Night and the City
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| Night and the City | |
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| Directed by | Jules Dassin |
| Produced by | Samuel G. Engel |
| Written by | Gerald Kersh (novel) Jo Eisinger |
| Starring | Richard Widmark Gene Tierney Googie Withers |
| Music by | Franz Waxman Benjamin Frankel (UK release) |
| Cinematography | Max Greene |
| Editing by | Nick DeMaggio Sidney Stone |
| Distributed by | Twentieth Century Fox Film Company Ltd. |
| Release date(s) | June 9, 1950 (U.S. release) April 1950 (UK release) |
| Running time | 101 min / USA:96 min |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Night and the City is a 1950 film based on the novel by Gerald Kersh, directed by Jules Dassin, starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney. Shot on location in London, the plot evolves around an ambitious hustler whose plans keep going wrong. It is considered a classic of the film noir genre. Director Dassin later confessed that he never read the novel the movie is based upon. In an interview appearing on The Criterion Collection DVD release, Dassin recalls that the casting of Tierney was in response to a request by Darryl Zanuck, who was concerned that personal problems had rendered the actress "suicidal," and hoped that work would improve her state of mind. The film's British version was five minutes longer, with a more upbeat ending and featuring a completely different film score. Dassin has endorsed the American version as closer to his vision.
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[edit] Critical reaction
The film has lately been noted as groundbreaking in its lack of sympathetic characters, the punishment of its protagonist, and especially in its realistic portrayal of triumph by racketeers neither slowed nor at all worried by the machinations of law. Critics of the time did not react well; typical was Bosley Crowther's June 10, 1950 review in The New York Times, which read in part:
"[Dassin's] evident talent has been spent upon a pointless, trashy yarn, and the best that he has accomplished is a turgid pictorial grotesque...he tried to bluff it with a very poor script—and failed...[the screenplay] is without any real dramatic virtue, reason or valid story-line...little more than a melange of maggoty episodes having to do with the devious endeavors of a cheap London night-club tout to corner the wrestling racket—an ambition in which he fails. And there is only one character in it for whom a decent, respectable person can give a hoot."
Crowther also singled out the climactic wrestling scene -- a scene often praised by contemporary critics -- for special wrath:
"...if any more cruel, repulsive picture of human brutishness than this is ever screened, this writer has no desire to see it."
The film was first re-evaluated in the 1960s, as film noir became a celebrated concept, and it has continued to receive laudatory reviews to date. Writing for Slant Magazine, Nick Schager writes in the DVD review of the film "Jules Dassin's 1950 masterpiece was his first movie after being exiled from America for alleged communist politics, and the unpleasant ordeal seems to have infused his work with a newfound resentment and pessimism, as the film—about foolhardy scam-artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) and his ill-advised attempts to become a big shot—brims with anger, anxiousness, and a shocking dose of unadulterated hatred."
In the Village Voice, Michael Atkinson notes "...the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook."
The film was remade in 1992 starring Robert DeNiro. See Night and the City (1992 film).
[edit] Cast
- Richard Widmark as Harry Fabian
- Gene Tierney as Mary Bristol
- Googie Withers as Helen Nosseross
- Hugh Marlowe as Adam Dunne
- Francis L. Sullivan as Phil Nosseross, Silver Fox Club
- Herbert Lom as Kristo
- Stanislaus Zbyszko as Gregorius the Great
- Mike Mazurki as The Strangler
[edit] References
- Harry Tomicek: Der Wahnsinnsläufer. NIGHT AND THE CITY von Jules Dassin, Kamera: Max Greene (1950). In: Christian Cargnelli, Michael Omasta (eds.): Schatten. Exil. Europäische Emigranten im Film noir. PVS, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-901196-26-9
