Blues in the Night

A group of musicians scraping by in St. Louis comes together around pianist Jigger Pine, forming a small band that includes singer Ginger Powell, her trumpeter husband Leo, and a rhythm section. The members swear to stick together through hard times. On a train south they cross paths with a gangster, Del Davis, who offers them steady work at his underground club, and they take the chance at a career despite the risks it carries. The arrangement draws the group into old grudges and romantic entanglements that test both their unity and their hopes of making it as musicians. The film is a crime drama with music at its center, set among hard-luck players and the underworld figures who surround them.

Anatole Litvak directed, with a screenplay by Robert Rossen and Henry Blanke producing for Warner Bros. It was Litvak's fifth feature in the sequence of his films, arriving between All This, and Heaven Too in 1940 and Why We Fight: Prelude to War in 1942. The cast is led by Richard Whorf as Jigger Pine, Priscilla Lane as Ginger Powell, Betty Field as Kay Grant, Lloyd Nolan as Del Davis, Jack Carson as Leo Powell and Wallace Ford as Brad Ames.

The film runs 88 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.7 from around 1,500 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.2 from a much smaller pool of 32 votes, a contrast that reflects the broader sample behind the IMDb figure.