NIGHT and the City is one of the great London films. Directed by Jules Dassin and released in 1950, it captures the dark, seedy underbelly of the English capital like few motion pictures before or since.
It’s not just the shady alleys and dirty side streets that are bathed in darkness either. The film is awash with murky men and dubious women all scrambling to make a living or at least keep their heads above water in the big bad city.
Like all good film noir excursions into the seamier side of society, the whole thing is peopled with low-life chancers and loose-moral tricksters all out to squeeze their adversaries out of the picture by whatever means necessary. The people are desperate, the settings dingy and the tone relentlessly downbeat. In that sense it’s a grim, fatalistic film but at the same time it's a tremendously entertaining one.
Fast paced, complicated and shot with a painter’s eye for detail, Dassin’s film (adapted loosely from a popular Gerald Kersh novel) also boasts one of the least likeable leading men in cinema. In Harry Fabian, a get-rich-quick petty scamster with all the moral fortitude of a cornered sewer rat, we’re given a remarkably mean-spirited figure to root for.
Richard Widmark, a man for whom meanness seemed to come easily on screen, delivers a career best performance as this hateful conman who’s out to make his name in postwar London.
“I just want to be somebody” he moans desperately at one point and that desire to claw his way out of the gutter by whatever means pushes him on through an exhausting race through the city's back streets.
Stuck in a dead-end job luring gullible tourists into a seedy gentleman’s club run by the slimy Philip Nosseross (Francis L Sullivan) and his mean old wife Helen (Googie Withers), he dreams of landing one big hustle and busting out of the back streets forever.
Supported by his loving girlfriend Mary (Gene Tierney) he becomes a pro wrestling promoter and muscles in on the crime syndicate of Kristo (Herbert Lom). Needless to say his big plan collapses around his ears with grimly predictable results.
Night and the City is a film steeped in the old-school dread of classic noir. Life is cheap and Dassin captures that beautifully in the East End locales and the joyless clubs where desperation and loneliness hang heavy in the air.
Widmark is astounding as Harry, a pathetic creature driven by greed and a manic passion for success. It’s a high energy, possessed performance that must have been exhausting for the actor to maintain. And from Tierney’s beautiful, if misguided, lover to the clutching old chancer essayed by Googie Withers, this is a film laden down with brilliant character actors doing their thing to great effect.
Dassin nails the utter hopelessness of it all. Targeted by McCarthy’s House Of Un-American Activities Committee for a suggested Communist party connection, he found himself blacklisted and wouldn’t work for a full five years after this masterpiece appeared.
