All Night Long (1962)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched All Night Long a version of Othello set in the London jazz world of 1962.

Johnny Cousins (Patrick McGoohan) is a drummer in Aurelius Rex’s (Paul Harris) band. He longs to break off and form his own group, but there’s no chance unless he can coax former lead singer Delia out from retirement; since Delia married Rex, she stopped singing. Rex was jealous of her in the spotlight and would only marry her on condition she give up her career, which she was glad to do – only she does miss the spotlight, and the excitement of singing.

On the night of Rex and Delia’s first wedding anniversary, rich jazz fan Rod Hamilton (Richard Attenborough) arranges an after-hours party for the couple, and invites all the great jazz players in London at the time. In a neat little twist, and one of the main reasons why anybody would want to watch the movie today, these supporting roles are played by real muscicians like Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, John Dankworth, and others; several jam sessions are used as entr’actes between the dramatic scenes as the party goes on … ‘All Night Long.’ (‘All Night Long’ is also Delia’s signature song, which she sings at one point.)

Johnny proceeds to lie, manipulate, steal, and connive to break up Rex and Delia and get Delia to agree to sing with his band he’ll form – because as booking agent Lou tells him, ‘I got too many bands, but if you can get Delia to un-retire, then you’ve got something.’

The producer also takes credit for production design, and the principal set is the warehouse place in which Hamilton stages the party, with balconies, stage area, circular staircase, rooftop, private office. The film is shot B&W and 1.66:1, though the version I saw was reformatted to fit 1.33:1 TV aspect ratio. I never got a sense I was missing anything in the compositions though, they seemed pretty effective and I didn’t catch any elements crowded off the sides of the frame.

In a departure from the play, Rex pulls back from strangling Delia, and she forgives him. Johnny is revealed as the lying sneak he is, Rex and Delia walk off into the dawn, so we can hope they patch things up. Meanwhile Johnny in a scene that isn’t in the play tells his own wife to go home and leave him ‘like all the rest of them.’ ‘But I love you,’ she says, and he answers, ‘You love me, he loves her, everybody loves everybody … except me. I don’t love anybody. Nobody – not even me!’ The last we see of him he is alone on the stage area, drumming wildly, madly, in total frustration and hatred.

Changing the ending is OK with me since Othello itself is more Iago’s tragedy than Othello’s. All Night Long pretty much pushes any racial concerns aside; at a couple of points in the movie I though they didn’t even need to cast a black man as Rex. Othello works as the Moor’s tragedy only insofar as he is driven to killing his wife, and ends an outcast, because he is black, and the Venetians cannot accept him, have never been able to accept him, as an equal. This movie leaves all that out; there seems no trace of racism anywhere; that leaves only Johnny as the guy who schemes and maneuvers and loses everything when he is at last found out.

McGoohan is the reason I wanted to see it; I’ve been a fan of his work since his TV show Danger Man and later on his masterpiece, The Prisoner. Here he plays a total, weak, sly bastard, smoking pot, trying to push pot on others to ruin their careers … he has no redeeming features in fact. There is no greatness in his character to feel pity for him at the end; he gets what he deserves, he was only a mediocre and envious musician who thought he was better than he was. McGoohan does struggle with the accent a bit – he calls himself a ‘white American jazz musician’ and I don’t know if he is trying for an American accent here, or just trying to cover up whatever vestiges of Irish accent he may have had.

(6 April 2009)