The Long Night

Henry Fonda goes through "The Long Night" after committing murder in this 1947 film noir directed by Anatole Litvak and also starring Vincent Price, Ann Dvorak and Barbara Bel Geddes. Fonda plays Joe, a returning veteran, now a blue collar worker who falls in love with young, pretty fellow orphan Jo Ann (Bel Geddes), only to come up against Price. Price plays Maximilian, a creepy magician with a show that features dogs and Charlene (Ann Dvorak). At first, Maximilian asks Joe to stay away from Charlene because she's his long-lost daughter and he wants better for her. From Charlene, Joe learns the truth - Maximilian is not her father, and she's attracted to his worldliness - though she claims to love Joe. Depressed, he turns to the sexy Charlene, his heart still with Jo Ann. During a fight in his apartment, he shoots Maximilian, and spends the entire movie under siege in his apartment as he relives in flashback and flashback within flashback what led him to this moment.

Litvak, a talented director, stages this film in an interesting manner - it begins with a blind man (Elisha Cook Jr.) stumbling across the body of Maximilian in the hallway of the apartment building where he lives. Joe will not leave his room, and the police work throughout the film to get him out. The photography and direction capture the darkness and drabness of Joe's surroundings, the cheapness of the nightclub where Maximilian performs, and focuses a harsh light on Charlene's room and Charlene herself.

Despite all of this great style, the film has a cheesy quality; the characters aren't really likable except for poor Joe; and the motivations of the characters aren't fully fleshed out, so the story ultimately doesn't make it. The acting is very good - Fonda shows us some still waters that run pretty deep in an excellently crafted performance. He's sexy as all get-out, too, when he lays down on Charlene's bed and smiles. Dvorak does a great job as a brittle Charlene, and Price is a complete sleazebag as the cruel Maximilian. Bel Geddes is incredibly young - this is her first film, and though she was 24 or 25, she looks and acts about 18, which is appropriate for this small-town, inexperienced girl.

"The Long Night" has some interesting elements, but because of a spotty script, we're not invested enough in the film for it to be really intriguing or exciting.

I've never seen the original French film upon which this film was based, but I can tell you I kept waiting for a plot line payoff that never came. It has everything going for it - solid cast giving good believable performances, good direction, even a good speech that Fonda's character delivers from this broken out window as he is under siege by the police that gives us some insight into what it's like for an average guy who has returned home from years of killing and seeing killing in the war expected to pick up where he left off. But ultimately, I never see anything that Fonda's character, factory laborer Joe Adams, has been put through as far as shock or emotional torment or even disillusionment that would justifiably cause him to kill a man. Is Vincent Price's character Maximillian eloquently taunting and creepy? Yes, and in a way that Price excelled at over the years starting in noirs and proceeding on into his horror films. However, at no time does he do anything that would drive anybody to do more than shoo him away or stuff earplugs in their ears or possibly call the ASPCA (You'll have to watch the film to understand this last remark). I'm giving this film a five just for the fact that I believe the production code is the reason any hard edges that seem to be just under the surface never appear. I'm almost positive the script would have gone further if the censors would have allowed it to be so.

The real point of interest to me was the action of the police, who behave a lot like the fascists that Joe Adams spent years fighting in WWII. Sure they have a murderer holed up in his rented room, but he's holding no hostages, they've emptied the building, and still they spray him twice with automatic gunfire unannounced - once from the outside into his window, then from the stairwell into the door. When he pushes a sturdy dresser against the door and they realize they can't force their way in THEN they try talking to Joe, starting with the line "We're not fooling"?? No kidding! After Fonda's speech to the crowd, once the crowd starts voicing their support for Joe and promising financial help with a lawyer the police form a line and practically trample the crowd forcing them out of the street. I don't know if the heavy handedness of the police was something that Litvak wanted the audience to notice, but it was something I noticed.

I'd recommend this one just for the good performances and atmosphere and some imagery you don't see that much in films immediately after WWII, but don't expect something shocking or even interesting to happen just because of all of the talent assembled here.

When I went to my local library to check some DVDs, I stumbled onto this obscure flick that starred Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes (in her film debut), Vincent Price, and Ann Dvorak. With that cast (I just remembered that Elisa Cook, Jr. has a memorable role as a blind man here), with Anatole Litvak as director, and Dimitri Tiomkin conducting his score (as well as some Beethoven pieces spread among it), I expected an excellent suspenseful movie and I got it! Well, maybe nearly so since the speech Ms. Bel Geddes says to Fonda at the end is obviously contrived to address the audience as well as the leading character about the faith of people. Otherwise, the dialogue was mostly spot-on especially the heated exchanges between Fonda and Price who, as usual, is absolutely charming even in his creepiness. And Ms. Dvorak marks a nice contrast with her cynicism as compared with Ms. Bel Geddes' optimism. Fonda himself goes the full range of emotions whether during the flashbacks or his present condition of being holed up in his apartment while the police are waiting outside. So for all that, I highly recommend The Long Night.

Henry Fonda, Vincent Price and the film noir genre are reasons enough to see any film, and The Long Night did show a lot of promise. I didn't find that the The Long Night quite delivered enough, but it certainly has a lot of good things. It's very well made for starters, one of the most beautifully shot and visually atmospheric film noirs of the 1940s in my opinion. Dmitri Tiomkin's music is far from his best work with a lot of it sounding like re-arranged Beethoven(you decide whether you consider that a compliment, but it is very haunting and fits the film very well. But the high point of The Long Night was the acting. Henry Fonda gives an intelligently sensitive lead performance, and Barbara Bel Geddes- managing to look younger than she was- in her film debut is very touching as the love interest. Ann Dvorak is deliciously cynical, and Vincent Price is effortlessly ominous and smarmy as an utter sleaze-bag of a character(people will argue that he was at odds at the rest of the film but I rest the blame on the writing not Price). The Long Night does have faults though, the characters are not fleshed out enough to make me care for them(I would have cared more for Joe if the "when he's in jeopardy" scenario had been made less emotionally hollow and senseless), while the script is of rather rambling quality with Bel Geddes' final speech particularly contrived-sounding. The Long Night also lacks momentum pace-wise- well the final twenty minutes picks up a bit but comes too late- and the constant switching back from past to present and vice versa is enough to cause confusion. There are even some ideas like with Joe and Charlene's involvement with one another that are shoehorned in but not explained satisfactorily. So in conclusion, interesting for the cast and how it was made, but with stronger script and story execution it would've been less underwhelming than it turned out to be. 6/10 Bethany Cox

I wouldn't say The Long Night is a great film, and if anything it only peaks my interest more to see how much more classic the film it's based on is- Marcel Carne's La Jour se Leve. But for the time it ran, I was mostly glued to the screen, and got wrapped up in the plight of Henry Fonda's character Joe, and his predicament of his downfall from normalcy. It probably isn't very original, taking aside its connection with the French source; it's about a factory worker, very nice guy, who falls in love with a woman whom, he finds out, was an orphan just like him. But one night he follows her to a bar, sees her cavorting sort of with a sleazy magician (Vincent Price), and his perfect image of her is shattered, and grows only darker after he meets him (he first tells Joe he's her father, which is a truly great scene between two huge stars of classic film), and when she tells him about her history with him.

While I could never take my eyes off the screen, it should be said that for all of the strong craftsmanship with the picture (it's one of the finest photographed 'noirs' of the late 40s, especially for those stark scenes of Joe alone in his room with the whole town on the street calling for him) and for all of the tremendous talent in front of the camera- besides Fonda and Price, who the former it's a splendid and rewarding if not best-ever performance and for the latter a triumph of playing sneaky and villainous, the girl playing Jo Ann (Barbara Bel Geddes) is very good- it only works up to a point. I was engrossed the most in the last twenty minutes or so, as the film revved up its pace and tempo to the "will Joe or won't Joe" beat. Before that, it's many scenes that mostly rely on the presence of the actors to uplift the material past the breezy and conventional air of the dialog. There's nothing especially "wrong" with the material, but it doesn't go anywhere aside from hitting its main points.

The Long Night is something of a minor lost marvel- only recently did it come out on DVD in an OK print- and for Fonda and Price fans its a can't-miss kind of picture. Just don't go expecting anything that will change your perception of what film-noirs can go that don't go for the easy routes.