The Long Night

Joe Adams is a factory worker. He is upstairs in his room and the police are below. A short while ago he shot a stage magician named Maximilian. He will not open the door. Through the night he waits alone in the room and goes back over it: meeting Jo Ann, what the magician was to her, what the man told him, whether any of it was true. By morning both the police and Joe have made their own decision. Anatole Litvak directs; a hundred and one minutes, with Henry Fonda as Joe and Vincent Price as the magician. The film is a remake of Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève of 1939. The American producers bought the rights to the original and had prints rounded up; the French film was thought lost for years and resurfaced in the fifties.