and very poor writers and direction.