The Big Night was Losey's last American film (of five) before he left for exile in England, one step ahead of HUAC. It's a corrosive view of one night in America where a son, John Drew Barrymore, looks for revenge on a well-known sportswriter who gave Barrymore's father a thrashing in a bar, as a dozen spectators watched. It's a film noir of dark and lonely streets, grifters and dipsomaniacs, seedy nightclubs and bars, shot in crisp black-and-white by veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr. Only after Barrymore shoots the sportswriter does Barrymore's father (Preson Foster) tell him that he had refused to marry the sportswriter's sister because he was still married to Barrymore's mother, who had left him and was still alive, contrary to what he had told Barrymore.
Barrymore's hunt for the sportswriter takes him to a boxing match, where he gets shaken down by a lowlife pretending to be a cop and hooks up with a dipso and his two female friends, one of whom tries unsuccessfully to hide Barrymore's gun. Barrymore has a great deal to prove, after the local kids beat him up because he is carrying books, and he constantly seeks the approval of his father. The America that Losey portrays is matter-of-factly anti-intellectual and racist. At one point Barrymore hears an African-American (Mauri Leighton) sing a lovely version of "Am I Too Young?" in a nightclub and when he sees the singer on his way out he compliments her, telling her she is beautiful and she smiles until he adds, "even if you are..." and he leaves the sentence unfinished as her expression quickly turns to sadness.
Everyone in the film is lonely, for one reason or another, a regular theme of Losey's in his five American films as well as the English films, particularly those written by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971)
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