“The Big Night” (1951) is the last movie that Wisconsin-born Joseph Losey directed before avoiding being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a dozen years before the first collaboration with writer Harold Pinter (The Servant, 1963). Both in Hollywood and then in London, Losey mostly directed noirs with some flourishes that some recorded as pretentious, others as cinema.
The pulp novel on which it was based was Dreadful Cummit by Stanley Ellin. Its protagonist was an awkward teenager, George La Main, played awkwardly by the actor then billed as John Barrymore Jr., and later as John Drew Barrymore (son of “The Great Profile,” father of Drew). In Losey on Losey the director recalls the actor as difficult but enormously talented. I can’t say that I see much evidence of talent either in “The Big Night” or in Fritz Lang’s “While the City Sleeps” (1956) in which Barrymore played “the Lipstick Killer.” Barrymore had one advantage over the James Dean of “Rebel without a Cause” four years later: Barrymore was a teenager (18) playing a teenager, whereas Dean was 24 in “Rebel.” This was more than made up for by Dean engaging audience sympathy. I find Barrymore about as sympathetic as another son of a famous father, Karlheniz Boehm in Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” (1960).
The role is not as psychotic, but George La Main is armed and dangerous, after being beaten by peers in the movie’s first scene and then watching his father take a beating without any resistance from a sportswriter, Al Judge (Howard St. John) in his father, Andy’s (Preston Foster) tavern. In between these two beatings, George blows out the candles on his birthday cake (17, I think). He was supposed to go with his father to a boxing match that night, but his father is recovering from the beating and George is fleeced out of the ticket that he scalps.
The rest of the night he spends trying to find Le Main. Along the way he appreciates the performance of a black nightclub singer and then insults her meaning to compliment her. The confrontation with the crippled sportswriter (who used his cane to beat George’s Pops) is the second-best scene in the movie (after the flubbed compliment) and there is also the interest of about-to-be-blacklisted actress Dorothy Comingore (best-known as the wife of Orson Welles’s Kane).
Losey had the services of two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Hal Mohr for some arty shots (notably a double exposure of birthday cake candles and table lights in the nightclub and through the curtains shots back home above the tavern). (Mohr would shoot a better-remembered young rebel movie “The Wild One” in 1953, and among many other movies the swashbuckler “Captain Blood” in 1935 and both of Marlene Dietrch’s westerns: “Destry Rides Again” (1939) and “Rancho Notorious” (1952))
Barrymore prefigured some of the confusion of 1950s teenagers of “Rebel without a Cause,” in particular the puzzlement at the seeming passivity/subservience of the teenager’s father (failed role model). There were no parts or characters for the likes of Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo in “The Big Night”: George appears friendless.
BTW, Losey recollected that he fled the US before editing began and that his intention was for most of the movie to be a flashback. I think that showing events in order, the way Edward Mann (The Blue Gardenia, Birdman of Alcatraz) did is better and spared a voiceover, a recurrent feature in noirs.