Friday's Old Fashioned: The Big Night (1951)

“The Big Night” giving Joseph Losey’s 1951 film its title is the 17th birthday of George, nay, Georgie La Main (John Barrymore, Jr.). One minute he’s being bullied by some peers for refusing their dare to kiss a girl and the next he’s watching a man bully and beat his father Andy (Preston Foster) to a bloody pulp. His reaction: to slip on his father’s jacket and hat, both a little too big for him, like he’s merely some out-of-his-element mini-me, grab his father’s gun, and set off on a rash quest for vengeance. That quest becomes a coming-of-age checklist as he attends a boxing match, gets scammed, goes to a club, has a drink, falls in love, discovers his father isn’t quite who he thought he was and that the world doesn’t work quite the way he thought it did. That suggests noir, and “The Big Night” has the look and feel of one, though Barrymore, Jr.’s overwrought performance feels cut and pasted from a melodrama. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as it unexpectedly reinforces the feeling of someone thrust into a world where he doesn’t belong. And though “The Big Night” can sometimes lay things on thick, like the birthday candle on Georgie’s cake that ominously fails to extinguish, it also has moments of searing truth. After being smitten by a black jazz singer’s (Mauri Leighton) performance, he compliments her, only to make such a casual and clueless racist remark in doing so that he doesn’t even seem to realize his own inherent prejudice until he’s cruelly spoken it into the world.