A mix of noir and melodrama in Losey's The Big Night

Joseph Losey's 1950 film, The Big Night, was, I think, has last work in the U.S. before he was blacklisted and migrated to England for a great career. Big Night is by no means a great movie, but it deftly combines two seemingly antithetical genres, noir and melodrama: In essence, a young man (played by Jonathan Barrymore Jr.) sees his father brutally beaten by a man bearing a cane; he vows to avenge this humiliating event and tracks down the assailant, who we learn is a sports writer involved in fixing boxing matches (unlikely, but there you have it). After he finds the man and shoots him, in a tearful reconciliation scene w/ his father, he learns some dark family secrets. OK, not much of this is believable, but we do get some fine night-time sequences, some shot apparently on location. Notable scenes include the crowd entering the arena for the boxing match (where the naive Barrymore is robbed of a ticket); Barrymore visiting a newspaper during the late-night/early-morning presstime - quite accurate, I would add; a visit to a nightclub where the protagonist has a memorable encounter with the chanteuse; and some nicely moody scenes shot on near-deserted city streets. The film would be better if the protagonist could learn about his family history gradually and over the course of the film - rather than in a big confession from dad in the final minutes - but still it's a pretty good film by a director who was treated badly.