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| Philip Bourneuf, Dorothy Comingore, and John Drew Barrymore in The Big Night |
Cast: John Drew Barrymore, Preston Foster, Joan Lorring, Howard St. John, Dorothy Comingore, Philip Bourneuf, Howland Chamberlain, Myron Healey, Emile Meyer, Mauri Leighton. Screenplay: Joseph Losey, Stanley Ellin, based on a novel by Ellin. Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Art direction: Nicolai Remisoff. Film editing: Edward Mann. Music: Lyn Murray.
An odd little noir, Joseph Losey's The Big Night begins with an exposition full of enigmas. We learn that it's George La Main's (John Drew Barrymore) 17th birthday, and that his father, Andy (Preston Foster), who owns a small bar, has bought them tickets to a prize fight. We see George reading a newspaper column by Al Judge (Howard St. John). But when he asks his father if Frances (or perhaps Francis -- the spelling in the closed caption reinforces the ambiguity) is going with them, the answer is evasive. And then, just as his father brings out a birthday cake and George blows out all of the candles but one, none other than Al Judge enters the bar and orders George's father to take off his shirt. "Show me some skin!" he commands, insisting that Andy remove his undershirt as well. Then he beats the submissive, prostrate Andy with his cane. Movies of the era didn't get much more homoerotically sadomasochistic than this, and there's more rather kinky stuff to come. The rest of this strange film takes its short time (75 minutes) to inform George (and us) what's really going on. In its day, reviewers mostly dismissed The Big Night as a routine melodrama. Now we know that Losey was about to go onto the blacklist and into exile (along with a couple of the movie's uncredited screenwriters, Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner Jr.), so it's tempting to interpret it as a fable about American postwar paranoia, homophobia, and even, in one remarkable scene, racism. Time does curious things to art.
