Title: Night and the City
Year: 1950
Director: Jules Dassin
Country: UK
Language: English
Director Jules Dassin knew he was about to be blacklisted in Hollywood due to the House of Un-American Activities Committee anti-communist witch hunts at the time, so he fled to London, where he made Night and the City (1950) for Twentieth Century Fox. I first saw this film 11 years ago for Michael Boyce's International Cinema class and I'm revisiting it now due to the commencement of Noirvember. Is the film as good as I remember it?
A small-time grifter and nightclub tout named Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) takes advantage of some fortuitous circumstances and tries to become a big-time player as a wrestling promoter.
Fabian, played as a slime ball by Widmark, is the classic film noir character; a tragic antihero that is doomed from the outset, driven by an ever increasing desire to get ahead in life. Dassin’s cinematographer Max Greene emphasizes the character's increasingly hopeless situation by shooting in claustrophobic dive bars & inescapable alleyways.
Night and the City transforms a familiar London setting into an unseemly environment that perpetuates an atmosphere of dread. It's a sordid, alternate backdrop that easily reminds one of another great noir in The Third Man. Dassin's use of shadow and documentary-like realism made admirers of even his harshest critics. Love the story or not, one cannot deny its technical merit.
Dassin's masterpiece is a film that improves with every viewing. Night and the City is a substantial creative achievement that deserves to be studied in every University that has a film studies major.
No comments:
Post a Comment