Louis K. Ansell was a St. Louis, Missouri exhibitor and theatres owner who complained loud and often that the films he was getting from Hollywood had no exploitable value. So he ups and goes to California and produces one of the last of the great exploitation picures. Not great in any artistic sense, other than it was indeed exploitable.The trademark of most of the films that fall into the Exploitation genre---if such a genre doesn't exist, it should---is that the true Exploitation film states right off that it is based on something or another and will hide nothing to lay bare the "real truth behind something or another." Dope peddlers and white slavers was the hot topic of the 1930's, but Wheeler Oakman and Willy Castello were gone and no one could replace them when it came to pushing reefers or throwing white girls into Mexican bordellos.And WW II offered lots of chances for unplowed-ground exploitation, but Warners, RKO and Republic had already plowed this ground before Louis K. Ansell came along. "Women in the Night" begins by saying it is "based on case histories from the files of the United Nations Information Offices." That, even if true and even if there was a UN Informations Office, was no ringing endorsement and becomes less so every day. It also promised to depict the heroisms and courage of the women of the countries occupied by the Nazis and Japanese during WW II. The film then proceeds to crunch all of the women and countries that did indeed suffer at the hands of the occupying troops, down to a motley few Anglos in Shanghai. Then it really gets down to the nitty-gritty with a story that makes Bela Lugosi's and Monogram's 1942 "Black Dragons" look like factual history well told. It takes place over a period of 36 hours, or 90 minutes that seems like 36 hours, in a German Officers' Club in Shanghai. It seems that these Nazis have developed a cosmic death ray that is 100 times more deadly than the Atomic bomb. But they evidently overlooked telling Hitler and the boys in Berlin about it, and Adolph and his henchmen are now history. But the Japanese want the secret to ensure they won't face the same fate as the Germans. The war in Europe is over but this group of Germans are not only hanging on in Shanghai, they have the funds to manage the upkeep of a club that would rival a Vegas night spot, or will in the future when Vegas begins to flower. Anyway, the Japanese guys want this secret real bad, and the Germans tell them to come on over to the Club and they will give it to them. But the German commandant of the Club has no intentions of demostrating the "weapon" and has some distracting-diversion tatic planned for the Japanese honchos, and he has the club Maitre'd-slash-torture chamber guy bring in a group of captive women, and his instructions to them is to get out there and "entertain" the Japanese guys, and the way he says "entertain" it is real clear that he means total "entertainment." What his plans are when the Japanese recover from being "entertained" aren't real clear and aren't cleared up later either because one of his officers, (William Henry, the only male in the cast that isn't Asian or speaks with a German accent) is actually an American O.S.S. officer-slash-spy. And one of the "entertainers" is his wife (Tala Birell),a Shanghai version of Mata Hari. Then the plot gets kind of outlandish. The only surprise and disappointment is that it wasn't directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (thus allowing someone to proclaim it a classic and realistic piece of low-budget filmmaking), but Eugene Shufftan was involved and it may yet qualify. Written by Les Adams