An amnesiac finally learns his true identity...as a murder suspect. And he doesn't even know whether he is guilty...An amnesiac finally learns his true identity...as a murder suspect. And he doesn't even know whether he is guilty...An amnesiac finally learns his true identity...as a murder suspect. And he doesn't even know whether he is guilty...
Shirley Patterson
- Carol Shay
- (as Shawn Smith)
Bruno VeSota
- Eddie Packman
- (as Bruno Ve Sota)
Jack Chefe
- Bank Employee
- (uncredited)
John Cliff
- Heckling Workman
- (uncredited)
James Conaty
- Man Leaving Hotel
- (uncredited)
Edgar Dearing
- Foreman
- (uncredited)
Sayre Dearing
- Croupier
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- Quotes
Johnny McBride: Nobody knows where I come from, not even me.
- ConnectionsReferenced in Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane (1998)
- SoundtracksOnce
Written by Harold Spina and Bob Russell
Performed by Dolores Donlon (uncredited) and Anthony Quinn (uncredited)
[Played over opening credits]
Featured review
Spillane's misogyny distorts noir about amnesiac battling corruption
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.
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.
helpful•2019
- bmacv
- Jul 5, 2002
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Details
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $1,500,000
- Runtime1 hour 34 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.75 : 1
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