NIGHT AND THE CITY provides a shroud for the NAKED CITY.
Written: Jan 18 '00 (Updated Oct 04 '02)
Product Rating:
Pros: A driving, never-let-up morality play, with superb atmospheric photography of a London now gone.
Cons: Highly melodramatic moments and a romantic triangle that may strike modern viewers a bit ripe.
The Bottom Line: NIGHT AND THE CITY is an underrated, forgotten melodrama, full of atmosphere, energy and action. Richard Widmark, Stanislaus Zymbisko, Herbert Lom, Francis L. Sullivan, and Googie Withers are memorable.
NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) marked the end of Jules Dassin's career as a director in Hollywood. Mentioned in McCarthy black list records, deprived of a haven by the death of his benefactor Producer Mark Hellinger, Dassin was sent to London and told to lie low by Twentieth Century Fox Mogul Darryl F. Zanuck. While in Britain he used Fox's foreign finance credits to make a dark little melodrama, NIGHT AND THE CITY. Dismissed at the time, often dumped in the lower half of double bills, it disappeared for years, difficult to find even on television.
Today, following Irwin Winkler's mediocre 1992 remake with Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange, the original NIGHT AND THE CITY is considered by many a match for *NAKED CITY (1948) as Dassin's best film. It is reminiscent, in its milieu and atmosphere, of Neil Jordan's early success, MONA LISA (1986).
Based on Gerald Kersh's urban novel of the same name, NIGHT AND THE CITY tells the story of Harry Fabian, an American, in some respects like Dassin, who has retreated to London. Fabien makes his living as a shill, bringing rich American tourists to shady Soho nightclubs, where they get taken.
NIGHT AND THE CITY, despite its high contrast, atmospheric monochrome photography, is not really a film noir in the classic sense, nor is it intended to be. It is a transplanted morality play, in the form of a chase, about the kind of New York hustler that Bud Schulberg and Clifford Odets examined in What Makes Sammy Run or THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (Mackendrick, 1957). Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is a prodigal son who, in the course of a score of seamy adventures, describes a desperate circle through the London underworld to end up a dead man at dawn below a bridge.
Harry's thinks his ticket out of the Soho underworld is an old Greek wrestler, who has come to Britain to see his gambler son (Herbert Lom, in an excellent early performance). The wrestler is a long forgotten undefeated Greco-Roman Champion of the World (which the man who played him, 76 year-old Stanislaus Zymbisko, was at the time). The Champion blames his son for helping ruin the sport he worships. The son loves his father and wants to protect him from the dirty, false spectacle he knows wrestling has become. What Harry doesn't know is that when he provokes and promotes a grudge match between the Champ and a modern poseur (the giant Mike Mazurki) it will kill the old man, sending the enraged son's minions off to hunt Harry Fabian down.
The fight between Zymbisko and Mazurki, aided by a pounding musical score from Franz Waxman, is exciting . . . electrifying. It illustrates the whole history of wrestling, its rise and fall, and is worth the price of a rental in itself. The action comes to a tragic and poignant finale which leads Harry to his doom.
Along the way, Harry double crosses everybody, including the "singer" who might have saved him (Gene Tierney), his greedy boss (Francis L. Sullivan, an actor of Dickensian proportions), his boss's calculating wife (the brassy beauty, Googie Withers) and a host of other seedy characters. (Look for Kay Kendall, a future star, as one of "the girls" in the club.)
Though much smoother, not so brutal, very different physically, Harry resembles in an existential sense the memorable villain Eddie Garzah (Ted De Corsia) of Dassin's NAKED CITY. In that influential work, Garza, a failed wrestler, double crossed everyone and ended up falling from a bridge into New York Harbor.
NIGHT AND THE CITY's weakness, for some modern viewers, will be not be just its (beautiful) black and white photography but certain of the "intimate" scenes. Part of the trouble is inherent in the genre, and in the censorship of the time, but it must be admitted that Dassin had a weakness for naive, unrealistic romantic relationships, such as the triangle here between Widmark and Tierney and The Sculptor (Hugh Marlowe). Their scenes sometimes strike one as washed out, done by a different hand.
NIGHT AND THE CITY is a very Greek story, with overtones of Nemesis. Dassin, a product of the Yiddish and Group Theaters, came to Hollywood, like Orson Welles, via radio, and like Welles, struggled on in Europe during the 1950's. The black list got worse, and it was years before he made a comeback film, *RIFIFI (1956), in France. That led him to the sympatica Greek, Melina Mercouri, who made them both a success in NEVER ON SUNDAY (1962).
Mercouri and Dassin married, lived in Greece (where she was regarded as a national treasure), and produced a number of films together, the best of which is TOPKAPI (1966), but Dassin directed just one other American film, an unsuccessful black remake of John Ford's THE INFORMER (1935), also the story of a double crosser who is followed to his death. It was called UP TIGHT (1968), and shot on location in Cleveland, Ohio!
But Dassin could not work his charm again. UP TIGHT bombed.
The mother of my son-in-law, a German woman who often vacations in Greece, tells me that Jules Dassin, a very old man now, can be seen in cafes on the docks of Piraeus, still planning movies, ones that will never be made.
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UPDATE . . . UPDATE . . . Since I wrote this review, RIFFI 2000, a restored version of his 1955 French classic, has appeared. Dassin, at age 89, took an active part in the restoration. A Survivor!
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