Michael Draine's Twisted Vista
The Long Night
(Kino) DVD
A 1947 remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se
Lève (Daybreak, 1939), Anatole Litvak’s The
Long Night transforms French Poetic Realism
into American noir at its most gritty and
fatalistic.
The Long Night relates the flashbacks of Joe
Langford (Henry Fonda), a lovestruck blue
collar worker turned killer. In a captivating
screen debut, Barbara Bel Geddes plays an
ingenue torn between the earnest Langford
and the pathological liar Maximilian (Vincent
Price), a nightclub magician. Maximilian’s
miniature dog act provides moments
of priceless camp, subsequently rendered
poignant by Maximilian’s compulsion
to force a fatal confrontation with his
unassuming rival.
The film abounds with images of pain and
loss: the despair written in Fonda’s eyes
as he stares at himself in a bullet-
riddled mirror; a WPA billboard reading
“Peace and Prosperity” amidst a blasted
industrial landscape; Elisha Cook,Jr.
as a blind veteran stumbling upon
a murder victim; the weary resignation in
cleaning woman Queenie Smith’s voice
as she explains that her cat hasn’t been
the same since its mate was run over
by a garbage truck.
The sumptuous textures and gray
scale of Kino’s print showcase cinema-
tographer Sol Polito’s Expressionistic
command of light, shadow and smoke.
Strobing during camera pans comprises
the only visible compression artifact.
The supplement includes an excerpt from
Le Jour Se Lève, which reveals noir
elements waiting to be expanded upon in
the American remake.
The slightly ragged sound makes a few
lines of dialogue difficult to catch, making
the absence of subtitles an unfortunate		Music Review Index
omission. The sound drops out of the front
channels in chapters 15 and 16.
An overlooked RKO classic, The Long
Night casts a jaundiced eye upon the		Twisted Cinema
American class system.
published in Schwann's DVD
Advance, October 2001
www.kino.com