One Exciting Night
United Kingdom
1944
89 Min
Black and White
1.37:1
English
Synopsis
If Rhythm Serenade disappointed, Miss Lynn’s third and final on-screen movie offering, One Exciting Night (1944) should have given her flagging film career a much needed boost. Abandoning the all-hands-to-the-wheel flavoring of her first two films, One Exciting Night (as the title implies) is a crime comedy/drama produced on a grand scale and niftily directed by Walter Forde who keeps the moving skidding along (except for a slightly draggy sequence with boring Richard Murdoch’s m.c.). True, the twists and turns of the saboteurs-at-large plot are interrupted by six songs, but two or three of them are really great. I particularly enjoyed It’s Like Old Times, a really catchy number by Dave Franklin which director Forde stages in a very attractive manner. You Can’t Do Without Love (which was used as the movie’s USA release title) and It’s Easy To Say Good Morning were also most agreeable. Thanks to Otto Heller’s radiant photography, Miss Lynn looks gorgeous. She’s given top-notch support by Donald Stewart (in a very clever dual role) whose movie career, alas, never amounted to much, despite his charismatic performance in this one. Frederick Leister comes over strongly as the villain, while Cyril Smith almost walks away with the movie as his pickpocket accomplice. —IMDb
Director
Walter Forde
British director Walter Forde started his show-business career on the stage of the music halls of northern England. He entered the film business as a screenwriter but became an actor in 1920, in a series of two-reel comedies he wrote himself. He spent some time in Hollywood, but not much happened and he came back to Britain in 1925. He went to work for Gainsborough and began directing. The studio was impressed with the results, and began to hand him its “A”-list projects. Several of his films, such as The Ghost Train (1931) and Der Würger kommt um Mitternacht (1931), were well received by critics. He worked in a variety of genres, most comedies, but he turned out the occasional thriller or mystery. His star began to wane during the war years, and his post-war films didn’t live up to his pre-war ones. He made his last film in 1949. He died in 1987 at age 84 in Los Angeles, California. —IMDb
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