All Night Long

All Night Long

“There are some films that seem to have their own moods, and the mood of “All Night Long” is dispirited mopery. Here’s a movie with a high-energy cast and a promising comic plot, and the director seems to be aiming for the bittersweet. How can you possibly start out with Gene Hackman as the manager of an all-night drugstore, and Barbra Streisand as a fireman’s wife who likes to swing, and wind up with a movie where everybody’s sighing all the time?

Jean-Claude Tramont accomplishes it. He’s the director of “All Night Long,” and maybe he should bear this in mind. I’ve been saying for years that Barbra Streisand would be one of the great comedians if she’d just take direction like any other actor instead of using her movies as vehicles for demonstrating how well she understands her personality problem. Maybe I was wrong. It probably wasn’t her idea to play this character as a quiet, vacant minded nonentity; she has less fun than anyone else in the movie except Gene Hackman.

His character also lets us down. He plays an executive of the drug chain, demoted to all-night manager when he throws a chair through his boss’s window. And at about this point (very early on) “All Night Long” loses its way; it could have unfolded into an interesting study of all night society, but it doesn’t. It assigns a few weirdos to march through the store and do their thing but they don’t feel real, they feel like actors and then abandons them without ever really getting around them or into them or finding something for them to say.

A movie is in trouble when it allows itself such scenes as one in which a black man asks another: “How you doing?” And he replies: “Living.” When one actor says that to another in a movie, it means they’re alive and unhappy. If they were dead and happy, the response would be: “Fooling.” You know a movie’s in trouble when it makes a running gag out of how to pronounce the hero’s name (“Bubba”).

Meanwhile, there’s this would-be sex comedy trying to get started. Hackman discovers that his son is having an affair with a married cousin (Streisand). Hackman tries to break it up, but gets involved with Streisand himself. Hackman’s wife (Diane Ladd) calls her lawyer. Streisand’s husband (Kevin Dobson) tries to intimidate Hackman. This might have somehow been made into a farce, but the director keeps losing the pace; scenes start with promise and end with characters not knowing what to say or do next.

You also know a movie’s in trouble when it has the heroine ride a motor scooter just to make her seem like more of a character; or when she bursts into unconvincing rages of anger every once in awhile for no reason at all except that she hasn’t had anything else to do lately; or when everybody stands around sighing all the time.”

In the midst of this mess, there are some funny lines. Barbra Streisand: “So you only planned one child?” Gene Hackman: “Nobody plans a kid like mine.” But the movie never really gets going. It has all the right ingredients, but it is a million miles from life. Was it shot entirely on a sound stage? In some shots in his office at the drugstore, Hackman stands in front of a one-way mirror looking into the store, and the store looks like a painted backdrop.

Even when he’s in the store, it’s all wrong. There are no people there, just character actors who walk in and act crazy. One low point: A female athlete tries to hold up the store, throws Hackman and the security guard around, and gets dumped into the frozen pizzas.

This should create an effect something like electricity; instead it simply lays there on the screen first ugly, then pointless.

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