Night and the City

Rating R Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Herbert Lom, Francis L. Sullivan, Hugh Marlowe Directed by Jules Dassin Publisher Criterion Collection External Links Criterion Collection

Harry Fabian is always running, if not to then most certainly from. Only occasionally does he know the difference.

Harry (Richard Widmark) is the protagonist of Night and the City (1950), a flawed but nonetheless interesting transitional work from director Jules Dassin. And like Harry, Dassin's transition occurred when going to met coming from.

Beginning his career in the early 1940's, Dassin quickly traded making short subjects at MGM for directing features at Twentieth Century-Fox. Most of these early films are little more than training exercises, the work of a talented and ambitious but dramatically vague young man. His first important film, the aptly titled Brute Force (1945), applied noir techniques to the prison melodrama. Like Brute Force, his next important film also had the good fortune of helping to initiate a genre. The Naked City (1948) took the new semidocumentary style and wedded it to the police thriller. The result was the prototype for every police movie and cop show since.

Just as Dassin was beginning to hit his stride, though, a past affiliation with left-wing causes made him a target for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Shortly after completing Thieves Highway (1949), studio boss Darryl Zanuck thought it might be a good idea to get his hot young director out of town. Dassin was quickly packed off to London to make Night and the City. The move would prove to be the greatest transition point in Dassin's career. At this moment, he would go from American to exile, from contract director to European independent.

Melding the semidocumentary style of The Naked City and the noirish mood of Thieves Highway, Night and the City is a rather odd duck. Filled with the intense emotionalism of the noir yet set within a stereotypical notion of a repressed England, Dassin settles for a view of London that at times seems like Los Angeles with kippers and stout. The result is sometimes unsettling but just as often filled with a dark tension. When Widmark's hyperkinetic "player" butts up against the cool machinations and repressed countenance of a nightclub boss (Francis L. Sullivan) and his good-for-nothing wife (Googie Withers), you can can't help but wonder if his fire will melt their ice, or will they be the ones to extinguish his flame.

Night and the City is a story of plot and counterplot, deception and self-delusion. Like most noirs, the story is little more than a rack on which to hang an existential tragedy. Harry is a smalltimer who makes his living by steering out of towners to a nightclub where they will be fleeced by the management. In Harry's world, the con man is king. Unfortunately for him, he hasn't even ascended to that plateau. He's nothing more than a shill for the real con artists. Harry does have two things going for him. He has a ferocious energy and he has forgotten where he left his morals. The first will show him the way out; the second will cause him to lose that success the moment it is within his grasp. Harry's great irony is that the one thing he can do better than anyone else is to destroy himself.

Night and City is filled with a number of incidental pleasures. Cinematographer Max Greene does an exceptional job of capturing the fatal tinge of London's underworld and Franz Waxman's score finds the balance between the high-pitched emotions of the night and the quietly repressive mood of the city. And several of the performances, particularly Widmark, Sullivan, Withers, Herbert Lom, and professional wrestler Stanislaus Zbysko, are perfectly in key.

Off key, though, is Gene Tierney as Widmark's girlfriend, Mary. It isn't that she's bad; she's just superfluous. At the time, Tierney was suffering from a suicidal depression so Zanuck asked Dassin to write her in. Unfortunately, her character feels as arbitrary as that sounds. Mary is simply too nice and too smart to ever be caught hanging around with this no-hoper. Because this relationship never rings true, Harry's reach for nobility in the last moments of the movie simply makes no sense.

Night and the City signaled the end of more than Dassin's American career. As he took up the life of journeyman director in Europe, his films became less specific, more flaccid. With the exception of his masterpiece, Rififi (1955), the remainder of his films would reveal a director who was never quite comfortable where fate had landed him. Although he would have a number of popular successes, particularly Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964), his later films were missing the relentless drive of his studio work. His American films show an incipient social commentator on the rise; his foreign work came across as travelogues shot by an enlightened tourist. Standing squarely at the nexus point of this transition, Night and the City simultaneously reveals the artist Dassin had been and the one he was about to become.

Criterion Collection has released Night and the City with a pitch perfect look. Using the original nitrate camera negative, this transfer reveals the full weight of Greene's chiaroscuro lighting and some exceptional depth of field work. It is hard to imagine that Night and the City has ever looked better than it does here. Also included is a recent short but charming interview with the 93 year-old director, a much earlier one from French television, a commentary track from film scholar Glenn Erickson and a reasonably wide ranging essay Paul Arthur.