The Big Night

Plot synopsis:
On the New Jersey Shore in the 1950s, two Italian immigrant brothers from Abruzzo own and operate a restaurant called "Paradise." One brother, Primo, is a brilliant, perfectionist chef who chafes under their few customers' expectations of "Americanized" Italian food. Their uncle's offer for them to return to Rome to help with his restaurant is growing in appeal to Primo. The younger brother, Secondo, is the restaurant manager, a man enamored of the possibilities presented by their new endeavor and life in America. Despite Secondo's efforts and Primo's magnificent food, their restaurant is failing.
Secondo's struggles as a businessman render him unable to commit to his girlfriend Phyllis, and he has recently been sleeping with Gabriella, the wife of a competitor. Her husband's eponymous restaurant, "Pascal's", has succeeded despite (or perhaps due to) the mediocre, uninspired food served there. Desperate to keep Paradise afloat, Secondo asks Pascal for a loan. Pascal demurs, repeating a past offer for the brothers to work for him. This Secondo refuses to do; he and his brother want their own restaurant. In a seemingly generous gesture, Pascal insists that he will persuade popular Italian-American singer Louis Prima to dine at Paradise when in town, assuming the celebrity jazz singer's patronage will revitalize the brothers' business. Primo and Secondo plunge themselves into preparation for this "big night", spending their entire savings on food and inviting people (including a newspaper reporter) to join them in a magnificent feast centered around a timpano, a complicated baked pasta dish. Primo pours his heart into every dish, lavishing care and great expertise on the cooking.
As they wait for Prima and his entourage to arrive, the diners indulge in the exquisite food and partake in a fabulous celebration. Hours pass, however, and it becomes apparent that the famous singer is not coming. Phyllis catches Secondo and Gabriella kissing and runs off to the beach. At Gabriella's insistence, Pascal admits that he never called Louis Prima, thus ending the party.
Secondo follows Phyllis to the beach where they have a final quarrel. Primo and Secondo have a fiery, heart-wrenching argument, chafing at their mutual differences. In the wee hours of the morning, Pascal admits to Secondo that he set the brothers up for failure; not as revenge for Secondo's affair with Gabriella but because the brothers would have no choice but to return to Italy or work for Pascal. Secondo denies him, saying they will never work for him.
As dawn breaks, Secondo silently cooks an omelette. When done, he divides it among three plates, giving one to Cristiano, their waiter, and eating one himself. Primo hesitantly enters, and Secondo hands him the last plate. They eat without speaking, and lay their arms across one another's shoulders.

Tags: revenge

Review:
A teenager on the verge of becoming a man watches his father get beaten to a pulp by a gangster.
This leads to the teen going on a short odyssey for vengeance, where he discovers some ugly things about himself and his father.This is a short b-movie without much story, concentrating on the passionate lives of hard folks living in a 1950s cityscape.
The teen is enraged, but he's also idealistic; in a night club he hears a woman belting out a torch song and is entranced; later when he gets to meet her, the teen tells her how beautiful he thinks she is, even if she is, you know, a black woman.
The look of pain on the singer's face rips the heart out of the white teen, who for all his idealism still can't get over the fact that the singer is Negro, and he was transported by her.This film has one of the great film noir lines ever.
The father, a broken man who lost his wife when she ran out on him with another man, and who had chances to marry again but remained in love with that betrayer, tells his son, "Some men are like that.
Sometimes a man loves one woman in the whole world.
If she turns out to be the wrong one...well, it's just tough." That's the sense of this film: haunting loss that comes back and smacks you down, day after day.
Strong stuff..
A Little Deeper Look at an Oddly Affecting Noir.
Uneven film that at times seems to drift.
Still, there are genuinely compelling moments, as when burly dad LeMaine (Foster, in a fine performance) meekly submits to a brutal cane lashing that had me cringing.
Why he's submitting remains a puzzle until the end.
Because of the beating, Dad's insecure son George (Barrymore Jr.) spends the movie's remainder trying to avenge his father.Beneath the revenge narrative, however, is really a rite-of-passage story.
For example, in a not very believable opening, a cringing George is pounded in humiliating fashion by his teenage peers.
We're given no explanation, nor does actor Barrymore physically resemble an easy mark.
It's not a promising beginning.
Then, in a much more persuasive scene, Dad casts a slightly disapproving eye over his nervous son's birthday cake (symbolic of the story).
So the kid must prove himself not only to Dad, but to himself.It's not a tight screenplay.
Events more or less simply follow one another, tied together by the theme of vengeance.
Happily, however, the narrative doesn't drag.
Actor Barrymore Jr. had a rather brief career despite the pedigree.
One thing for sure, he's certainly different looking.
With a mop of unruly hair and slightly crooked mouth, he's no glamor boy.
Nonetheless, his looks are perfect for the role, such that, when he dons a sport coat and hat, he still looks like a kid trying to take a big step up.
All in all, the young actor does pretty well in the kind of difficult role that would later go to James Dean.
I also like a de-glamorized Joan Lorring, who's a good match for him.
My one real complaint is the way Al Judge (St. John) is written.
His behavior is so crude and ugly, it's hard thinking of him as a respected sports writer.
A racketeer would have been more credible and easier, so the scriptwriters must have had a reason.Then too, the screenwriters, Butler and Lardner Jr., along with director Losey, were all blacklisted during Hollywood's commie hunting period.
I suspect it was their leftist leanings that are responsible for one of the film's most arresting sequences.
George goes to a nightclub where a drop-dead beautiful black songstress (Mauri Lynn) entertains.
Afterward, he encounters her outside and is compelled to compliment her looks and talent.
She glows at the flattering remark.
Trouble is his heartfelt momentum carries over to the unspoken qualification "for a Negro woman".
She grasps the unfortunate hanging-in-the-air racial reference, and is reminded of her not-fully-equal status.
Thus, disappointment clouds her former glow.
It's a beautifully played moment and quite powerful in emotional impact.
I wonder what happened to that fine actress.Anyway, the movie does have a number of effective noir touches, especially George's twilight escape through LA's towering industrial district.
It's a mysterious world so much larger than himself.
All in all, the film is oddly memorable, thanks, I think, to Barrymore's unusual presence.
I know I sought it out on DVD, lo, so many years after having first seen it in a theatre.
(In passing—the burly guy sitting next to Barrymore and Bourneuf ringside at the fights is Robert Aldrich, the great director of such classics as Kiss Me Deadly {1955} and Attack {1956}.).
THE BIG NIGHT (Joseph Losey, 1951) **1/2.
From Losey's American feature films (a period which barely lasted four years, when he fell victim to political persecution) I had only previously watched his eccentric debut, THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948).
The same year he made THE BIG NIGHT, a low-budget noir, he directed two other thrillers - THE PROWLER, Losey's own favorite from this early phase of his career and M, an Americanization of Fritz Lang's German masterpiece.
Both these films promise to be a good deal more interesting than the ones I watched, and I hope I get the chance to view them someday...Anyway, back to THE BIG NIGHT: in itself, it wasn't too bad but it didn't feel at all like a Losey film; perhaps that's because I'm not used to watching him dealing with an American setting - but it's still a minor film, not quite knowing where it's going and not even that compelling while it's on.
The noir-ish atmosphere (courtesy of cinematographer Hal Mohr), however, is quite interestingly deployed - sometimes with an audacious psychological resonance, as in the nightclub scene where a riotous drum solo brings back to lead John Barrymore Jr.
(looking more like Sean Penn than his matinée' idol father!) memories of his father's vicious beating at the hands of a crippled but influential sports columnist (an effectively sinister Howard St. John); the latter episode is actually a key scene, which sets the plot in motion and sends Barrymore - who witnessed father Preston Foster's humiliation and whom he idolized - seething with revenge in search of St. John.The characters are largely stereotypes - caring bartender (Foster owns a bar), philosophical drunk pal, his bitter girlfriend (a rather spent Dorothy Comingore, who 10 years earlier had played Susan Alexander in CITIZEN KANE [1941]!), her good-girl sister who falls for and yearns to 'save' Barrymore, shady promoter Emil Meyer (a dry run for his memorable turn as a crooked cop in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS [1957]), etc.
- but the last act provides a couple of ironic twists involving the characters of Foster, St. John and the tragic fate of a woman they both loved in their own way..
John Barrymore, Jr., memorable in coming-of-age noir.
Joseph Losey's The Big Night is a film noir that's also, like Moonrise and Talk About A Stranger, a coming-of-age story.
The young male undergoing his transformational journey is John Barrymore, Jr., son of the Great Profile and father of Drew.
His film career was not high-profile, as he inherited the family disposition toward chemical dependency (blood will tell).
But here, boasting a luxuriantly healthy crown of hair, he gives a surprisingly intense yet controlled performance.
His big night happens to be his 16th or 17th birthday, when his barkeep father is brutally beaten and publicly humiliated by a local sportswriter (Losey's staging is unflinching).
Frustrations about his own Hamlet-like ditherings and confusions impel him to seek revenge on his father's behalf, and, gun in pocket, he sets out into a nightscape of prize fights, gin mills and the walk-up flats of casually met strangers.
While Losey's sympathies lie with Barrymore, it's always clear that the emergent man is still a callow stripling, incapable of apprehending the complex reality he crashes into, like a fatted calf in a china shop.
Though the director refrains from pushing the conclusion to where it might logically go -- he retreats into sentimentality and sententiousness -- The Big Night still scores as a provocative, moodily shot film..
The Wrong Woman.
The Wrong Woman.
The story here is revenge, more real-life based, a 1950's version of the crime of passion.
A teenager's good-hearted father is beaten to a pulp by a gangster, so the kid invades the streets to get some payback.
The father's not worried about the floor-wiping, which leads to a mystery behind the teen's mother, who skipped out on the family long ago, and a woman the father knows who has committed suicide.Seeing this film, there's not much in terms of plot, but there are some notable scenes, particularly when the kid hears a beautiful night-club singer, becomes entranced, gets a chance to meet her on the street, and tells her how beautiful she is.
Even though she's, you know,black.
The pain in the singer's face rends the poor kid, who was transported by her voice, but can't get beyond her skin color.This film also has one of THE great lines ever in any film noir or any movie period, at least concerning the tragedy between a man and a woman, when there is love involved.
There are no words more powerful or poignant, especially for a man who loves a woman beyond reason, who knows he has lost the love of his life.
Unable to move on, to love or marry another woman after that one woman has destroyed him, and in fact still very much in love with his destroyer,Preston Foster tells his son, "Sometimes a man loves one woman in the whole world.
If she turns out to be the wrong one, well...that's just tough." Truly, the heart of noir is not blackness, but the white-hot scars of passion..
Too stage bound!.
As someone who knew John Barrymore Jr. 25 years ago, I was heartbroken to see him early in his aborted film career.
Though not as charismatic as James Dean would be just a couple of years later, he was certainly Dean's prototype in The Big Night.
Perhaps with a better film and a less disturbed personality, Barrymore might have been a working Hollywood actor for many years to come.
Anyway, what director Joseph Losey lacked here was the Los Angeles cityscape he used to full effect that same year in his retelling of Fritz Lang's M.
The Big Night was screaming for a location project on downtown L.A.'s seedy, beaten down Bunker Hill, a neighborhood of crumbling Victorian mansions and apartment buildings with vertiginous stairways that provided so much atmosphere to other films, such as Kiss Me Deadly, Criss-Cross, The Exiles and, yes, M.
Instead, the movie is stage bound and hemmed in by sets that never look convincing.
With its rambling "a night in the life" plot line, The Big Night needed another character: a dark city of real streets, background lights, rambling old house, and dingy clubs and bars.
In other words, the kind of verisimilitude that transports the viewer into the protagonist's world.
The back lot, unfortunately, was a poor stand-in..
Vivid and dark and despairing...with that spark of survival throughout.
The Big Night (1951)Wow, the dark scenes and the dark mood of this movie are gripping stuff.
Even the ever-struggling Barrymore in the lead role--Drew's dad, John Drew Barrymore--is edgy and tough enough to carry it through some very intense emotional stuff.
Ultimately the movie is about redemption, but it is mostly an exploration of nihilism--a kind of self-defeating despair that was probably in the air for many in post-war America.The plot is pure Hitchcock--a murder takes place at the wrong time for the wrong reason.
The difference is that the focus here isn't on the innocent man accused (there is one of those, and we don't sympathize with him) but on the guilty man unaccused.
And so there is a psychological thread as we see his decline, and the pressure around him build.
Other layers to the plot include his mother dying, and an overall desperation to survive in the most basic ways, paying the rent and eating.
Don't expect to be cheered up on this one.
But do expect to be deeply embroiled.
If it lacks the depth and drama of, say, "On the Waterfront" or some other movie set in the New York area around the same time, it makes up for it at least partially in gritty realism.
This is small time stuff without the gloss and hype.
But with director Joseph Losey's famous use of photography (brilliant, by Hal Mohr) and ambiance (the art director went on to do a lot of classic "Gunsmoke" episodes).
A great one for what works best here..
The night has its secrets.
***SPOILERS**** At a coming of age 17th birthday party at a neighborhood bar young George La Main, Drew Barrymore, is shocked to see his father Andrew, Preston Forster, meekly allow himself to be whipped black and blue in front all the shocked costumers by crippled sportswriter Al Judge, Howard St. John, without as much as raising a finger in his defense.
Seeking revenge against Judge for what he did to his father George gets a .38 revolver from his room and goes out into the night looking for him and planning to blow Judge away in an act of revenge.This all has George later find Judge in his pad writing a story about a fight that he and George witnessed at the garden arena who seems not at all surprised to see him even with a gun pointed at his head.
It's then that Judge gives George the lowdown to why he so brutally beat his father and why he being far bigger and much stronger the the crippled and old Judge that he took the beating almost willingly!
Soon a fight erupts between George and Judge with Judge enduing up on the floor from a bullet wound with George fleeing from the oncoming, who were alerted by the neighbors, police!***SPOILERS***Back home with his dad and waiting to be arrested for the murder of Mr. Judge George finds out that his dad is taking the rap for what he just did.
It also turns out that despite George being more then willing to take the blame for shooting Judge everything is soon to turn out to be find with Judge alive and well suffering only powder burns and Judge willing to drop all charges against George or his dad who's taking the rap for him.
We and George then learn from his dad that he more then deserved what he got from Judge by driving his sister to suicide by refusing to marry her.
We also find out that George's dad is still married to his wife whom he told his son has died soon after he was born!
Which is the reason he couldn't marry Judge's sister that drove her to kill herself!
So as we and George found out his dad really got off light in what he did and even in taking responsibility for shooting Judge, who dropped all the charges against him, it was his actions that lead his son George to try to blast Judge!
Who as it turned out was the real injured party in this strange and baffling case.