Some time back I picked up a box set of Basil Dearden movies from Criterion's Eclipse series in no small part because it had The League of Gentlemen on it. The one movie in the set that I hadn't done a post on before is All Night Long, so not too long ago I put that one in the DVD player and watched it to do a post on here.
Richard Attenborough plays Rod Hamilton, a wealthy man who is a lover of jazz music. He's met jazzman Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) and Rex's wife Delia (Marti Stevens) before. Now it's their first anniversary, so Rod rented out a warehouse in an industrial party to have an all night party/jazz session for the couple and many of their jazz-playing friends. It's something they can't do in the polite and posh part of London where Rod lives, because of the noise complaints it would engender. But it also shows just how rich Rod is, being able to rent such a warehouse and furnish it like this.
Among the guests are Rex's manager, Cass (Keith Michell), who has a bit of a drug problem, although amazingly enough the drug of choice isn't heroin; some famous real-life jazz musicians (more on that later); and drummer Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan) and his wife Emily (Betsy Blair).
Johnny has been hoping to step out on his own and start a combo. But there are a lot of combos out there, and he'd need something more than just a competent drummer, as promoter Berger tells him. But he's got a plan for that too: Delia is a singer. Or was, as she decided to retire when she got married to Rex. Johnny has been working on convincing Delia to come out of retirement, starting by her surprising Rex with a new arrangement of a song at the party.
Rex doesn't know anything about this, however, and he's not going to be particularly pleased when he starts finding out. If that weren't bad enough, Johnny has a particularly nasty way of getting Rex to find out. Johnny's plan it to make it seem as though Delia is being unfaithful with him, instead spending time with Cass. It is, of course, untrue, but it certainly gets Rex's temper up.
Supposedly, All Night Long is a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello, a play that I haven't actually seen first-hand, but only in adaptations like this or Ronald Colman's A Double Life. So I can't really say just how faithfully this follows Shakespeare. But I can say that the acting performances are quite good.
Equally good are the jazz performances. Fans of vintage jazz will probably highly enjoy seeing people like Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and some names I didn't recognize but jazz fans probably would such as John Dankworth. They not only do some very rudimentary acting, but also play various jazz pieces, which are by themselves worth the price of admission.
If there were one flaw, it was how Johnny was able to record everybody to make a fake conversation to try to convince Rex of his wife's unfaithfulness. If Rod had rented and furnished the place, why would the reel-to-reel recorder be there, and how would Johnny have gotten access to any tapes? It's not as if this were a real house where a musician might have had such a recorder.
But that's a minor plot hole. In any case, I'm thrilled that I bought this box set and got to watch (or in some cases re-watch) all four films in it.
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