NIGHT AFTER NIGHT

Paramount production and release

Released October 29, 1932 Production August 22 - September 1932
Running time 76 minutes [Tuska: 70]
Producer Willliam LeBaron
Director Archie Mayo
Adaptation and screenplay Vincent Lawrence, based on Louis Bromfield's "Single Night"
Continuity Kathryn Scola
Additional dialogue Mae West
Costumes Travis Banton
Photography Ernest Haller

CAST
Joe Anton George Raft
Miss Healy Constance Cummings
Iris Dawn Wynne Gibson
Maudie Triplett Mae West
Mabel Jellyman Alison Skipworth
Leo Roscoe Karns
Blainey Al Hill
Dick Bolton Louis Calhern
Jerky Harry Wallace
Patsy Dink Templeton
Frankie Guard Bradley Page
Malloy Marty Martyn
Tom Tom Kennedy
Escort Gordon [Tuska: "Bill"] Elliott

"Night After Night" was Paramount's star vehicle for George Raft, a stage hoofer imported from New York whom the studio slicked over as a new Valentino. Raft had also been affiliated with Owney Madden's organized crime syndicate. Mae West's "Sex" (as well as "The Drag" and "Pleasure Man") was bankrolled in part by Madden through West's confidante/attorney/lawyer Jim Timony, and stories are that Raft was Madden's bagman visited the theater between performances for the receipts, and regularly came up to see West backstage.

Titillation aside, Raft used his influence as leading man to persuade Paramount to cast West in "Night After Night." West always claimed that Paramount begged her to come from New York to Hollywood, which was hard hit by the Depression and by a potential dearth of bankable stars with the transition from silent movies to talkies. Emerging from her traincar in Pasadena, California, West swaggered before the assembled media: "I'm not a little girl from a little town making good in a big town. I'm a big girl from a big town making good in a little town."

However, West's move to filmdom may also have been mandated by circumstances; her shrewd stage career had made her popular and successful, but she may also have painted herself into a corner. Her exploits with "Sex," "The Drag" and "Pleasure Man" garnered her plenty of headlines, but only the first play was a financial success. Her other plays, "The Wicked Age" and "The Constant Sinner," were also sensational but unprofitable. Even her tours of her most succcessful work, "Diamond Lil," ran into legal threats once outside New York, shut down or prohibited in even major cities like Milwaukee. The klieglights of New York were increasingly inhospitable to Mae West, and Hollywood may have seemed a much more viable option for her.

In fact, as much as the studio may have welcomed the already famous star to its fold, the movie industry, wounded as it was, embraced West tentatively because of her brassy reputation, with social watchdog groups already focusing more scutiny on film content, prompting more pronouncements from the industry's self-policing body, the Motion Picture Prodcction Code Studio Relations Office. Indeed, the office and its head, William Hays, were keenly watching West's train trek to Hollywood. Contrary to popular accounts, Mae West was not the Hays Office's first victim, but Hays and his cohorts were prepared and laying in wait for America's most infamous sexual comedienne; they would claim their toll in only a few years.