Night and the City (1950)
Directed by Jules Dassin

Film Review

Night and the City is the most fulsome expression of the stark fatalism that is film noir's most essential characteristic. The impossibility of escape from a seemingly pre-ordained descent into ruin and death is a curse that hangs over not only the central protagonist, a pathetic hustler with an insanely deluded level of self-belief (Richard Widmark at his finest), but most of the secondary characters, in particular a nightclub manager who delights in fleecing her customers (Googie Withers at her nastiest and most tragic) and her grotesquely Machiavellian husband (Francis L. Sullivan). It is the bleakest film that Jules Dassin made and there is good reason why this should be so. At the time he made the film, Dassin was conscious of the fact that he was living on borrowed time, his career as a film director all but over as he fell foul of the anti-Communist paranoia that was sweeping his native United States in the late 1940s.

It was to prevent Dassin from being summoned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities that 20th Century Fox top honcho Darryl Zanuck sent him to London to shoot Night and the City (which was very loosely based on a recently published novel by Gerald Kersh). Dassin's long and open association with the Communist Party was a guarantee that he would be placed on the Hollywood blacklist and be prevented from ever making another film in America. Such was the stigma associated with the blacklist (and the power of the American film distributors at the time) that Dassin would have had a hard job finding work in any other country and, as it turned out, once he had been blacklisted it would be five years before he was able to make his next film, Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), the French production that spectacularly revived his career just when it seemed to be over.

Night and the City opens (after some hauntingly melancholic shots of the London skyline) with a man (Widmark) running for his life. It is a sequence that is replayed, with an even greater sense of desperation and urgency, at the close of the film, and this may well have been how Dassin felt whilst making the film. Time was running out. He was a hunted man, pursued by insuperable forces (the agents of McCarthyism) that would soon catch up with him and annihilate him. No film that Dassin made is as relentlessly grim, as intense, as oppressively suffocating as this one. This is film noir at its purest and darkest - a film that positively revels in its sadistic portrait of a lone outsider being dragged down into Hell by the forces of the night, the foremost of which is human venality in its rawest state.

Night and the City is often compared with Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). The locations may be different (Reed's film is set in post-war Vienna) but the mood and cinematographic style (strongly expressionistic at moments of extreme tension) are remarkably similar in places, most visibly in the final sequence. Both films represent a high watermark for British film noir, and are arguably the only two such films made in Britain to rival the great films noirs being made in Hollywood in the '40s and '50s, including two directed by Dassin himself - Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948). The London that Dassin and his genius cinematographer Max Greene show us is not one that any tourist to the city would recognise. Shot mostly at night, Dassin's London is a festering dung heap of crime and corruption, where the unsuspecting and gullible are preyed upon by criminals who practice their vile arts brazenly, without fear of being touched by the law. The dimly lit streets, eerily deserted and strewn with terrifying blocks of shadow, carry a stifling stench of decay. Even familiar locations are transformed into something bleak and menacing as the nourishing light of day fades and reveals the city's darker, more insidious side. This other façade of England's capital city is reflected in the characters of the vermin that thrive in this crepuscular shadowland of vice and venality - the pimps, the touts, the brothel owners and full-on gangster types (including one supremely nasty piece of work vividly portrayed by Herbert Lom). It is within this putrid cesspool of iniquity that the eternal boy optimist Harry Fabian seeks his fortune - with results that are all too predictable. How can Harry be so stupid not to see that he is a minnow in a tank filled with piranhas?

The only sympathetic character is Harry's former girlfriend Mary (Gene Tierney was given the role by Zanuck to help stave off a bout of depression following a romantic upset). Mary is the only individual who appears on screen that is capable of a selfless act, the only one willing to help Harry to a safer, happier life. There is a fleeting sliver of hope towards the end of the film that she will succeed in this, but Harry's inability to grasp the one life-line that fate offers him seals his doom. The city, the nocturnal hell monster conjured up by Dassin in an orgy of nihilistic despair, is in Harry's blood - a disease thay carries the fetid odour of failure and a death which he cannot outrun. In the end there is nowhere left to run. Harry's human enemies become part of the twilight setting, feeding its growing malignancy, and it is the placid metropolis, no longer an impassive background but a creature of pure malevolence, that ensnares and crushes the life from his body

Night and the City is now regarded as one of Jules Dassin's best films (marginally eclipsed by his subsequent, better known heist movie Rififi), but when it was first released it was generally reviled by the critics and bombed at the box office. Even the slightly more upbeat British version of the film (which was a few minutes longer than the American version and had a completely different score) was lambasted for its pessimism and perceived lack of morality, to say nothing of its far from flattering portrayal of London. The grimmer American version (the one that is now mostly widely available and favoured by Dassin) was a dismal failure and this aggravated its director's inability to find work after his name found its way onto the Hollywood blacklist. Given that Dassin was prevented from overseeing post-production of the film in America (he could only communicate with the editors and composers by telephone, without the studio's knowledge), it is surprising how strongly Night and the City carries his distinctive signature, fitting seamlessly into his oeuvre between his earlier and later films noirs. The film was better received in France, where it was to become an important influence on the French New Wave, through its use of real locations, improvisation and natural lighting. How fitting that when Dassin made his next film it should be in France, the result being the defining example of French film noir.

Film Synopsis

An American living in London, Harry Fabian is a small-time con artist with big-time ambitions. So far his dreams of getting rich quick have led him nowhere and without his ex-girlfriend Mary to bail him out when things go wrong he would have ended up as food for river rats long ago. He presently scrapes by as a club tout, luring gullible tourists to a seedy nightclub owned by crooked businessman Phil Nosseross. The club is managed by Phil's wife Helen, who has grown to despise her husband and plans to leave him and start her own nightclub one day. Whilst touting, Harry gains the confidence of former Greek wrestler Gregorius the Great and immediately sees a way to muscle his way into the lucrative wrestling business, on which Gregorius's son Kristo has a complete monopoly. To start his business, Harry needs four hundred pounds, which he manages to wheedle out of Phil with Helen's connivance. In return, Helen expects Harry to help her obtain a licence for her dream nightclub, allowing her to finally escape from her loathsome husband. Convinced that Harry is romantically involved with Helen, Phil contrives a plan that will cause Gregorius to lose faith in him and allow Kristo to move in and destroy him. By the time Harry gets wind of this deception he is already a dead man...