Patrick McGoohan, who was born in America but grew up in Ireland, had previously acted in the stage play of Shakespeare's Othello, so he was well versed in the play's story and dynamics.

To prepare for his role as the manipulative drummer, Johnny Cousin, McGoohan diligently applied himself to learning the drums. In Roger Langley's biography of the actor, McGoohan admitted, "In All Night Long I actually played the drums in the film. I learned three pieces for that. It took me four months. Almost drove my family crazy! I had a set of drums in the garage and practised relentlessly."

Betsy Blair, a recently blacklisted actress from the U.S., was cast in the film and, as a former stage actress, had always wanted to play Desdemona in Othello. In her biography The Memory of All That, she recalled, "All Night Long is a modern version of Othello set in a jazz milieu. Finally, I was to be in Othello, not with Paul Robeson at Stratford-on-Avon, nor with Orson [Welles] in Morocco and Venice, but at Pinewood Studios outside London. And not as Desdemona (in this case, the lead singer with the band) but as Emilia, the wife of the drummer, Iago, played by Patrick McGoohan. The film was okay. Dave Brubeck was in it, so the music was great. And for me, it turned out to be the most important job I ever had."

The reason All Night Long became Blair's "most important job" was because she met director Karel Reisz. In her memoirs, she wrote, "Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and David Storey were preparing This Sporting Life [1963] at Pinewood, with Lindsay directing, Karel producing, and David, who had written the book, writing the screenplay. Through my friendship with Lindsay, I usually had lunch with them. Most days they drove me back to London after work. The assistants on All Night Long knew where to find me if I wasn't on the set or in my dressing room. Karel and I were getting to know each other...I woke one morning with a "visual" in my head, a sequence of shots for the opening of a film - not any old film, but A Walk With Love and Death...I lay in bed and wondered if it was presumptuous to imagine that my unconscious was thinking like a film director. At lunch that day, I revealed all this to my chums. In this context they seemed to me to be an august triumvirate. Lindsay, never one to show surprise, raised a quizzical eyebrow...But Karel said, "Go for it - find out about the rights to the book." That may have been the moment when I fell in love."

by Jeff Stafford

SOURCES:
The Memory of All That by Betsy Blair (Alfred A. Knopf)
Patrick McGoohan: Danger Man or Prisoner? by Roger Langley (Tomahawk)
www.afi.com
www.screenonline.org.uk
IMDB