Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 6 August 1947 by Select Productions, Inc. Released through RKO Radio Pictures. New York opening at the RKO Palace: 16 September 1947. U.S. release: 6 August 1947. Australian release: 26 February 1948. 8,902 feet. 99 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Joe Adams (Fonda) is a soldier just returned from wartime service, who returns to his small Pennsylvania town and has trouble adjusting to dull civilian life. He takes a job as a sandblaster and meets a pretty girl, Jo Ann (Barbara Bel Geddes) and soon falls in love with her. Both are orphans and sympathetic to each other's background. Complications arise when he learns that she had been seeing a suave magician, Maximilian (Vincent Price). Joe seeks out the magician's assistant, Charlene (Ann Dvorak), who warns him that Maximilian is a charming seducer. Maximilian visits Joe and claims to be Jo Ann's father and that he wishes Joe to stay away from her.NOTES: A re-make of the 1939 French film "Le Jour Se Leve" directed by Marcel Carné, with Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Jacqueline Laurent and Arletty in the roles now played by Fonda, Price, Bel Geddes and Dvorak respectively. This marks the film debut of Miss Bel Geddes, daughter of famed stage designer/producer Norman Bel Geddes ("Dead End"), and star of numerous Broadway productions including Elia Kazan's enormously successful 1945 "Deep Are the Roots".Negative cost: around $2 million, all of which was lost when the film failed at the box-office.COMMENT: The public hated this movie. The critics likewise, all of us (including me) comparing it unfavorably to Le Jour Se Leve. A recent re-examination of this film shows that we were all more than a little hasty in dismissing it so glibly. In fact there's much to admire from Litvak's superb control of the teeming crowds of onlookers to Barbara Bel Geddes' luminous portrait of the too- romantic Jo Ann and Ann Dvorak's suitably cynical study of the disillusioned Charlene. Fonda is perhaps too up-market an actor to play a mill-worker adequately. Certainly he's too well-spoken and has far too sophisticated a presence for the rather naive hero of this story. You never get the feeling he is a real Joe, but just an actor, struggling to play the part. The same criticism can be applied to Vincent Price. A difficult role it's true, but his interpretation is just too mannered, too contrived, too artificial. Aside from these two key performances, however, everyone else is fine.Litvak, his photographer and set designer have really let themselves go with the Hakim Brothers' money. As a mood piece, "The Long Night" would be hard to equal. One major change that I like is Litvak's use of aggressive police and a huge chorus of onlookers who shout the hero their support. I also thought the heroine's struggle and eventual meeting was suspensefully and realistically constructed, leading to a satisfying, upbeat conclusion.OTHER VIEWS: "The night is long that never finds the day." This opening quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth failed to impress contemporary critics who likened this version most unfavorably to the original. Certainly Jules Berry's performance would be difficult to equal. Perhaps wisely, Vincent Price doesn't even try, acting on a superficial one-note throughout, but this does make it hard to accept the film as a whole, despite the radiant presence of Barbara Bel Geddes as the heroine, and Ann Dvorak giving one of her most impressive performances ever as the cynical Charlene. Henry Fonda is badly miscast. The role really called for a Gary Cooper or a James Stewart, someone who could portray the intensity of a simple common man with naive ideals. Fonda could do this later in his career, but here he is too mannered and artificial to be convincing. The director has more success in marshaling his vast crowds, using his famous signature crane shots to great effect. - JHR writing as George Addison.AVAILABLE on DVD through Kino. Quality rating: Ten out of ten.

tieman64 This is a brief review of "Decision Before Dawn", "Sorry, Wrong Number" and "The Long Night", three films by director Anatole Litvak.Born in the Ukraine, Litvak's career as a film-maker took him from Russia to Germany to France and eventually to Hollywood, where he became a contract director for Warner Bros. He directed "Decision Before Dawn, regarded as one of his finest pictures, in 1951. It tells the tale of Happy (Oskar Werner), a German soldier who, in 1944, defects and becomes an Ally double agent. At the command of American Colonel Devlin (Gary Merrill), Happy embarks on a mission deep behind German lines."Decision Before Dawn" was one of many Hollywood films released in the 1950s which attempted to rehabilitate Germans as "now our allies". Like the similarly themed "The Big Lift" (1950), it boasts superb location photography, Litvak filming in actual cities still scarred by war and still littered will real WW2 machinery. Whilst the film's promises of complexity are eventually betrayed, Litvak's establishing shots, handling of spaces and architecture, his grand outdoor vistas and a beautifully dour performance by Oskar Werner, elevate things tremendously. Werner would milk similar material in Martin Ritt's 1963 masterpiece, "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Today, "Decision Before Dawn" plays like a rebuke to Litvak's own "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" (1939), one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films.Released in 1947, and a remake of Marcel Carne's superior "Le Jour Se Leve", Litvak's "The Long Night" stars Henry Fonda as Joe Adams, a man who blockades himself in an apartment following the murder of Maximillian the Great (Vincent Price), a nightclub magician. Via flashbacks we delve into the circumstances which led to this crime.Typical of Litvak, "The Long Night" boasts audacious camera work. Litvak's whip-pans, cranes, clever forced perspectives and snaking cameras were novel for the era, and his locations drip with atmosphere. While beautiful in a clinical way, Litvak's visuals still can't match Carne's poetic realism and the gauzy romantic humanism which made "Le Jour Se Leve" so famous. Litvak's film – noirish and brooding – also ends on a note of optimism, a reversal of the Carne's more downbeat ending. The film was a financial flop.Litvak released "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948) a year later. A precursor to high-concept, modern thrillers, "Number" stars Barbara Stanwyck as Leona, a crippled woman who overhears a murder plot on her telephone. From her bedroom – the film's base of operations – Litvak's camera embarks on a dizzying quest to avert the crime, dipping into the past, different locations, through telephone lines and back out again."Sorry, Wrong Number" was based on a Lucille Fletcher radio play, which Litvak's aesthetic attempts to break free from. He glides from New York suites to State Island beaches to Manhattan skylines, but the film's print-oriented origins are hard to escape. Interestingly, Stanwyck's character is revealed to suffer from psychosomatic issues, and it is her very own flights-of-fancy, her constricting nature (epitomised by her crippled legs) which results in the film's central crime. Leona smothers her lover (Burt Lancaster), wants to make him as immobile as she is, a fact which pushes him into criminality. Throughout the film, Leona's stationariness is thus contrasted with the film's countless telephones and telephone wires, devices which seem to enable and amplify Leona's neuroses. Rather than connecting her to the outside world, these wires alienate Leona further, wrapping her up in paranoia and further illusions of control. Litvak followed "Number" up with "The Snake Pit", "Wrong Number's" thematic mirror image.7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Young Man With a Horn" (1950) and "The Clock" (1945).

MartinHafer I don't like remakes--and that is why I waited so long to watch "The Long Night". Originally it was a dandy French film ("Le Jour Se Leve") and I saw no reason to redo the film, as the original was quite good. And, after seeing it, I stick by my original opinion--there just wasn't a need to make this remake. However, I can understand why they made it, as folks in the States back in the 1940s did not watch foreign films--and when they saw this American version, it did seem original. But now with DVDs, Turner Classic Movies and Netflix, you should just stick with "Le Jour Se Leve".The film is a talky picture about a brooding guy (Henry Fonda), his sweetie-pie (Barbara Bel Geddes) and a completely bizarre blabber-mouth (Vincent Price). Fonda and Bel Geddes are in love but Price is determined to break them up--and push Fonda to the breaking point. The story is told through flashbacks and is similar to the Jean Gabin film--without the film noir camera-work and lighting. Also, the American version comes off as much talkier--much. All in all, not a terrible film at all--but not the 9 that the other film deserved when I rated it a couple years ago.

Spikeopath The Long Night is directed by Anatole Litvak and written by Jacques Viot and John Wexley. It stars Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes, Vincent Price, Ann Dvorak and Howard Freeman. Music is by Dimitri Tiomkin and cinematography by Sol Polito.A man is shot and falls down the stairs, as the police surround the apartment of the apparent murderer, Joe Adams (Fonda), a siege unfolds and Joe reflects on the circumstances that led him to this situation.Think we'll just about make it.A remake of Marcel Carne's La Jour se Leve (Daybreak), The Long Night is a sweaty and sullen film that also comes cloaked with noirish atmosphere. Essentially the plot is driven by a love triangle, but there is nothing remotely corny or melodramatic about this fact. Story is told via Joe Adams in flashback, and in some cases flashbacks within flashbacks, this format gives the narrative some real edge, a complexity that sidles up nicely to the troubled emotional state of Joe as he sits holed up in his cheap hotel room, chain smoking and pondering the hand that life has dealt him since returning from service in the war. There's intelligent asides in the writing involving the act(s) of killing, a skew-whiff expectation of womanhood and a dangled carrot by way of hope for the common man in a new dawn of Americana. Litvak already had Carne's excellent template to work from, his job here is to get powerful performances from his cast and let Polito work his photographic skills. In that respect it's a triumph for the director. Some have said Fonda is miscast, he really isn't and his tortured performance underpins the grim nature of the story. Price is at his magnificent best, all smarm and charm and rightly bringing the creeping ham to the character. Bel Geddes is sweetly enigmatic, the perfect foil for Fonda's confused emotions, and Dvorak has the tart with a heart portrayal down pat; with legs so beautiful they could start a war as well! Polito is the ace card, serving up some striking images in moody black and white, be it an industrial working class back drop of cement mixers and steel works, or filtered lighting of a stairwell, his photography perfectly marries up with the psychological depth pulsing from the human characters.The PCA pleasing ending stinks and annoys in equal measure, and we of course want more for Elisha Cook Jr and Charles McGraw than the secondary supporting slots they get, but this is still a fine movie that holds its noir head up high in a year that would prove to be one of the best noir years ever. 8/10