Night World is a Prohibition story from near the end of Prohibition and a pre-Code film from near the end of the pre-Code era; this 58-minute film is a comedy, a gangster movie, a romance, a musical and a soap opera that takes place during a single night at Happy's (Boris Karloff) speakeasy, as Mae Clarke and an inebriated Lew Ayres find each other, fall in love, nearly get killed and decide at the end of the night to get married and move to the South Seas. The doorman at Happy's, who waxes philosophically with an Irish cop about how people are starving for things other than food, is played by Black actor Clarence Muse as a sympathetic and intelligent man who is quite concerned about his wife, who is in the hospital.
Lew Ayres plays Michael Rand, who drinks because his mother killed his father and was acquitted at her trial. His mother, played by Hedda Hopper, shows up at Happy's and says how much she hated her husband and dislikes Michael, after which chorus girl Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) listens to him sympathetically while gangster Ed "my-place-never-closes" Powell (George Raft) harasses her between dance numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, where the camera goes between the legs of the chorus girls. Meanwhile drunken patron Tommy (Bert Roach) wanders around asking everyone "are you from Schenectady?" This fascinating 58-minute film is written by Richard Schayer and directed with punch and speed by Hobart Henley, whose penultimate film this was; he stopped making films at the age of 46 after making 57 films, of which 11 were made after sound came in.
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