A Striking 50's Club Scene

 This Could Be The Night (1957)  Pleases In B/W Scope

A picture that J.J. Hensecker would have enjoyed if J.J. Hunsecker had been a real person, and perhaps a last to depict New York on Damon Runyan terms. MGM even arranged to have Earl Wilson host a trailer, him a columnist who would certainly have frequented spots like where action happens here. He appears on-camera with chanteuse Julie Wilson and mentions that he hasn't seen her around town lately because she's been in Hollywood making this movie, such insider talk maybe a turn-off to rurals otherwise disposed to go see This Could Be The Night. It would probably have lost money anyway, this being 1957 when most of what MGM released lost money. For director Robert Wise, Night came between hit that was Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Until They Sail, a feature trio to argue Wise's reliability for polished product. Wise could take good material and reliably make it very good, like story-and-tempo minded filmmakers Jacques Tourneur, Rudolph Maté, others who await proper recognition. This Could Be The Night has prim schoolteacher Jean Simmons (hers the school also used in Blackboard Jungle) moonlighting as secretary for tough but tender nightclub owner Paul Douglas, he and partner Anthony Franciosa taking it upon selves to protect her from unsavory nightlife and types (including themselves). Idea of Simmons as a "greenhorn" (read virgin) is much emphasized, in that sense a reprise of The Moon Is Blue, but Simmons was by now twenty-eight, so notion of her as inexperienced is hard swallow indeed.

Past that, however, is sometimes bright comedy and music/dance of a sort we'd figure for uptown cabarets in final days of thrive. Trailer-bait Julie Wilson isn't remembered much, at least by me, but was a Manhattanrage and thrush with Ray Anthony's orchestra, latter also appearing in This Could Be The Night as himself. Dancing Neile Adams came close to Broadway brass rings, does striking numbers here, but chucked it to marry Steve McQueen, endure quietly his stardom and infidelities, her second career a memoir of their life together and non-stop reminiscence of McQueen for documentary profiles. Nibbling round edges is Joan Blondell, her character a long-ago headliner, whose apartment with daughter Adams is splayed with stills of Blondell at Warner Bros. peak. Of veterans aboard, ZaSu Pitts is in/out as concerned landlady for Simmons. Maltin Reviews called This Could Be The Night "forced ... frantic" --- opening up of intended B&W-Cinemascope relieves at least some of that, but there is lots of shouting and running about, a hazard when characters are drawn along Runyonesque lines. This Could Be The Night is available on DVD from Warner Archive.