The Man I Love 1947

     This film is based on the novel Night Shift by Maritta M. Wolff .  Nicky Toresca owns a nightclub and he likes the ladies.  Petey Brown is a lounge singer and she travels from New York to Los Angeles to visit her two sisters and brother, Ginny, Sally and Joe.  Ginny is the youngest, she doesn’t want to date and she just wants to stay home.  Sally works as a waitress for Toresca and sometimes he gives her a hard time.  Joe sometimes gets into trouble.  Their neighbors have twin babies and the sisters try to help with babysitting.  Petey meets an ex-jazz pianist San Thomas but he’s never recovered from his divorce.

     A lot of the dialog is from this period and I could picture Humphrey Bogart saying some of the lines.  Women are called kid!!  There is a sleaze factor to some of the lounges during this period and some were involved with organized crime.  Ida Lupino suffered from some Hollywood type casting and she seemed to get the hard but sympathetic woman from the wrong side of the tracks role.  She joked that she was the poor man’s Bette Davie.  She turned to direction and she did inexpensive melodramas in the 50’s, for television she directed The Untouchables and The Fugitive.  In the 70’s she did guest appearance on television shows and small parts in films.  The better roles seemed to go to Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn.  3 ½* (I liked this movie)

96 min, Crime directed by Raoul Walsh with Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King, Martha Vicker, Bruce Bennett, Alan Hale, Dolores Moran, Roy Otis, Don McGuire, Warren Douglas, Craig Stevens, Tony, Romano.

Note:  Imdb 6.9 out of 10, 80% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon 4.6* out of 5* with 18 reviews.

Special Note:  There is also a song with the same title by the Gershwin brothers.  Martin Scorsese used this film as the inspiration for his film New York, New York.  Originally Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart were to star in this film.  Production fell behind schedule because Lupino was exhausted and she fainted during one scene with Robert Alda.  She had to be cut out of her dress and the film was 19 days late with $100,000 over budget.