The Long Wait

If you liked Mirage, rent The Long Wait. It came ten years earlier, but it feels like a poor man's Mirage. Anthony Quinn stars in the film adaptation of Mickey Spillane's novel. He survives a terrible car accident, with amnesia and burned hands as his souvenirs. He has no memory of his past, but when he finds out he's wanted for murder, he has to work quickly to prove his innocence.

This is actually a pretty entertaining flick, with plenty of eye candy and good acting from Tony. The only detriments were the leading ladies in the film. They looked so much alike, I kept getting them confused, and their collective talent was maybe one tenth that of a normal actress. The only way I was able to excuse it was to believe they were all cast as favors to producers, and in the story, they all were supposed to look similar. Tony is trying to find a girl from his past, and he-and the audience-can't tell if she's Peggie Castle, Shirley Patterson, Dolores Donlon, or Mary Ellen Kay. I didn't really like being confused, but that was the point.

Charles Coburn adds a bit of class to the movie and somewhat makes up for the lousy acting of the four women. Really, though, it's Tony's show. Without him, it would be a terrible B-picture with low energy and bad pacing. Tony's incapable of giving a low energy performance, and he adds a fantastic spice to the tension-filled scenes with the ladies. And if you're wondering how many of the girls he romances, the answer is all of them. Want to rent it now?

Once the dreadful title song is over this proves a surprising but welcome departure by Victor Saville into Mickey Spillane territory, which shares with 'Kiss Me Deadly' a formidable foursome of females (one of whom actually tells the hero "Oh mister! I haven't been kissed like that for a long, long time!" and a sense of humour that somewhat disqualifies it as a bona fide film noir.

Anthony Quinn (who inevitably turns out to be called "Johnny" and finds himself surrounded by guys in big suits shooting at him) gains in assurance as the film progresses back in the days before winning his first Oscar turned his head.

The Long Wait is directed by Victor Saville and adapted to screenplay by Alan Green and Lesser Samuels from the Mickey Spillane novel. It stars Anthony Quinn, Charles Coburn, Gene Evans, Peggie Castle, Mary Ellen Kay and Shirley Patterson. Music is by Mario Castelnuovo- Tedesco and cinematography by Franz Planer.

Johnny McBride (Quinn) is a amnesiac who manages to get back to his home town of Lyncastle where he hopes to unravel who he is. But pretty soon he finds himself in a quagmire of trouble and strife...

Every once in a while I come across an instance like this, where a film noir picture's reviews back upon its release were savage, and yet today the more modern noir lover is mostly positive about the pic. In fact IMDb's rating sits currently at 7.2, which as the site's users will attest to, is pretty good going. So where we at with this Spillane revamp?

The complaints back in the day about it being dull and boring smack to me of writers back then not exactly understanding the noir ethos, though it's noted that there is the odd modern reviewer sharing the same complaint. It's a film very much erring on the side of bleak and moody, dabbling in the complexities of the human condition, and it's done very well, though the screenplay is hardly minus plot holes and is full of incredulous set-ups.

We also have to buy into Quinn being catnip to the dames, four of them no less! But Quinn does angry and broody very well, and he gets to do lots of both here. The aura of a town paddling in its own muck is evident, the amnesia angle merely an excuse to keep things on the side of murky, for it's imperative that we feel Johnny McBride's confusion and mistrust, and we do. All of which is framed superbly by Planer's (Criss Cross) photography, which never misses a chance for shadows and low lights.

With salty villains and sultry dames, violence and choice dialogue, and a few superb scenes (one sequence in an empty warehouse is stunning), this is very much a noir for noir lovers to sample. But with that in mind, these warnings should be noted, that as is often the way in noirville, the ending is divisive and the overt misogyny could well offend. 6.5/10

Mickey Spillane's "The Long Wait" stars Anthony Quinn, Charles Coburn, Peggie Castle, and Gene Evans.

Quinn plays Johnny McBride, who survives a horrible car crash but winds up with burned hands and amnesia. A clue leads him back to his home town where he, unbenownst to him, is wanted for the murder of the DA. And there seem to be people who don't want to ask too many questions. However, he learns one thing - a woman he knew back then, Vera West, who has left town, can tell him what actually happened.

Johnny also learns that rumor has it that Vera, to escape the bad guys, has had complete plastic surgery and changed her name - but she's back in town with her new identity. Johnny meets several women, but which one of them if any, is Vera?

Johnny proves himself a chick magnet as he becomes involved with each of these women, who work for a man named Servo - but Servo takes orders from someone else.

Unfortunately for the viewer, the potential Veras looked alike and it was hard to tell them apart. They weren't familiar enough to this viewer to be able to tell them apart.

The film has an amazing scene where a bound Peggie Castle crawls up to a tied-up Johnny, supposedly for a final kiss, but to get his gun. Stylish pulp for sure.

This is a real Mike Hammer type of story - dames, brawls, and misogyny.

Contemporaneous with the noir cycle came the rise of the cheap paperback, bringing lurid crime novels with provocative cover art to racks in drugstores and bus depots. Spearheading this pulp revolution were the scribbles of Mickey Spillane, several of which became films: I, The Jury; The Long Wait; My Gun Is Quick; and Kiss Me Deadly – the only indispensable title among them.

The Long Wait remains anomalous in that Spillane's thuggish protagonist, Mike Hammer, makes no appearance. Anthony Quinn hitches a ride in a car which promptly plunges into a ravine and bursts into flame. In the fire, he loses both his fingerprints and his memory. After two years working in an oil field, he's sent on a wild-goose chase to his home town, unaware that he's wanted for the murder of the District Attorney, who was prosecuting him for embezzling a quarter-million. His cauterized fingertips force the police to release him, but other parties want him dead. But he forges ahead with a two-pronged quest: to vindicate himself, and to find the girl he's told he once loved. She used to be called Vera – shades of Moose Malloy and Velma in Murder, My Sweet (Farewell, My Lovely) – but now she's...somebody else.

The four prime candidates for Verahood (Peggie Castle, Mary Ellen Kay, Shawn Smith and Dolores Donlon) become pasteboard targets at which Spillane can spew out his misogynistic venom. They're nothing more than scheming nymphos, throwing themselves at Quinn despite any prior arrangements they've made to insure their kept-women comforts. Inevitably they're terrorized and slapped around.

The movie's most visually arresting sequence (thanks to cinematographer Frank, or Franz, Planer) proves also its most sadistic: in an abandoned factory, lit with Expressionistic panache, Castle, bound with rope and under the muzzle of a gun, crawls across the floor to give Quinn a final kiss. Aficionados of film noir must, of course, grapple with the nettlesome problem of the femme fatale, the alluring but heartless Lilith who brings men gladly to ruin. But The Long Wait preserves an unregenerate, macho view of womankind that surpasses the merely dated or distasteful. It's a movie about the corruption of a small city that never questions the corruption of its own vision.