“The Long Night” (1947) is a film noir era police stand-off thriller built around flashbacks that show us how the killer landed in this predicament.

Melodramatic to a fault, it stars Henry Fonda, with Barbara Bel Geddes and Ann Dvorak playing two women of differing backgrounds who want him and what’s best for him, with Vincent Price as the dastardly wild card in that love quadrangle, playing a devious magician, no less.

Ukranian American director Anatole Litvak (“The Snake Pit,” “Anastasia,” “Mayerling,” “Sorry, Wrong Number” and “Decision Before Dawn”) turned out decades of stylish, professional thrillers and if he never quite reached the Andrew Sarris “pantheon” of great auteur filmmakers, his name above the title — even on an RKO production like this one — conveyed European panache realized on simple if not mundane subjects.

Fonda shows off his full range as an actor in playing a goofy lovesick puppy, moon-eyed in love, but suspicious and short-tempered enough not to take his new girl’s inattention lying down. When we meet this veteran, a sandblaster home from the war working at a steelworks in on unnamed city along the Pennsylvania/Ohio line, he is armed and trapped in his apartment, having just shot another man who tumbled down the stairwell.

As the local police department and sheriff’s department take turns riddling the place with bullets and blasting it with tear gas, Joe Adams remembers how he got into this fix, the crush on the florist Jo Ann (Bel Geddes, years before “Vertigo” and TV’s “Dallas”) that became a love affair, her connection to the oily snob Maximilian the Magnificent (Price) and both men’s fascination with Max’s former dancer/assistant Charlene (Dvorak of “Scarface” and “Merrily We Live”).

“Welcome Home Servicemen” banners decorate the streets, and Anzio and D-Day veteran Joe is happy go lucky because he has a steady job and he’s just met somebody he can plan a future with.

“You almost look cute,” he flirts (Fonda fashion, with a hint of “gee whiz”), standing there with those flowers like something growing” amongst them.

But the mysterious Max seems to be a third wheel in their love connection. He is tall, polished and provocative, and not shy about dropping a lie or a put-down when it suits his purposes.

” You know, I always find it rather amusing, these conceptions you simple men have concerning women.”

It’s only when Joe starts keeping company with the just-quit-Max Charlene that he gets a handle on this creepy competition for Jo Ann.

The John Wexley script has plenty of eye-rollers, from the lies that Max spins which quickly unravel to the “convenient” way Charlene takes a romantic interest in Joe and gallantly steps aside when his interest in his fellow orphan (also convenient) Jo Ann is renewed.

“The Long Night” is suffused with violence — especially that meted out by the competing law enforcement agencies — but sentimental to the core, from the blind veteran (Elisha Cook Jr.) who “witnesses” the shooting to the little neighbor girl who gets past police lines for her version of “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The crowd takes up the veteran’s plight as he survives having his apartment machine-gunned.

“Don’t try to play ‘dead’ in there, or you soo WILL be!” the coppers promise.

Price was already well on his way to the sophisticated, epicurean villains he’d make a speciality, eventually settling into horror. His early roles suggest Hollywood regarded him as an American George Sanders (“All About Eve”), born to be bitchy, droll down to his marrow.

The “While there’s life, something’s bound to happen” credo here has an optimism you don’t often sense in the cynical “Home from the war, facing the same old evils right here in America” messaging of a lot of thrillers labeled “film noir.”

The locals may know police overkill when they see it, but there’s nary a hint of a veteran’s possible PTSD triggered by the villain he’s confronting. Max is more snide and self-servicing than any sort of darker menace. He sees the naivete in play.

“Good heavens, do I have to apologize for superior imagination?”

The pacing isn’t great, with too many pauses by the jumpy, competitive police for Joe to lapse into flashbacks. But the production, an oversized street and crime scene overrun with interested spectators, impresses and the near-sophistication of this menage a quatre stand out in “The Long Night.”

And Fonda and Price make unexpectedly delicious foils — Tom Joad vs. Roderick Usher.

Polished as it is, like the gifted craftsman who directed it, “Long Night” doesn’t merit inclusion in any list of the great noirs of the day. It’s more sentimental than cynical, slow of foot, and we know John Huston, Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder wouldn’t have stood for that.

But Fonda and Price fans will still find plenty to relish in their parts in it.

Rating: TV-PG, violence, innuendo

Cast: Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes, Vincent Price, Ann Dvorak, Elisha Cook Jr., Moroni Olsen and Howard Freeman.

Credits: Directed by Anatole Litvak, scripted by John Wexley. An RKO release on Roku.

Running time: 1:40