David Traversa
I'm floored, I 'm devastated, I could never imagine I would enjoy this film as immensely as I just did.Yesterday I saw "The Lady is Willing" -1942- with Marlene Dietrich, and although both films belong to the same era and in both there is froth and the morality of the time, they are worlds apart; Marlene looks like an embalmed corpse while Rita Hayworth is Mother Earth personified, all beauty, glamour and warmth, plus an excellent actress and a superb dancer, maybe the best dancer of all times for this kind of vehicle."Tonight and Every Night" is so very well put together that it's almost a miracle, incredible how professional those people were!! Top drawer each one in whatever they were doing: The scriptwriters, the technical film crew, the dancers, the choreographers, wow, everybody and everything!! Let aside the war propaganda very understandable for those years, I was so impressed by the camaraderie, the human bondage between the company members, the warmth the whole movie is wrapped in...Rita Hayworth is so lovely that seems to be unreal, but not unreal the way Marlene was unreal, Marlene could freeze you on the spot with just a look, Rita doesn't look fake, she is just adorable and human. Maybe the rouge on her cheeks and the eye shadow are a bit too much, but the whole movie being a fantasy, who cares! The costumes are gorgeous, the color combinations are superb, all the dancers, male and female, have the most slender figures anyone can imagine, they look like Barbie dolls, but human --I don't know how to put it-- we talk so much nowadays about that controversial subject, anorexia, well, already in those years they have these slim figures we have nowadays, but inexplicably, they don't look emaciated, they look incredibly healthy!! An interesting detail was that all these chorus girls were...virgins... well, according to their behavior in this movie they were. Enough, I think I made it clear that I liked this movie, didn't I?
Robert J. Maxwell
Rita Hayworth is alluring and I know the song writers are a famous team and all that but I didn't hear a memorable number in the score. I have to admit I only watched this piece of fluff with one eye, so I may have missed a good dance or two. Marc Platt is accomplished and, of course, Hayworth used to be Margarita Cansino, part of a Spanish dance team before she was glamorized by Harry Cohn.Rita Hayworth and Janet Blair have a colorful number in which the duo sing about the boy they left behind while prancing around in form-fitting long johns -- Blair pink, Hayworth blue.Lee Bowman provides the male glamor as an RAF officer, though he's no more convincing than usual. Some events during the blitz dampen the light-hearted ambiance.It's not worth going out of your way to watch although it's a minor divertissement.
writers_reign
This is nothing so much as a prototype for London Town, i.e. Hollywood attempting disastrously to set a musical in London. Though they couldn't come out and say so the inspiration for what plot there is came from the Windmill - 'we never closed' - a striptease theatre below street level that remained open all through the blitz with Florence Bates in the role of Mrs Henderson albeit under a Jane Doe. It was virtually impossible to photograph Rita Hayworth badly but her gorgeous looks are really all this dire movie has going for it. It's also proof that Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn could actually write ho-hum numbers and is arguably by a country mile the worst score they ever penned. Lee Bowman is something of a joke as a leading man; clean-cut looks and superficial charm do not a Leading Man make. Definitely worth missing.
Gary Brandner
You have to cut them some slack since this was filmed at the height of World War II Lee Bowman as leading man was no Gable. He was not even a John Payne. But he was available. The plot is non-existent and the English accents (This is supposed to be London) are laughable. Rita Hayworth looks great, dances acceptably, and has a nice dubbed singing voice. Janet Blair twinkles, and that's about it. Boy dancer Marc Platt was on a rocket to obscurity. The sets appear to be thrown together from available surplus material. If there was a memorable song in this musical, I can't remember it. Most of the people involved, with the possible exception of young Platt, went on to better things.
AD
