Night and the City

I've been watching a lot of these old noirs lately, many of them featuring Richard Widmark. In the past few weeks, I've seen him as a pickpocket in Pickup on South Street, a government health official in Panic in the Streets, and finally a desperate low-level conman with dreams of something larger in Jules Dassin's unbelievably fantastic Night and the City. Turns out I saved the best for last. This isn't just the film with Widmark's finest performance; it's one of the all-time classic noirs, an incredibly dense story of bad luck, shady schemes, double crosses and, um, Greco-Roman Wrestling.



Widmark stars as Harry Fabian. He works part-time drumming up business for the sleazy gentleman's club owned by Francis Sullivan, where his part-time girlfriend (Gene Tierney) works as a singer. But he mostly spends his time running - from debtors, from responsibility, from the affections of his lady friend, from time itself.

Fabian's always in a hurry, and Widmark brings to the role a neurotic, almost unhinged demeanor. Fabian's a guy with a lot of great ideas but he lacks the patience to carry them out properly. He just can't see all the angles, so he's doomed to failure.

But this time, Harry's come up with his greatest scheme ever, a can't-miss proposition. He's befriended an old Greek fighter named Gregorius (real former Greco-Roman wrestling champ Stanislaus Zbyszko) who just happens to be the father of the hood/promoter that runs all the wrestling games in London.

That man is Kristo, and he's played by Herbert Lom years before the actor would gain international fame as Inspector Dreyfus in Blake Edwards' Pink Panther movies. He's absolutely note-perfect here, displaying next to no emotion when dispatching his enemies, but on the verge of tears whenever he speaks to his father.

And for a while, it seems that Harry's plan will work. He swindles Sullivan and his frigid trophy wife Helen (Googie Withers) out of seed money, sets up his own gym and begins promoting his first big-ticket fight, a grudge match between Gregorius' son Nikolas and local wrestling champ The Strangler. But, alas, Harry's success is not meant to be, and events spiral out of control, eventually leaving him destitute, alone and on the run for his life.

In John Huston's brilliant The Asphalt Jungle, the characters meet tragic ends because of some personal vice. For example, Sam Jaffe's Doc Reidenschneider is captured by police after lingering in a diner to watch a young girl do the jitterbug. Dassin's take on this material is decidedly more fatalistic. Harry fails through no real fault of his own. During the brawl that leads to the cancellation of his first and only big-ticket event, he tries to intervene and save everyone's hides, but The Strangler's manager holds him back. "There's no stopping it now," he says.

All through the film, people repeat to Harry his utter inability to alter the future. When he tells his girlfriend about his latest get-rich-quick scheme, she tells him to abandon his dreams. When he travels all around London begging his friends and underworld associates for a loan, they all refuse him. One man, who makes a living by running a ring of panhandlers, offers to set him up in the begging business but not to loan him money for anything else. As Sullivan relates to Harry in the film's most famous monologue, "You've got it all, Harry Fabian, but you're a dead man. You're a dead man, Harry Fabian."

Many other noirs have picked up this sort of nihilistic attitude. Even the currently-playing Sin City dabbles in fatalism, particularly during its final act. Characters at first struggle against the bad lot they've been cast, but eventually come to accept and even start to appreciate their lot in life. I was also reminded of something like Goodfellas or De Palma's Scarface, delighting in showing us the early successes of the lead characters just so their painful fall from grace will be even more cataclysmic and brutal.

And, of course, this sort of character-inundated London crime film has echoes in the work of guys like Guy Ritchie to this day. As in his movies, a vast variety of oddball criminal types are thrust together by chaotic circumstances, forced to ply their trade in some manner of cooperation with one another despite abundant mistrust and disrespect. The only difference is, Dassin doesn't fall back on snappy one-liners or music video trickery to entertain.

And there's just something about Widmark in the final act of Night and the City that outdoes any of its followers...He's sweaty, he's wild-eyed, he's scared but there's also a serenity to him. After a lifetime spent trying however he could to make a fast buck, to get out of the streets and earn a decent living, Harry finally accepts his place in the food chain. A born loser, he only escapes from the cycle of crime and cowardice by embracing it.

Dassin relates this powerful material through a mastery of cinema style rarely seen in 1950, when the film was released, or now. Just as Fabian is endlessly inventive with his plots and manipulations, so Dassin continually finds new and exciting ways to depict the seedy world of London criminals. In one amazing sequence, we follow a car as it motors around the city, informing stool pigeons to keep their eye out for a wanted man. In another, a bare-knuckled fight determines the fate of Harry's entire enterprise. In another, Lom's Kristo watches from a bridge as his henchmen scour London for any sign of Harry Fabian.

Night and the City is a movie filled with memorable imagery and dramatic intensity. It's one of the most engaging and impressive noirs I have ever seen.