Movie Review – Night and the City

Night and the City (1950)
Written by Austin Dempster, William E. Watts, and Jo Eisinger
Directed by Jules Dassin

For years, American film industry censorship worked to soften the edge of noir films. There would always be a good cop, or crime would always punished severely. This caused the stories to lose their bite present in the source material, where writers wrestled with big existential questions and faced the cruelty of life in the modern era. The United Kingdom, while not exempt from moralizing about films, allowed for a more nuanced version of noir to be presented on the screen. At the time of its release, Night and the City was noted for being a film without sympathetic characters (save for maybe one woman). Some critics of the time saw the film as “trashy” and “pointless” in reaction. I take a different stance; this movie points out how desperately people live in the struggle for survival exacerbated by capitalism.

Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is an American hustler in London. He is always searching for ways to get rich quickly, often by manipulating others into joining his schemes. While trying to pull a small-time con at a wrestling match, Fabian encounters Gregorius, a veteran Greek wrestler, in town to watch his son Kristo’s wrestling exhibition. Gregorius is disgusted at what he perceives as a tasteless perversion of his beloved sport. Fabian overhears this and makes sure the old wrestler hears him demanding his money back at the box office for how disgusted he was. 

The con man feigns a love of traditional Greco-Roman wrestling and befriends Gregorius, eventually offering up the idea of a classical wrestling organization to put on exhibitions in London. Fabian has to borrow money from Phil Nosseross, a local nightclub owner whose wife is having an affair with Fabian. At first, the business plan seems sound, but Fabian continually pushes his luck, and the fallout will have devastating consequences.

This was my first encounter with Richard Widmark. I tried watching Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street over a decade ago, but my head was not in it then. What I love about Widmark is how he feels, unlike a traditional leading man. There’s a sliminess to his performance, which his physical appearance accentuates. He has a slight overbite, a double chin, and a heavy brow, and his eyes can sometimes be a little buggy. 

These features ground him as a real person, not an expertly polished Hollywood ornament, and thus, I believe he is Fabian, the conniving weasel of a character. He plays the character with extreme pathos so that when the dreadfully tragic finale comes around, we both sympathize with him and believe he’s harvesting the fruits of his horrible manipulations.

The film’s title highlights two critical themes explored: Darkness and Urban Life. In the mid-20th century, the City dominated people’s lives. The Suburbs were certainly bubbling over, but The City still served as the best setting for stories of conflict. They were dense environments where people of differing backgrounds were forced to cohabitate to try and survive without turning on each other. 

The fact that cities continue to exist and still function is a testament to the human will to make them work. Even many American urban settings, for all their decay & evident neglect, are still functioning reasonably well (for now). London is also one of Western fiction’s archetypal cities, making a beautiful setting for this seedy noir. This London is a form of Hell, where no one can escape, much of the same post-war rubble of The Third Man lingering ever-present in the background. The visuals of the setting are a reminder of how broken the modern world was to these people.

The Darkness comes from the lack of loyalty anyone has to each other. The most honorable character in the film is Gregorius, the Greek immigrant who only wishes to stay true to his precious wrestling. He’s not out to screw anyone over or get rich by doing harm. Everyone else is pretty unscrupulous. Fabian is not an exception; he clearly comprehends the rules of this society and tries to angle them to his own benefit. Everyone around Fabian wants to fuck him over, so can we blame him for wanting to do it first. But it’s hard to be mad at them when Fabian has stolen from & betrayed them. The film looks at the consequence of living in a hyper-individualistic cutthroat society. When you are scrambling for basic needs or living with a hunger to consume that will never be satisfied, then you lose your humanity. You view others as non-humans, as the worst misanthropes today call them “NPCs,” which leads to a justification of your cruelty in your mind. 

Director Jules Dassin was a victim of this rancorous mindset, having fled to England upon realizing he would be forced to testify before HUAC as part of his communist witch hunts and likely blacklisted. America is a country predicated on making sure people constantly see each other as rivals for survival, and thus, everyone is an enemy of one degree or another. While not a social realist film due to its noir trappings, Night and the City is the closest I’ve seen to the two genres crossing over; maybe only Kurosawa’s Stray Dog comes closer. Fabian’s visits to his contacts throughout the city, all of whom are struggling to make ends meet, is a tableau of people on the edge of society, not part of the rebuilding of British society in the wake of the war.

This is not the London you will see as a tourist; no recognizable landmarks, except maybe the London Bridge, are present. This is the London of the fringe, where people live out the last years of their frantic, dangerous lives. By the end, Fabian is cowering in alleyways, begging acquaintances to hide him, only to find that most of them are willing to give him up for a few bills. Night and the City exemplifies the core elements that draw people to noir, a portrait of a world mired in structurally imposed misery. The people who make morally good choices seem to get screwed over as much as those who make bad ones. And it is all executed so beautifully.