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Excellent but underrated film

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This film stars mostly second and third-tier actors from Warner Brothers. Familiar actors like Jack Carson, Priscilla Lane, Lloyd Nolan and Wallace Ford are here, but there is also a starring role by the relatively unknown Richard Whorf as well as a supporting role by Elia Kazan--before he made a REAL name for himself as a director. And while none of these folks are huge stars, they do a fine job and the film has the usual high quality and polish you'd expect from the studio.This film is sort of like a fairy tale about a group of musicians who love Blues, though it's NOT exactly the same style you'd find in Black America--it's more like a big-band/Hollywood idea of the Blues! It's filled with various clichés (such as the BAD girl who might break up the band) but because it's made so well and the music quite enjoyable, it's still worth seeing. Just be sure you aren't looking for THE Blues! Not great but for old movie fans (like myself), it's worth seeing.

The final minute is what I would have expected from the entire film: dark, slow, some blues music, and moody. Regrettably, that last minute is an aberration in a script wherein the intended blues theme is overwhelmed by way too much dialogue. And the story lacks focus.A troupe of blues musicians never quite gets around to playing much blues music. Instead, lots of contrived situations keep the film plot bound, with assorted conflicts swirling around the various characters. Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf) is a piano player and the troupe leader, with lots of problems. But as soon as the angry, brittle Kay (Betty Field) appears, about a third of the way through the film, the story's emphasis seems to switch to her. Kay is nothing if not embittered, and she hisses her way through the remainder of the film, as she crosses paths with Jigger.All that angry talk drains away a blues atmosphere, which could have made the film sultry and moody.Casting and acting are acceptable. But characters talk ninety miles an hour. It's as if the director is timing actors' lines of dialogue with a stopwatch. The music is generally disappointing. One of the production numbers in the second half, "Says Who? Says You, Says I" is just awful.The B&W cinematography is okay, but there are too many dissolves. And a montage that details a psychiatric problem is so visually juvenile that it looks like something from a high school drama class experiment.Production design is drab, bleak, and cheap looking. But at least it gives what is probably a fairly accurate representation of film sets used during the Great Depression.Overall, "Blues In The Night" is disappointing, mostly because of a script that is too talky and so rigidly plot bound that the intended musical blues theme gets smothered.

This movie was a bit unusual because it starts off strictly like a musical the first 20 minutes. It had me puzzled; I didn't think I had rented a musical. Well, it wasn't, as it turned out, even though music was a central element in the story. The rest of the film was a combination of drama, film noir and melodrama. At least that's the way I saw it and, yeah, I was glad to see IMDb confirm my description when I got to the title page here to post the review.The only time the movie bogged down was when it became a little too melodramatic in a few spots. Betty Field ("Kay" )was usually in those scenes, playing a woman with a chip on her shoulder. As I watched her, I thought, "Wow, this woman is tailor-made for film noirs. She could have been another Marie Windsor." Sadly, she wasn't, but she was in a good number of movie and television shows. Still, I think noir would have been the best vehicle for her.Priscilla Lane plays the female opposite: the wholesome-looking good gal ("Character") who just wants the band to click and for everybody to be happy. Heck, that's what the band in general wants, but "Jigger" is the guy who keeps putting a monkey-wrench into the deal and seems to be the band member whom everyone looks to for leadership.Richard Worf plays "Jigger," and he's so-so as an actor. The fact he never made it big is understandable. There's a smoothness to his delivery that's missing. His changed his career from acting to directing in 1945 and did better at that. Obviously the same can be said for another member of the band in this story: "Nickie," played by Elia Kazan, who classic film fans know as a very famous director.When all is said-and-done, actors Lane and Lloyd Nolan ("Del") seemed to be the most "real" in this film, and those two were the ones who had the best careers of this cast, particularly Nolan. Jack Carson and Howard da Silva are also in this movie and they're "known" actors, too.My favorite part of the movie was a very short scene with about 15 minutes left with "Jigger" was in the hospital and he was hallucinating. The innovative camera-work was terrific, right out of Dali painting. Kudos to director Anatole Litvak for some good closeup shots and interesting camera angles and use of light, in that scene and others in the film. This movie is very well photographed. Ernie Haller was the cinematographer. Haller's resume includes some very famous films.The odd mix of genres makes this intriguing movie I'm glad I checked out, and I recommended to fellow classic film fans.

Everybody's heard of this movie because of the famous title song, but almost nobody's ever seen it. It defies genre classification -- both a musical drama and a sort of missing link between the Warners gangster movies of the 1930s (mugs, molls, and rat-a-tat dialogue) and 1940s film noir (femme fatale, dark shadows, smoky atmosphere, seamy underside of life). It's a genuine one-of-a-kind movie that deserves to be much better remembered than it is.However, one commenter here needs to refresh his memory; BLUES IN THE NIGHT has nothing whatever to do with the career of Jimmy Lunceford or any other famous musician of the period. It's about a small jazz combo, not a big band, and they begin and end the movie as obscure journeymen living from hand to mouth between gigs.