All Through the Night

Gloves Donahue, a Broadway gambler, is dragged into a murder because of a singer his mother followed. The trail leads him to a cell of Nazi saboteurs operating in New York. Gloves and his friends, a crowd on poor terms with the law, find themselves doing patriotism. Vincent Sherman runs comedy and thriller side by side. Humphrey Bogart leads, opposite Conrad Veidt, who fled Germany for Hollywood and played Nazis there repeatedly. Peter Lorre, Judith Anderson, William Demarest and a very young Jackie Gleason fill out the cast. The timing is a story in itself: shooting finished two months before the United States entered the war, and the film opened on 10 January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor. Who it's for: Viewers who like 1940s Warner Bros. pictures, Bogart, and wartime propaganda entertainment. Who it's not for: The tone swings between comedy and menace and the Nazis are sometimes drawn as too inept. Anyone expecting a serious war film will find it light.