The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the problem. The remake sandpapers flat all the roughness of the original, losing the grain and texture on the way.
Apart from that it’s remarkably faithful to the original. Same story – a man at bay in his attic room ruminates on the events that brought him to this sorry position. Outside the police are ready to shoot him if he won’t come out. Inside a man lies dead. In flashback we see solid, everyday working dude Joe meeting a sweet girl called Jo and wooing her. Joe and Jo seem destined for each other, sharing both a name and an orphanage background, and a fine romance appears to be in the offing. But then she has her head turned by a stage magician. And so Joe kills suave man-of-the-world Max out of pique? That’s what it looks like.
Henry Fonda is Joe, Barbara Bel Geddes is Jo, Vincent Price is Max – whatever else you might say all three slot nicely into their roles. Decent Henry Fonda, Bel Geddes in her debut in a role you can imagine being played by Joan Fontaine – a bit dithery. Price twirling the metaphorical moustache. Gender roles too – masculine Joe works as a sandblaster, feminine Jo is a flower girl, the altogether more indeterminate even slightly effeminate Max is a creature of the stage, louche and labile.
Anatole Litvak happily plunders the original for look and emotional beats, there are even framings and shots that have been lifted from Carné’s film. But there’s a folksiness here that isn’t present in Carné’s film. There, with Jean Gabin as the hero at bay, there was an earthiness which Fonda’s slightly cuter working man doesn’t quite achieve.
Best thing in this remake is Ann Dvorak, who is entirely successful as Max’s cast-off, the magician’s assistant who goes for Joe when she realises he’s also been left high and dry. Charlene is a loser making the best of a bad job, and Dvorak is every bit as good in the role as Arletty was in the French original.
It’s a nice looking film, with Litvak and DP Sol Polito aiming for an Americanised version of poetic realist lighting. It’s luminous and soft and suits the swooping crane shots Litvak likes to use for establishing changes of scene or timeframe.
Perhaps the most obvious deviation is in the character of Max. Price plays him as written, but it’s in the writing of Max that the film’s compromises become clear. In the French original, the magician was an older man who preyed on youth. Jules Berry, who played him, literally licked his lips while talking about his conquests. Price’s version merely suggests his perversion, making his death, when it comes, less deserved – Berry’s Monsieur Valentin really had it coming to him.
Misery loves company in both movies, though in the French original it was much more obvious that the Arletty/Gabin coupling was out of a need to have sex – the mercy fuck. Here, Charlene and Joe treat each other as consolation prizes.
I could go on. The Long Night isn’t a bad film but it doesn’t resonate like the original. Without shade can we appreciate light? Yes, insist RKO, who in their wisdom even tinker with the film’s original tragic ending. That’s not an improvement either.
The Long Night – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
