Night life in the 30's was something else. It's almost like it was a different world, especially compared to night life today. Sure, we have night clubs, drinking, and dancing, but, for better or for worse, it's not the same.
"Night World" is a movie that highlights an aspect that permeated just about every 1930's movie: the night club/speakeasy scene. The movie began as a rather random, scattered affair giving us snippets of the lives of the various nightclub patrons and staff. There were cheaters, drunkards, lovers, gangsters, professionals, and everything in between. Slowly the movie began to focus on a few main characters and I wasn't impressed.
I watched the movie mainly because of Boris Karloff who played Happy MacDonald, the proprietor. His wife, Jill (Dorothy Revier), was cheating on him with his manager, Klauss (Russell Hopton). It was the same old story you see in half the movies of that era.
The movie also focused on Michael Rand (Lew Ayres) for no good reason. He'd been attending the joint for several nights straight drowning his sorrows in bad booze. One of the dancers, Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke), took an interest in him probably because she's one of those women who likes to nurse wounded animals back to health. She doted over him and protected him all while he was drunk and sobering up. By the time he was fully sober he asked her to marry him because that's some of the idiotic things they did back then. Usually proposals came after a day or two. If a proposal came after a few hours, it was because the man was drunk. In this case he may have still been a little drunk. It was a lame pitiful attempt at romance as if it were thrown in there just to check a box.
Michael got to be her hero on two occasions which were probably for the society crowd who fancy themselves brave. The first time was when he knocked out Ed Powell who was a gangster played by George Raft. George Raft and Jack La Rue were always playing gangsters. It was clearly type-casting, but work is work.
The second time Michael got to play hero was when he and Ruth were at gunpoint at Happy's Club. Ed and his boss just got through gunning down the doorman Tim (Clarence Muse), Happy, and his double-crossing wife. He was about to gun Michael and Ruth down as well, but Michael first had to hold Ruth tight and tell the gangsters what he thought of them. It was an uninspiring scene that made me like Michael even less.
He was saved from meeting his maker when a fat flatfoot somehow snuck in behind the two gangsters and shot them in the back. He saved the lovers from the grave and gave the movie the unceremonious end it deserved.
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