BLURAY: ALL NIGHT LONG

Shane | 21 August 2018 | Reply

BLURAY: ALL NIGHT LONG
Directed by Jean-Claude Tramont
Starring Barbara Streisand, Gene Hackman, Dennis Quaid
Shock Entertainment, June 2018
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
5/10

Amazingly, Babs Streisand was paid four million US bucks for appearing in All Night Long – the highest fee paid to an actor in Hollywood at the time of filming in 1981. The most amazing part of this is that the film is little more than a melodramatic bedroom farce, certainly undeserving of its US$15 million budget – barely deserving of its less than US$5 million gross takings, in fact!

Streisand plays Cheryl Gibbons, a good looking dame married to aggressive fireman Bobby (Kevin Dobson). She’s having an affair with Freddie Dupler, played with naïve charm by a young Dennis Quaid. Freddie’s unhappy Dad George (Gene Hackman) is demoted following a temper tantrum at work, and winds up as night manager of a 24-hour supermarket and pharmacy.

George discovers the affair and forbids Freddie to see Cheryl, who then confronts George, and one thing leads predictably to another. Streisand and especially Hackman play true to their characters – frustrated middle suburban everybodys – but Jean-Claude Tramont’s film always comes off as a slightly confused, second-rate Neil Simon play, and it’s painfully obvious that the bulk of the budget went on the stars’ salaries.

All Night Long is too suburban to be an engaging drama, too indecisive to be an engaging romance, and worst of all, not funny enough to be a comedy, and there are a couple of scenes which are woefully beneath the talent involved – the one where the George and Cheryl foil an armed robbery being the worst. You might be better off giving this one a miss.