Customer Reviews

The Long Night

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Henry Fonda is Joe Adams, a man pinned inside his third floor apartment after gunning down a mysterious magician Vincent price. Joe's fractured memories are told in an intricate web of flashbacks that reconstruct the events leading up to the murder. Barbara Bel Geddes plays the third corner of the tragic, complicated and mesmerizing love triangle. Exceedingly mody and atmospheric direction by the masterful Anatole Litvak ("The Snake Pit," "Sorry Wrong Number"). The DVD is a pristine transfer made from a 35 MM nitrate negative. Bonus material includes a gallery of photos and artwork as well as excerpts from Marcel Carne's Le Jour se Leve. (Full Frame, B&W, 68 minutes, Not Rated)

I liked this forgotten film, i think it is very well directed by Anatole Litvak. Henry Fonda gives a fine performance as the doomed fugutive, who barricates himself in an attic room while the police tries to make him surrender and come out. During the night he thinks back on the events leading up to a murder, and the situation he is in now. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, interrupted by scenes where the police try in different ways to make him come out. Vincent Price plays an evil magician with whom Fonda has a dramatic encounter, Price is both smarmy and unplesent in this role, and he plays very well. Both Barbara Bel Geddes and Ann Dvorak are good in their roles as a naive young girl, and a more down to earth woman. The photography by Sol Polito is very good, giving it a wonderful noir sheen, also the sets by Eugene Lourie are intriguing, giving the film a dark, dirty look, that at the same time is glossy, but filled with low key images that makes shadows on the walls. This was an american remake of a french film by Marcel Carne called Le Jour Se Leve, and it is by no means as inferior as many filmguides might lead you to think, its more dramatic and has more background musik. The original film is intense in a restraind way, more poetic while the remake goes more out for dramatic effects, and is more hard boiled. The Long Night uses almost the same screenplay as in the original, ecept for the ending which is different. The story is grim and gloomy, but i think this is one of the more visually dynamic american films from the 40s, very well directed by Anatole Litvak, no camera tricks were used in the scene where Price performs his magic show, Litvak wanted the actor to learn to make tricks from a real magician, so he could make a realistic magic performence. This film is a minor gem.

This was a very cool film. Henry Fonda did an excellent job as a man who is hiding from the law. Vincent Price plays the guy that gets killed by Henry Fonda at the very beginning. Almost the entire film is flashback, which explain why Fonda is in this predicament in the first place, and how it came to be that he killed Price. A great suspense movie.

This romantic noir set in some nameless small rust belt city just after the war has a really great cast - Henry Fonda, Vincent Price, Barbara bel Geddes, Elisha Cook Jr and Ann Dvorak - awesome set design and photography, and is based on a powerful French film directed by Marcel Carne from a few years earlier, LE JOUR SE LEVE, but somehow doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts. At the very beginning of the film, we have Cook as a blind man walking into his apartment building and hearing a gunshot and a man (Price) falling down the stairs. Police soon figure out that it's Fonda, a factory worker, holed up on the top floor. Price is dead and the cops try to get Fonda out, first by cajoling and then by shooting, and the rest of the film consists of flashbacks showing his romance with Bel Geddes and his confrontation with Price, a stage magician and womanizer who she claims at first is her father.

The sets, as I said, are terrific; they're by the Russian-French designer Eugène Lourié, and when you add his work to the screenplay based on a French original, and the Russian-born Anatole Litvak as director, it's no wonder that the film has a more "European" flavor than most American productions of the time. Fonda's apartment building in particular, in which a good chunk of the film takes place, and the square on which it sits, would look very much at home in a pre-war French "class" film. There's a great "doomed" noir feel to it throughout, and Price and Dvorak are awesome, but Fonda's playing the same character he played a million times and the whole theme (guy goes nuts because he finds out his girl actually - horrors - slept with another man, and slimy Vincent Price at that) is hard to take now. I hate hate hate calling things "dated" but the morality of this one surely is; it's very much influenced by the virgin/whore dynamic and seems at times more than a little laughable. Then again, the fact that it makes the sexual act so obvious in some respects puts it ahead of its time. I suppose one had best talk it up to the typical sexual confusion and repression of most American cinema in the period, and let it go at that.

All in all worth it for the performances I mentioned and the truly spectacular look of the thing; Dmitri Tiomkin did the music which is appropriately longing and wistful.

A gunshot rings out as a blind man (Elisha Cook, Jr.) tap-tap-taps his way up a flight of stairs in an apartment building. A well-dressed and well-wounded man tumbles out of a third floor apartment and rolls down the stairs. THE LONG NIGHT begins where most crime thrillers end - with a murder - and through a series of flashbacks it unravels and reveals its story. Henry Fonda plays an Average Joe conveniently named Joe Adams who has an average girlfriend named Jo Ann, played with sweet innocence by Barbara Bel Geddes. After the smoke clears a bit we're propelled into the story proper when Joe interior monologues `How can I explain what I don't understand myself?' In 1947 even a war vet (looks like Joe was a sergeant in the infantry) couldn't growl a `Get away from here and leave me alone!' to a hallway full of police without expecting a bit of tommy gun and sniper fire. Director Anatole Litvak will bring us back to Joe's bullet ridden apartment now and then for a cigarette until a photograph or a stuffed bear trigger yet another flashback.

Chain smoking and brooding doesn't seem to help clarify things much for Joe, but the movie is conventional enough. Joe returns from the war and gets a job as a sand-blaster in an unnamed, heavy industry town somewhere in Pennsylvania. Litvak hints a bit about the edges that THE LONG NIGHT is a story about class in America, but that aspect of the movie is never developed. Joe's a regular working man with modest, if any, dreams when he meets Jo Ann. Their sweet twosome develops into a suspicion filled ménage à trois with the appearance of Vincent Price, a traveling magician with a dog act and a sharp-talking assistant played by Ann Dvorak. Price's Maximilian hides his demented self behind a glib air of sophistication and faux refinement. In short, he dazzles the naïve Jo Ann, who properly enough knew him before she met Joe. For a while Ann Dvorak's Charlene, one of those tough-talking dames with a heart of gold, threatens to turn THE LONG NIGHT into a messy ménage à quatre. Fortunately, though, this movie and the French film it was based on, 1939's LE JOUR SE LÈVE, keep things on track. Tragedy or redemption will be realized through Joe and Jo Ann.

The Kino disk has a nice text/film clips set of extras. One feature goes into a great bit of detail on Eugène Lourié's set design, and another highlights the similarities between the American movie and the French one that influenced it. The print shows a little bit of un-restored wear. It's bad enough to distract the purists but it wasn't so bad that it pulled me out of the movie. The movie itself was okay. Even without learning about the miniature sets, forced perspectives, and suchlike the movie would still look like it was shot on a big soundstage and after a while it made me feel a little claustrophobic. Even though I think Price injected the right amount of slightly hammy menace his character and the movie called for, Maximilian was a little preposterous. Without him, for - or maybe because of - all of Fonda's earnestness and Bel Geddes' little girl charms this one would have been edging on the dreadful.

A simple, tightly-told story with amazing art direction, sets and photography. Effective, hammy acting all around adds to the mix to make a very enjoyable short movie. The disc supplements are an entertaining and informative icing on the cake.

"The Long Night" is a remake of French director Marcel Carné's "Le jour se lève" (1939) that seeks to reproduce the French film's poetic realism, often nearly replicating its production design. A man stumbles out of an apartment, down the stairs, and dies. He's been shot by Joe Adams (Henry Fonda), a friendly factory worker, who then barricades himself in the apartment. As a crowd gathers outside, and the police contemplate their next move, Joe recalls the events that led to this situation: One day a young woman named JoAnn (Barbara Bel Geddes) walked into his place of work to deliver flowers. The pair discovered that they not only share a name but that they grew up in the same orphanage. Joe fell head over heels for JoAnn. But he discovered that she is somehow involved with a sleazy magician named Maximilian (Vincent Price).

At 1 hour and 38 minutes, "The Long Night" feels about a half-hour longer than it needs to be. It dwells too long on melodramatic conversations between Joe and JoAnn. In fact, it dwells too long on everything. JoAnn is saccharine. Vincent Price is a wonderful actor, but he is doing nothing more than a caricature here. Maximilian is unfortunately two-dimensional. We know little about the man who is preying on JoAnn and who will be Joe's undoing, beyond that he is a creep. Henry Fonda gives a strong performance. Unfortunately, that does little to engage the audience, because Joe is not very likable. He's socially awkward, friendly but often obnoxious without intending to be, and not very bright. A good character for a character actor -not so good for the viewer.

Production designer Eugène Lourié tried to recapture the French poetic realism of Marcel Carné's film, down to duplicating some sets. It's obviously not always original, but the combination of sets, miniatures, and rear projection that create the factory town in which this self-consciously proletarian melodrama play out are beautiful to look at. If the action bores you -and it will- try looking at the environment. In the end, "The Long Night" is just too long and too sentimental, with an overbearing sappy score, a dreadfully dull naïf, and an underwritten villain. But it is lovely to look at and worth seeing if you're a big Fonda fan. And I don't want to forget to mention Ann Dvorak's turn as Maximilian's embittered ex-assistant Charlene, which is also a bright spot.

The DVD (Kino 2000): The print is not perfect. There are some specks and other flaws, but it is quite watchable. Sound is okay. Bonus features are a comparison to two scenes from "Le jour se lève", a text essay on the production design with illustrative photos, and a Photo Gallery of 18 still images. The comparison offers two clips from "Le jour se lève" (1 minute each), one of the opening scene of the shooting and the other of the scene where the couple meets, with the corresponding scenes from "The Long Night" for comparison. This is very short but worth seeing to understand how closely the production design was replicated. The essay on the production design is also worthwhile. There are no subtitles available.

This was just bad casting of two otherwise fine actors who had no chemistry together. It would be like matching Clint Eastwood and Julianne Moore - they just belong in different genres.

Vincent Price is a self conscious actor always throwing a wink to the audience as he hams it up, and as bad guy he's an effective psychopath for that reason. But in this one, you don't really get an idea of why he's a bad guy except for being boorish. And that doesn't play well opposite Fonda, who always plays a repressed good guy character who might snap to the point of slamming a door but not kill someone. He always seems to be on the verge of breaking into his final speech from "The Grapes of Wrath." Neither character is well drawn, and the conflict over a woman seems contrived.

Watching Fonda and Price was like watching a movie spliced together from two different films.

It is wonderful to discover forgotten gems and this is such a title. Too bad the producers, Kino Video, could have taken time to produce better sound. On Chapters #5 & #16 the sound cuts out on front speakers when using surround sound and comes only from the back. Very annoying. Kino Video offer a disclaimer sayin thisis due to the age of the film....bull. It is due to someone cutting out the sound when the film was being reproduced. I hope others will take time to write Kino Video...someone should be horsewhipped. Otherwise the picture quality is super.

Because nothing else was on TV, I began watching this movie; after all, film noir I had never seen, Vincent Price, Barbara Bel Geddes, Elijah Cook Jr. How bad could it be, even if Henry Fonda was in it?

After 20 minutes or so, when my ribs started hurting from gales of incredulous laughter, I found out.

A flashback takes our angry WWII vet to before the war when he had a proletarian worker's factory job (making tractors?). A young buxom peasan..I mean orphan girl shows up needing directions to the executive offices where she is delivering lunch in a cloth covered basket (?!?!)...

I understand this film was adapted from a French original, but it is a gut-buster straight from Moscow. Dreadfully out of touch with American idioms and totally formulaic, this ridiculous thing is obvious Communist propaganda. I highly encourage anyone who needs more evidence than the Venona Papers to watch this piece of sad-sack Soviet nonsense which was successfully infiltrated into Hollywood.

The cinematography is nice, though.