All Night Long is Shakespeare’s Othello, set in the jazz world of 1962 London – and with real jazz stars and real jazz music.
All Night Long starts with a real estate fantasy – a wealthy jazz fan (Richard Attenborough) has transformed an industrial building into a party loft so he can host all-night jam sessions. When the musicians show up for the jam, they include none other than Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck – and a slew of top British jazz musicians, too. Marti Stevens, a real nightclub singer who acted in a few other movies, sings a couple of numbers.
The occasion for the jam is the one-year anniversary of star jazzman Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) and his wife Delia (Stevens). The discord is sown by drummer Johnny Cousins (Patrick MacGoohan), who is trying to start his own band by conniving to force Delia out of retirement. In his cmpaign of deception and blackmail, Cousins ruins life after life.
Of course, the plot and characters are from Othello; Rex is Othello, Delia is Desdemona and Johhny Cousins is Iago.
McGoohan is very good in the juicy Iago role of drummer Johnny Cousins – MacGoohan did devious scheming very well, and satisfyingly implodes when it all falls apart. His career was ascending, and he was only two years away from becoming a huge TV star with Secret Agent, to be followed by The Prisoner, possibly the most original show ever on television.
All Night Long was the first of only 13 movie credits for Paul Harris, and this was his only a lead role other than 1974’s Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes. It’s too bad he didn’t get more film roles because, in All Night Long, Harris certainly shows that he can play Othello.
The party host is played by Richard Attenborough, well into his acting career, 14 years after he played that classic film noir villain Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock. But this is a full decade before Attenborough directed his string of big Hollywood movies, exploring the lives of Churchill, Gandhi, Chaplin, Steve Biko, C.S. Lewis and Hemingway.
Another supporting player, Betsy Blair, appears six years after her Oscar-nominated turn in Marty.
I watched All Night Long on Turner Classic Movies. It can be streamed from Amazon and AppleTV.
