Night and the City (1950)

Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), a penny-ante crook who is forever going after the big score, gets in far over his head when he attempts to become a wrestling promoter. To do so he crosses mid-level crook Philip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), Norreross’s scheming wife (Googie Withers), his foolishly faithful girlfriend Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney), wrestler “The Strangler” (Mike Mazurki), and mob boss Kristo (Herbert Lom).

Director Jules Dassin, in the midst of being blacklisted, wanted to show a hellish London nightscape, and he does. Shooting at night and yet making everything visible, Dassin produced a fabulous looking feature, filled with sickness and despair in every frame and yet beautiful. You have to go back to Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Hawk’s The Big Sleep to find a Noir shot so well.

The acting is as good, but then it has a great cast, and all of them are at the top of their game. Widmark, Teirney, Sullivan—all of them spectacular. It’s embarrassing to see Herbert Lom in those Pink Panther films after seeing what he could do here. And they all had such deep characters to play with.

Yet with all that talent, all that skill, I don’t love Night and the City. I like it, but I should have loved it. And the problem is Harry Fabian. He’s a great character, but that’s not enough. This is a hard film to write because Harry is not only unlikable, but he is so in such a measly kind of way that I never cared about anything that happened to him. And that’s a problem, but it is only a small part of the problem. It’s that once I meet Harry, once I see what he’s like, everything that happens in the rest of the film is set. I could have written the story. Of course he’s going to fail, and of course he’s going to betray everyone, and of course he’s never going to “be someone,” and it is so clear that there is no point to watching the film outside of those twisted night shots. There’s no moment of wondering where he will mess up or who will get him. I am not simply referring to the ending—this is Noir after all so doom was more or less a given—but every step along the way. I knew what he was going to say and to whom he was going to say it and where he was going to go and how each of his moves would snap back on him. I knew because that’s the only way it could work for Harry. I kept wishing they’d made Mary the lead so that there might be a few mysteries; after all, it isn’t clear what Mary will do every moment. Or maybe if something really new and strange was tossed into this environment. But the story we get is the story Harry had to have and that story is as predictable as any film story has ever been.

This is a great world with great characters brought perfectly to life. There just isn’t a great story here.