Grade: D+
Synopsis: A veteran (Henry Fonda) rivals a stage magician (Vincent Price) for the affections of a girl (Barbara Bel Geddes).
The Long Night is just that. It’s long. With an hour’s worth of plot stretched into 101-minutes, this is a tired melodrama masquerading as a film noir that wastes the talents of its leads.
Henry Fonda is good as a frustrated veteran in a performance that evolves into a variation of his turn as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Barbara Bel Geddes is a bit cloying at times in this, her film debut, but she’s passable, and Vincent Price steals the picture as an egotistical stage magician.
Sol Polito’s cinematography is nice and goes along way toward giving the film its film-noir connotations, but the script lacks any real edge and director Anatole Litvak lets things drag on far too long. How many shots do we need of Bel Geddes fighting her way through the crowd in the finale? And really, that part where she gets knocked out by a bicycle? That’s just silly.
That said, if you’re a big Vincent Price fan, you might want to give The Long Night a look, as he really does steal the show, but everyone else can, and should, skip it.
