La lunga notte

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.

A well directed, well photographed little known gem of a film.

Great role for Quinn who would have made a great Mike Hammer. His primitive face and huge hands seem prepared for instant violence.

In spite of being a low budget film, the directing, acting and photography seems superior than that better known B classic 'Detour'. Gene Evans and Charles Coburn always took their character roles seriously and seemed incapable of bad performances. The lovely ballad that plays over the credits 'Once' is appropriately used throughout the movie and deserves to be a standard.

The scene where a bound-up Peggie Castle crawls to a bound-up Quinn (to get her hands on his hidden pistol under pretense of a final kiss) would have made a great paperback cover for a Spillane Novel.

I see by the credits that this gem of a noir was filmed by Franz Planer, who did many classics. I've seen most of the Mickey Spillane movies, and this one has the most distinctive photography. The director Victor Saville seems to have been a better producer than a director. he also had an affinity for Mickey Spillane; he produced nearly all the Mike Hammer movies in the 1950s.

The cast is outstanding; besides the great Anthony Quinn, there are several lovely girls, the best being Peggie Castle. Even the trampy woman at the beginning who gets a rude kiss-off from Quinn plays her small part to perfection.

The doctor who treats Quinn's hands at the beginning has a familiar face. I've seen him in many TV shows as well as movies.

It's impossible to make a bad movie when you have Charles Coburn and Gene Evans backing you up.

Girls, guns, fists, and fedoras abound in Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled yarn about an amnesiac (Anthony Quinn) who can't remember if he stole a quarter mil from his boss (a doddering Charles Coburn) or killed the town's D.A. ...not to mention the fact that his girl went and got plastic surgery, so he doesn't know who she is, either. Could it be Venus (a smoking hot Peggie Castle) or one of the other babes who swarm around the craggy Quinn like moths to a flame when he's not dodging bullets? Far-fetched fun for fans of obscure fifties noir with as much sex & violence as the Code allowed -and some of it is quite surreal, especially a bound & gagged Castle crawling across the floor as if in an S&M fever dream.

Director Saville and leading lady Castle filmed Mickey Spillane's I, THE JURY the year before (in 3D, no less) but that "Mike Hammer" mystery was more of a sucker punch thanks to Biff Elliot's powder puff PI. It's too bad he and Tony hadn't traded films...

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.