Noir Musical Watch: Blues In The Night (1941)

Watched:  07/15/2026

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Director:  Anatole Litvak

So, this movie is super strange, and maybe in a good way, because it really swings for the fences.  I am not sure it goes yard (it doesn't) but it's at least an interesting sac fly.  

It's a mix of the "let's put on a show!" spirit of the movie musical and takes a turn down an alley into what would come to be known as noir.  As the two collide, Blues in the Night (1941) can make for some strange viewing.  

A group of guys tossed in jail for the moment decide to form a band - they want to play "the blues".  They are not Black.  But in the next cell are Black guys, who are singing the Blues.  By 2026 standards, this will be the best performance you will see all movie.

Out of jail they head to New Orleans to pick up a trumpet player and his spunky wife, Priscilla Lane.  Travelling by box car (and seemingly unbothered by what seems to be this "band" thing going terribly) they meet Norman Lloyd on the lam - he directs them to his club outside of New York City.

Here our troubles begin as it becomes clear Lloyd is a gangster, and our plucky hero, Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf), falls for The Wrong Girl - played brilliantly by Betty Field.  She is absolutely the high light, character wise, in this movie - a character who is damaged and lashing out, because who ever did her any good?

Priscilla Lane and Betty Field demonstrate that there are two whole ways to be a main female character in noir

Why Jigger falls for Field is muy mysterioso - she may be foxy, but she's also clearly nuts.  His prior insistence on keeping the band together through thick and thin immediately dissolves as he abandons the band and takes Field to a higher echelon of living, playing swank clubs.  

But in short order, Field is picking up rich guys while Jigger's on stage and refusing to cover up her trysts.  Terrible girlfriend, really.  Field, you see, doesn't give a crap about our hero, she's in love with Norman Lloyd, and he'd given her the Heisman.  

Things go side-ways for our hero he ends up in the looney bin.

I'll go ahead and say, if this unpleasant, shouty lady leaving causes you to literally lose your mind, she must be really good at something. And it wasn't singing.

There's a whole sequence where Jigger tries to train her to sing, and it... is kinda painful for everyone, including us, watching.  But it's also my segue to mention that the movie has I think four montage sequences, and those, alone, are worth the price of admission.  It may be a movie that feels bobbled together from other movies, but when they get to those montage sequences, it's hard not to get a bit impressed.  

The movie winds up with a crime-thriller ending that feels deeply at odds with the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and it is a wild ride all the way.  In some ways, it's a real WTF-is-next? sort of experience as the movie lurches around figuring out what it wants to do and be.  And I suspect at some point there was probably a decent script, but this movie sometimes feels like it's two or three movies stapled together.

The result is that Blues in the Night feels plot forward, with too many characters, and no real resolution to fairly major bits.  A whole storyline seems to be brewing for Pricilla Lane and her philandering husband, and is just chucked out the window 4/5ths of the way into the movie.  Two of the guys in the band barely speak.  It almost feels like half-way through writing, someone saw a good crime movie or something from the more realistic Group Theatre and decided "THAT'S what we should do", but failed to rewrite the beginning.  And somehow... this went in front of cameras that way.

And, remember when I said it was sort-of a musical?  It is.  They keep stopping for numbers, the montage sequences are musical numbers.  The title song became a pop standard that is still sung today - written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.  Good stuff.  And not the last time a song would be more popular than the movie that spawned it.

The movie does have some interesting casting.  Priscilla Lane had already been in big pictures and would be in plenty more - she's in  both The Roaring Twenties and stars in Arsenic Old Lace if you're looking for a name movie.  After this, she's in Saboteur.  

Jack Carson I know mostly from Mildred Pierce.  Wallace Ford is in... everything.  Along with Lloyd Nolan.  

Elia "I name names" Kazan is in this in a cheesy supporting role as the guy who really wants to play music, not be a lawyer.  His arc is done in the first ten minutes.  After that, he's just there to ham up every scene.

Star Richard Whorf would only do a handful of movies in front of the lens and go on to direct a lot of television.  

The much mentioned Betty Field was in a 1939 Of Mice and Men adaptation, would play Daisy Buchanan in the 1949 Great Gatsby and then get absorbed into TV.  I had never heard of her, but she gives the great Ann Savage a run for her money as one of the most unpleasant femme fatales in noir-ish films.

I don't know if I'd watch this one again, though.  The part I enjoyed - Betty Field - isn't in the movie enough to warrant that the time.  But I guess if someone dared me to show them a deeply weird movie masquerading as a normal movie, I'd pull this one out.

The ending of the movie - which I think is supposed to be happy? - is almost unsettling.  The band, now down a baby, led by a guy who needs a shrink, and jobless, jumps a train again and is back to hoboing like this is the best life imaginable.

I have never seen people who needed to more all go their own way for their own safety and happiness.