(Check out the previous essay in this film noir essay series here: Fury)

1950’s Night and The City was the final film that esteemed American noir director Jules Dassin ever created for the Hollywood system. By 1948, he was already butting heads with a burgeoning HUAC crowd, and after being outed by the traitor, and his friend, Kazan, as a communist (which Dassin was not), his studio pushed for him to complete the final film in his contract in London and promised it would be his last film (he subsequently made dozens of pictures for the European market before returning to U.S, years later where he made independent features). Once in London, Dassin was set to adapt the 1938 pulp novel by Gerald Kersch, Night and the City, but had no time to read the novel and instead adapted a screenplay from the book summary on the back cover (much to Kersch’s ire, but assuredly not to Dassin’s critics and fans who found the final filmic project great in its own right).

The film shows the exploits of a racketeer always out for a quick buck, but who rarely has the good luck to capitalize on his schemes. The man is Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) who is shown running away from a creditor to whom he owes five pounds. The city is shown intensely gray and foggy, the cinematography of a arthouse drama more than a crime film. The city streets are teeming with life in the darkness of the night, almost a somber blue the sky permeating its essence through the black and white film stock. Down streets unpopulated, figuring Fabian an outcast from society proper, the man runs until he makes it to the home of his spurned fiance Mary (he only shows up when he needs money and the romanticism of their early relationship before his descent into the underworld is wholly spectral to the reality of the present circumstances). Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney) goes outside and gives the money to the man who is waiting in the road below and Harry is again on his way out moments after attempting and failing to hook her into a get-rich quick scheme he has concocted.

Later, we will see Fabian enter a wrestling match where a man is making a scene about the wrestling of the day being only a corrupted shade of its past glories. Fabian hears that the man is one Gregorius the Great (played by the real old-time wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko), a famous Greek wrestler, a legend, who has come to visit London to see this new wrestler The Strangler (the character actor and one-time professional wrestler Mike Mazurki) and found his skills wanting. Gregorius leaves infuriated, but Fabian capitalizes on the moment by sneaking out into the concessions and pretending to complain about how terrible the match was to the attendant. He demands his ticket money be returned just at the moment when Gregorius enters the room, impressing the man. Fabian then pretends he knows Gregorius and is a huge fan of his work, thereby making Gregorius into an unwitting sucker who falls hook, line, and sinker for Fabian’s plans to take Gregorius’ son Nikolas and create his own mark on wrestling promotion in London.

Fabian goes to his girlfriend’s boss, Phil Nosseross (the Hitchockian Francis L. Sullivan, a powerful screen and stage actor who coincidentally attended the same Jesuit school in his youth at Stonyhurst in Lancashire as Charles Laughton, only a year after Laughton graduated), at his burlesque club and asks for a loan from the man. He refuses to give Fabian 400 pounds, but Fabian persists and asks if Phil will match 200 pounds if he can secure it by the end of the night. Phil agrees, then Fabian goes on his doomed quest to find the money, eventually dealing with Phil’s wife Helen behind his back to get the money. Phil learns of their agreement later and of their romantic involvement, which incenses the man and eventually leads to Fabian’s downfall as Phil holds back his financial backing at the most crucial moment.

Fabian has all of London wrestling tied up, but he has no money to move the deal along any further, and a catastrophe at the film’s climax deals him an even worse hand as his major star and one man keeping the mob bosses at bay is killed in the ring during a brawl with his nemesis the Strangler. Phil prophesied earlier to Fabian that “you’ve got it all, but you’re a dead man Fabian, a dead man.” A sentiment he will later mouth himself as the underworld closes in on him as he waits in the shack of the last faithful underworld contact he has, the old boat rental woman Anna: “All my life I’ve been running. From welfare officers, from thugs, my father…. I’m a dead man Anna.”

Assuredly, he is found and decommissioned, just another death of another morally crippled man. The film was seen as exceedingly dark and brutal by critics and audiences upon its release. The only characters who are not morally corrupt turn out to be Mary and her neighbor, and always hopeful potential suitor, Adam Dunne. The protagonist is a man corrupted by visions of riches and power to do unnecessarily dangerous things and put himself into morally compromised positions. He is killed at the film’s denouement and no great heroic statement is made about beating the odds or the underground, which will inevitably swallow one up when they dare enter that domain. Finally, the racketeers and mob bosses who own wrestling promotion in London end up solidifying their position and making damn sure that no one muscles in on their territory. In the end, they are the only true victors and the system, though a black market one, still prevails against the small man crushed under its cogs.

It would be another four years before the creator (Dassin) of some of noir’s most gripping tales and most powerful aesthetic statements like Brute Force, Naked City, Thieve’s Highway, and Night and the City would be able to find work again. But when he finally did begin his next film, it was in France, in 1954, on the 1955 film noir classic, and quite possibly his greatest achievement, Rififi.

Cody Ward

[Next up: Pickup On South Street]