Never heard of All Night Long? You aren’t alone. This wonderfully sweet and gentle yarn (original on just about every level) suffered from inexplicable critical excoriation when it bowed theatrically in March of 1981, then fell into obscurity for almost 20 years. That began to change in the summer of 2001, when the Oxygen women’s network started running a censored version ad infinitum, and in late 2004, when it finally received a DVD issue thanks to the brass at Universal Home Video. Still, most people have probably never heard of it.

As directed by the unknown Jean-Claude Tramont and scripted by W.D. ‘Rick’ Richter (Buckaroo Banzai), All Night Long embodies a contemporary fable about a middle-aged man’s journey of self-discovery – midlife-crisis material turned inside-out, shot from the subject’s perspective, and given a happy spin and resolution. The character in question is drugstore corporation executive George Dupler (Gene Hackman), who reaches his breaking point one day in the office after he’s passed over, yet again, for a promotion. In a riotous opening scene (that keeps everything off-camera but lets the audience hear – and see evidence of - the goings-on), he slugs his boss and hurls a chair through the window of the office building. In lieu of termination, he’s demoted to a position as manager of one of the corporation’s all-night Los Angeles drugstores – one populated by a cast of hilarious weirdos and freaks. He then falls in love with an eccentric, bouncy blonde named Cheryl Gibbons (Barbra Streisand, playing way against type, who replaced Lisa Eichhorn in mid-production). Cheryl just happens to be one of George’s in-laws, and as he impulsively decides to leave his wife, she gratefully begins to drift away from her oppressive husband (Kevin Dobson) and into George’s arms - meanwhile losing her tacky veneer, one accessory at a time.

And that only represents the beginning. The movie is about improving oneself and one’s life almost blindly – bucking oppression and conformity, and leaping forward on a purely instinctive level, only to look back in astonishment and realize how dead-on-target those emotionally-driven choices were. Or, to put it another way: it offers a triumph-of-the-spirit story without the pitfall of self-conscious schmaltz. In terms of humor, Tramont and Richter balance a gentle whimsy with a wholly original comic voice. In part, that’s generated by Hackman’s continual sarcasm, delivered in a bone-dry, deadpan way. (In one of my favorite moments, Cheryl’s husband offers his Dalmatian a sausage without drawing a response, and the mordant George shoots back: “Heh-heh. He’s clever.”) But the film occasionally veers into off-the-wall humor as well; in a wonderful scene, for example, Hackman responds to 48 hours of insomnia by hitting the pharmacy in the drugstore and filching some uppers; he then phones his estranged wife on a drug-induced high – a conversation assuredly subtle and underhanded, but so funny that it can almost compete with Albert Brooks’s Quaalude scene from the same year’s Modern Romance. (It also boasts one of the best comic uses of a handgun as a prop). More broadly, the film works in some wonderful comic showcases, including a marvelously original scene in which George and his dense son (Dennis Quaid) finally put Cheryl’s husband in his place in a most unexpected way. George’s abandonment of his wife and home also provides some nifty comic highlights; it features a breakdown speech by Hackman where George takes full responsibility for everything (and I mean everything) on his shoulders.

If the movie limited itself to humor, it might simply qualify as enjoyable, but the central romance is deeply moving, involving and persuasive as well – it tugs at one’s heartstrings.

The movie falls just a few notches shy of complete perfection – the sets are never quite convincing, and the irritating, repetitive score by Ira Newborn deserves to be junked. (Tramont counterbalances this in a brilliant way by working in poignant strains of La Violetera from Chaplin’s City Lights in the second and third acts). But in the final analysis, those flaws are completely negligible. Very few comedies reach such giddy heights or send one out in a state of such blissful satisfaction. After viewing this 27-year-old character comedy for the third time last week, I replaced one of my Top Ten favorite movies with it. You can’t ask for a better recommendation than that.