It Came from Interlibrary Loan: All Through the Night (1941)

One things us old coots love about old coot movies is the tremendous roster of familiar character actors you had from the ’30s through, oh, the ’70s.  The heyday of these fellows was the age of the Studio System, when the studios had actors under contract.  Movies didn’t meander as much back in those days, and often casting was shorthand.  If Eugene Pallette made an appearance, you knew it was likely his character would be a grumpy, often beleaguered sourpuss.  Franklin Pangborn would be playing an officious, easily exasperated fellow, etc.

The studio systems died at the behest of the courts, but the character actor pool was kept alive for a while via TV shows, especially westerns and sitcoms that kept people like John Dehner and Jeff Corey and John McGiver, among a zillion others, busy.

The heyday of Hollywood was the character’s golden age, however.  You went to the movies to see the stars, but the texture of the film was generally provided by the character actors supporting them.  One of the greatest of the manifold pleasures provided by Turner Classic Movies is turning on your set, watching some flick you’ve never heard of, and seeing a parade of familiar faces file across your TV screen.

The other day I came across a flick called All Through the Night from 1941.  It follows a group of Runyon-esque neighborhood wiseguys who come across some real bad guys…Nazi infiltrators.  To be frank, it’s not a great film.  At and hour and 47 minutes it runs a bit long.  The attempts to make the hoods seem on the whole just regular, non-threatening joes results in comedy that’s a bit too broad, like you were watching the adventures of the older versions of the Bowery Boys.  I mean, we’re talking about a gang made up of guys named Gloves and Sunshine and Starchy and so on.

But, man, that cast.  They just kept on coming.  Big stars and then unknowns and bit players and beloved character actors.  Some you won’t know, probably, and there were undoubtedly folks I didn’t recognize that others would.  Even so, it was pretty amazing.

As I noted, you’re always going to build a cast like this around a star or two, and here we get one of the biggest.  Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jimmy Stewart!

But I kid.  Bogart that very year had finally really broken into heroic (not to mention romantic) leading man roles as Sam Spade in a little something called The Maltese Falcon.  The year after this he would star and Casablanca, and well, there you go.

Here Bogie plays Gloves Donahue, the sharp-dressed leader of a band of crooks.  He is clearly the inspiration for the gangster character played by Paul Sorvino in The Rocketeer, who when he finds he’s working for a Nazi, throws in with the hero.  In each case, the head Nazi tries to talk the hood into joining forces with him, sighting a mutual contempt for American law and order.  In each case, the crook sneers at the offer and affirms his bedrock love of country.  “I may not make an honest buck, but I’m 100% American,” Sorvino responds.

Oh, and in case you thought that Republican bashing was a recent Hollywood invention, Bogart here illustrates his patriotism by noting, “I’ve voted Democrat all my life.”

Before Bogie even makes his appearance, though, we get something amazing.  The first shot of the film proper is a bunch of toy soldiers on a table.  The camera pulls back and we get this group.  Now, I’m not even talking about the whole group, just the featured trio in the middle.

Here’s a closer view of the three as they continue to carry the scene.  Each went on to have very big careers in TV.   The guy on the left was the one movie veteran at this point, William Demarest.   Demarest had been working in film since the silent days of the mid-20s, and in the 1930s alone has about 40 listed movie credits on the IMDB.  He continued working steadily, generally playing grouchy mugs, but grabbed his most famous role as Fred McMurray’s Uncle Charley on TV’s My Three Sons.  Total IMDB credits:  138.

Next to Demarest is the then young comedian Phil Silvers.  Silvers too worked steadily in films, although not with the regularity of Demarest.  However, in 1955 he started playing the scheming Sgt. Bilko in the TV show The Phil Silvers Show, i.e, You’ll Never Get Rich.  The show was a smash hit, and Silvers was thrice nominated for an Emmy as its star, winning in 1957.  Although the program isn’t all that well remembered these days, it did inspired the cartoon show Top Cat, and Steve Martin starred in a typically lame Sgt. Bilko movie in 1996.  Silvers remained a very well-known, old school comic actor and continued to appear on the airwaves and movie screens, including inevitably 1963’s comedian convention It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  Total IMDB credits:  74.

And yep, that fat guy on the end is none other than Jackie Gleason.  This was either Gleason’s first or second film appearance, but of course it was on TV that he achieved immortality.  On 1952’s The Jackie Gleason Show he debuted a character named Ralph Kramden, who soon moved to his own sitcom The Honeymooners.  Except for perhaps I Love Lucy, it’s probably the greatest, most venerable sitcom ever.  Gleason continued to work through the ’80s, perhaps most notably was the oft-aggrieved Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit movies.  Total IMDB credits:  A paltry 51.

Less well known to modern audiences is Frank McHugh, but audiences of the time would have recognized him.  Generally playing comic relief skittish types, McHugh appeared in an astounding 83 films in the 1930s alone.  He even has some genre credits.  He played the nosy reporter hero in 1933’s horror flick Mystery of the Wax Museum, opposite Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill.  And he was the second banana sidekick in 1949’s Mighty Joe Young.  IMDB credits: 154.

Not long into things we meet this lady playing Glove’s extremely Irish mother.  This might be the only film where one of Bogart’s characters has a mom on display, and again was meant to signal the audience that Gloves might be slightly bent, but that he wasn’t really a bad guy.  In any case, Mrs. Donahue was played by Jane Darwell.  She unsurprisingly specialized in moms, and that same year played the salt of the earth mater in the fantasy classic All That Money Can Buy.  Moreover, she won an Oscar and screen immortality the year before this as Ma Joad, opposite Henry Fonda in John Ford’s seminal Grapes of Wrath.  All in all, she may have appeared in as many classics as anyone in the cast, short of Bogart himself.  IMDB credits: a whopping 201.

I sighed with pleasure when Peter Lorre showed up.  He’s got to be one of my top ten favorite actors of all time.  That guy had screen presence like nobody’s business, especially considering that he wasn’t exactly a leading man type.  (Although in real life it was he, and not Bogart, who ended up marrying the film’s lead actress, fellow German expatriate Kaaren

Verne.)  For the record, Lorre had appeared with Bogart in Maltese Falcon before this, and Casablanca after.  The two were good friends.  Sadly, though, Sidney Greenstreet did not join them in this one.  IMDB credits: 113.

In one scene a bit later Demarest calls two guys, both of them well known actors in their own right.  This one is Wallace Ford, played gangland shyster ‘Spats’ Hunter.  Ford would probably be most familiar to the elite readership of this website as ‘Babe’ Hanson, the comic sidekick in 1940’s The Mummy’s Hand, the film that introduced Kharis the Mummy. Ford reprised the part of a now elderly Babe in The Mummy’s Tomb, which was made two years later but set in the 1980s (!).  There Babe fatally learns that immortal menaces just don’t go away. He also was the lead actor in Tod Browning’s Freaks.

You can illustrate the lot of the character actor of the time by noting that Ford appeared, back to back, in the Karloff skid row cheapie The Ape Man and the class Hitchcock thriller Shadow of a Doubt.  On the whole, Ford had a great career, though.  IMDB credits: 160.

This is Barton MacLane.  MacLane had a zillion credits in the 1930s and was pretty well known by this time.  MacLane had also appeared in The Maltese Falcon as the thuggish bad cop who hassles Bogart’s private detective.  (His good cop partner was played by character actor Ward Bond, who by dint of being part of John Ford’s stock company had the distinction of appearing in more of the AFI’s 100 Best Films than any other actor.) He appeared with Bogart in a lot of films, including The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Like many of the actors here, Barton played a lot of cops and hoods, but he did appear in the occasional genre film, including Karloff’s The Walking Dead, the Spenser Tracy version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mummy’s Ghost, Nabonga, Cry of the Werewolf and the dinosaur flick Unknown Island.  IMDB credits: 177.

The great Edward Brophy, who made a career of playing crooks, often comic ones.  I’ll always remember him as the hood who threatens William Powell with a gun in The Thin Man, one of my all-time favorite movies.  (And, like The Maltese Falcon, adapted from a Dashiell Hammett novel.)  Triva:  Brophy played characters named Rollo in both Freaks and Peter Lorre’s fantabulous horror flick Mad Love.  IMDB credits: 143.

Ah, and here we get the main villain of the piece, the immortal Conrad Veidt.  Veidt had an amazing career, playing the first sympathetic monster, Cesare the Somnambulist in the earliest horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Veidt later played the model for the Batman villain The Joker in The Man Who Laughed.  He played Orlac in the German silent version of The Hands of Orlac, which his fellow countryman Lorre later remade as Mad Love (former Frankenstein Colin Clive played Orlac).  He played the heavy in one of the greatest fantasy films ever, The Thief of Bagdad.

The film is filled with actors who fled Hitler’s Germany, and like Lorre and Verne, probably saw the movie as a double win, a good role and a chance to ready the American public to confront Nazi Germany.  Many such actors played villainous Nazis for that reason alone, but Veidt seemed particularly passionate about it.  He, of course, played cinema’s greatest Nazi villain, Major Strasser, opposite Bogart again in Casablanca.  Sadly, Veidt died in 1943, just a few years after his appearance here.  Sadly, he didn’t live to see Hitler’s vile regime fall, but his unceasing work to oppose it makes him one of the most honorable actors ever.  IMDB credits: 119.

As if Veidt didn’t have enough support in henchman Lorre, his other sidekick is the far slinkier Judith Anderson, later Dame Judith Anderson.  An English stage veteran, she made a gigantic splash as sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca.  She was nominated for an Oscar for the role; it was only her second film, and she was typecast in sinister parts for a good long stretch.   She continued earning raves on stage and in such major films as Laura, And Then There Were None, The Ten Commandments, and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.  She eventually played the Vulcan high priestess who reunited  Spock’s consciousness with his body in Star Trek III.  IMDB credits: 45.

This guy, Dick Elliot, made a career out of bit parts in tons of movies.  And sure enough, he appears in this film for like twenty seconds and has no lines.  (Although as you can see, he hams it up to make the most of it.)  However, sometimes that sort of part is all you need to be remembered.  In Elliot’s case, it was as the guy on the porch who tells Jimmy Stewart to kiss the luminescent Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.  When Stewart hesitates, Elliot disgustedly exits with “Youth is wasted on the wrong people!”

It should be noted that such bit parts allowed Eliot to appear in a bazillion films.  He sports an astounding 353 film credits on the IMDB.  How is that possible?  Well, nearly every role he had in the 1930s was so small it was uncredited.

This is James Burke.  He, as indicated here, appeared in a ton of films and specialized in playing cops of various stripes, often comic ones.  IMDB credits: 216.

And finally, a young Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory.

But again, I kid.  This is actually the young Martin Kosleck, yet another actor who had fled Hitler’s Germany.  And sure enough, Kosleck went on to specialize in playing icy, ruthless villains, often Nazis and ex-Nazis, in a long roster of films and TV shows.  Readers of this site might remember him best as the mad scientist in The Flesh Eaters.  He also played the sculptor who manipulates the murderous Rondo Hatton in The House of Horrors.  Other genre films films appearances include The Mad Doctor, The Mummy’s Curse (lots of Mummy movie actors here), The Frozen Ghost and She-Wolf of London.  He eventually appeared in the spy drama and eventual MST3K subject, Agent for H.A.R.M.

Kosleck also guested on such TV shows as Suspense, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea, The Outer Limits (the real one), Get Smart, Batman, The Man from UNCLE, The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible and Night Gallery. among many others. IMDB credits:  88.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Wasn’t the line, “Youth is wasted on the young!”? I may be misremembering.

    But you’re right, a lot of fun from older movies is spotting familiar faces, even if the name isn’t so familiar. “Hey, it’s that guy! You know, what’s his name, who had the black cat in that other movie!”

    It’s just not the same in today’s films, since there really aren’t any character actors anymore. And people look kind of same-y, to be honest. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, “They had faces then.”

  • Dr. Whiggs

    Oh, come on, Ken. This was FDR’s heyday.

    And did you ever think that maybe is was a sly joke that a lifelong crook was also a lifelong Democrat? Huh? Huh?

  • BC: “Youth is wasted on the young” is a saying, but in this particular case, the line was “youth is wasted on the wrong people.” Believe me, I know my It’s a wonderful life.”

    Dr. Whigg, I do understand the context of the times, but c’mon. The whole idea of asserting your love of country (to a friggin’ Nazi, nonetheless) based on the idea that you vote for one party over the other is quite lame, I think…not to mention noxious. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a sly joke, moreover. It’s not that kind of movie; this one wears its heart on its sleeve.

    Also, maybe you’re making too big of a deal by responding to my offhand mention of the line. And then you can say I’m making too big a deal of it by so responding to your note. And then…well, that way madness lies. Madness, I tells ya.

  • There was a TV show called, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Street”?

    An entire show set in a sewer or storm drain, perhaps?

  • Corrected, HR. Thanks.

  • Seems like this should be a Nugget! I’ve seen this film in any case.

    And even in FDR’s heyday there were still Republicans. In the halls of congress, even.

    My Father in Law fought in World War II and is right wing even by my standards. A topical joke from his era:

    An army cook on Guadalcanal was pining because he was always behind the lines, and never got to shoot a Jap. He whined to his sarge, and sarge sent him out with a rifle to pot one. Sadly, the Japs stayed hidden in holes and behind trees and he couldn’t get one. When he complained to Sarge, Sarge said, “Well, when you get out there, just yell ‘To Hell with Hirohito!’ and one will pop out, furious, and you can shoot him.”

    The cook went out and came back, disappointed again. Sarge asked him, “Didn’t you do what I said?”

    “Yeah, I yelled ‘to Hell with Hirohito’ and one jumped out and yelled ‘to Hell with Roosevelt’!”

    Asked Sarge. “Why didn’t you open fire?”

    “Well, I couldn’t shoot a fellow Republican.”

    Though on reflection perhaps this story supports the theory of disloyal Republicans. I thought it was funny nonethelss.

  • KeithB

    C’mon, Democrats took some zingers, too:
    http://www.snopes.com/politics/humor/zombies.asp

  • Congrats on digging that one up, Keith. Who’da thought? Note, though, that such a thing was so rare that Snopes was called upon to confirm it.

    Again, though, I write this whole piece about these great character actors and everyone fixates on on throwaway line?

  • Rock Baker

    I think I’d read the ‘life-long Democrat’ line as an attempt to show patriotism, since FDR had been in office so long that he’d become the face of American democracy (if ironically so). Far more chuckle-making is the line in Yankee Doodle Dandy about ‘a Republican newspaper.’
    At any rate, I’v got to see this film!
    Silvers, and his Bilko character, also inspired the Hokey Wolf cartoons. Plus, it seems Hanna-Barbara fit a Bilko-like character into at least one episode of every series it did.

  • KeithB

    OK, then, I sighed when I saw your image of Peter Lorre, and *then* I read your commentary. 8^) That guy was amazing, a career that spanned “M” and “Arsenic and Old Lace”. While you could argue that he was playing to type in AAOL, he had great timing. And I think his eyes bug out less than Cary Grant’s, even though Peter’s actually bug out! (If you know what I mean.)

  • Reed

    One of the greatest classic movie pleasures for me in the past year or so was finally seeing all of the Mr. Moto films that Lorre did in the 30’s. I loved them, and thought that Lorre did a wonderful job as Moto even if he was, quite possibly, even less Japanese than I am.

    For those of you that have not met me at T-Fest (or can’t remember me), I am not Japanese.

  • Lorre really could wear a tux, too. He seemed quite at home at it when he appeared in one here.

    And yes, Grant mugged like nobody’s business in Arsenic…and it was great!

  • The weirdest was the Mr. Moto that was meant to be a Charlie Chan movie, but whichever Chan actor was current then got sick. So they made it a Mr. Moto movie, even though Chan’s son is still a supporting character in the film!

    You might want to check out Lloyd Nolan’s Michael Shayne movies too. They’re pretty fun.

  • GalaxyJane

    Frank McHugh as the heroic reporter of “Mystery in the Wax Museum”? Um, hello, forget about a little lady named Glenda Farrell? She just about carries that whole darn film as Fay Wray’s motormouthed reporter roommate. McHugh’s just her boss, he never once leaves his office over the course of the film and exists just to give Farrell a foil (and a highly-improbable marriage proposal).

  • Jane, please…Glenda Farrell is a girl. *

    [*Not part of a wily scheme to get Jane to show up at T-Fest, if only to kick my ass.]

  • GalaxyJane

    Damn right she’s a girl. My absolute favorite pre-Code girl! The only reason I own the comparatively tepid “House of Wax” is because “Mystery in the Wax Museum” is a special feature on the disc.

    I’ll consider deferring the ass-kicking in exchange for a heads-up next time TCM runs a Torchy Blane marathon.

    I’m trying to decide whether it would be endearing or simply embarrassingly pathetic to admit I once based a GURPS character directly on the incomparable Ms. Farrell.

  • Farrell’s co-star in the Torchy series was Barton MacLane…one of the actors I featured in this article. Ha-zah!

  • No Farrell marathons are currently scheduled (they did have one earlier, though), but she did co-star in Talk of the Town, which is playing on TCM on April 26th.

  • Reed

    You old movie fu is greater than mine. Although I do know that the Chan in question was Warner Oland. I also loved Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan films, whereas I find Sydney Toler to be creepy and disturbing.

    School me on Michael Shane; I’ve never even heard of that character. Are they adventures? Mysteries? Home movies?

  • They are very light-hearted detective films with Shayne being sort of a genially wise ass, slightly bent private dick. There was a set of half the movies (done by the same folks that did the Moto sets, so they have nice little documentaries with them), and separately one of the other films, Dressed to Kill, on DVD. They are very fun, and what I found interesting about the set is that all four movies have different tones, as if they were dabbling to stick Shayne into different sorts of movies, including one that’s almost an Old Dark House horror movie. Good stuff.

    I wish somebody would put the Boston Blackie movies out on DVD, too.

  • KeithB

    So these Shayne movies are like what Stross does with the Laundry books? While he uses the same characters, the tone of the books satirizes a different genre?

  • KeithB

    Kind of OT, but is there a good DVD version of the Thin Man series out there?

  • Yep, there’s The Thin Man Collection, which boasts all six films, and a pair of documentaries on, respectively, Powell and Loy. Amazon has the best price (factoring in shipping and tax) at $40 if you’re looking to buy, rather than rent. If you are, let me know and I’ll put a link to the set up.

    Speaking of character actors, the second film features a VERY young Jimmy Stewart prominently in the supporting cast.

  • KeithB

    A link would be great, thanks!

  • Thank *you*! Link added as more recent blog post.

  • sandra

    Too bad The Phil Silvers Show is forgotten, because it was hilarious. The episode in which a chimpanzee is accidentally inducted into the US Army is rivalled only by the ‘hashish brownie’ episode of Barney Miller as Funniest Thing On TV Ever !

  • I like reading these reviews, but man…for people who hate whiny victim politics, right-wingers sure like whining about how they’re victims.

  • One man’s observation is another man’s whine, Arguably Whiny Man from “apolitical” info news. Still, I can see that the like one line in this review annoyed you as much as the one line in the movie did me. And then we both mentioned it. Wheeeee!

  • Damian Keenan

    Nearly everyone I know says “the great Edward Brophy” when referring to this fantastic character actor, who never failed to raise a smile when he appeared on-screen. You mention his 143 IMDb acting credits (now 144) but don’t forget that Brophy started his movie career BEHIND the camera as an assistant director, and then as a highly regarded production manager for MGM, as well directing a number of foreign language versions of studio pictures. IMDb list 17 credits for him in this capacity but it’s generally accepted that it’s a substantially higher figure than this. Also, like a lot of the character actors listed here, he did an incredible amount of radio over his career.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yes, radio was the television of that time, allowing actors to keep busy.

    Thanks for all the additional info!

  • Damian Keenan

    My pleasure.

  • Alben

    “All Through the Night”…One of my great guilty pleasures. The quintessential Warner Brothers Stock Company movie.