Gene Hackman turned seventy-eight this past week. Though he seems to have eased into semi-retirement — his last movie appearance was in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport with Ray Romano, a teaming that I assume was a thrill for at least one of them — for decades Hackman was as sturdily dependable as any hard-working character lead turned unlikely movie star in Hollywood history. His birthday provides as good an excuse as any to dig out one of his best performances, in one of his best, and least-appreciated movies, the 1981 comedy All Night Long. It's also a terrific movie to discover at the dawn of a still-new year, because it's about a man who seems to be used up and past the point the point of no return taking the reins and making a new world for himself, by learning in the nick of time to cast off what no longer works for him and doing, and going after, whatever the hell he wants.
Hackman plays George Dupler, whose twenty years of service to the corporate behemoth have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. One day, his stress becomes notable enough that he's encouraged to express what's bothering him, and a chair goes flying through the shiny glass wall of his company's building. A dead man walking, George is shuttled off to serve out his days as night manager of an enormous twenty-four-hour Los Angeles drugstore. The screenwriter, W. D. Richter, apparently took his inspiration from a magazine article about nocturnal urban living as the last great frontier. George has to cross that frontier to build himself a new life; it starts with him adjusting his internal clock to his new working hours, expands to his taking up with the mistress of his teenage son (Dennis Quaid), and winds up with him moving into a loft and embarking on a career as an inventor. His first invention is a new kind of mirror. It doesn't reverse the image of what you're seeing: it gives the user the chance to see what others actually behold when they look at him, the poor sap.
All Night Long has its own eccentric humor and a cool, liberating tone, and it actually got several admiring notices when it was released early in 1981. Unfortunately, it got caught up in internal Hollywood politics and bad marketing decisions, all of them related to the actress who plays George's new squeeze: Barbra Streisand. The movie was directed by the Belgian Jean-Claude Tramont, who was married to the semi-legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who at the time had Streisand as a star client. The movie had headed into production with the actress Lisa Eichhorn set to play the female lead, but somebody must have thought that having Streisand on board would be good for something, with the result that she was nudged into the role, the film's budget ballooned accordingly, and the finished product was released with an ad campaign that seemed designed to call up memories of previous comic horrors such as For Pete's Sake and The Main Event. Tramont's career never recovered from the movie's high-profile commercial failure; he would direct only once more — As Summers Die, a 1986 TV film with Bette Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Scott Glenn — before dying in 1996. The funny thing is that Streisand neither makes nor sinks the movie; her quirky-mouse performance is amusing — you can see her consciously trying not to come across as a diva — but she and Hackman have zero chemistry. Their romance just seems like a fling he uses to cushion his fall as he transitions into a new life; you can't imagine they'll be together for long after the final credits roll. But if All Night Long is compromised as a love story, as a tribute to a loser who didn't know how to lie down, it's richly satisfying. Tramont, Richter, and Hackman started out with the quirky tools of classic screwball comedy and applied them with so much heartfelt grace and imagination that they constructed a comedy worthy of Rilke's dictum, "You must change your life!"