Night and the City

Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) is a true original. It’s a film noir, but transposed to London. Perhaps because I’m familiar with London, there is an immediacy about the film – the milieu seems familiar: the small-scale thieving and rackets that used to go on in Soho, and probably still do. It resembles film noir in several respects:

• A wonderful cast of eccentric character actors, including two professional wrestlers
• Filmed almost entirely at night
• A breathless pace, so you feel as if the action is happening in real time (in fact there are some curious tricks with the timing: Mary Bristol has the time to open her own night club seemingly the very day she is given a permit (which turns out to be false).

But unlike most film noir, there is a real character here, not just stereotypes. While Humphrey Bogart as a private detective remains a figure of fantasy (however appealing), Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is all too believable. He is a larger-than-life young man on the make, willing to cut corners and to defraud friends and family if there is a chance of realising his dreams of vast wealth. He starts the film trying to borrow money from his girlfriend, and ends up stealing all her savings. He lacks any ability to temper his dreams, and his ideas continually overwhelm him. He spends the entire film running away from earlier deals that went wrong. He is not unlike Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock: a similar character who dreams of being bigger than he is. Greene’s wonderful depiction of a seedy resort full of small-time crooks busy trying to defraud and outwit each other.

The success of the film is due in no small measure to the characters: Francis Sullivan as overweight night-club owner Philip Nosseross; Googie Withers as his wife, ready to steal her husband’s money if it enables her to break free and to start her own club; Stanislaus Zbyszko as Gregorius the wrestler – and he really was a champion wrestler; Herbert Lom as Kristo, a suave criminal boss.

Plus, the script is wonderfully sharp:

Phil Nosseross, owner of the night club, when he hears his wife is going to set up in business with Harry Fabian: You don't know what you're getting into.
Helen Nosseross: I know what I'm getting out of.

The depiction of women is fairly standard. There is a good woman (Gene Tierney) and a bad woman (Googie Withers) and we know within the first five minutes of the film that the good woman cannot really be Harry Fabian’s girlfriend – it can’t work. Instead, she will fall in love (she already has fallen in love) with the man upstairs, Adam Dunne. Adam is everything that Harry is not. He cooks. He is responsible. He thinks about what Mary Bristol wants. They end the film in each other’s arms. Actually Mary sings in one of the night clubs, but we aren’t invited to think too much about that part of her life.

Helen Nosseross, by contrast, lives fully in the night club underworld. She runs the night club and trains the young women. She is not above stealing money from her husband, and happy to go behind his back to finance her independence. We are shown very clearly that a woman seeking independence is a dubious activity. The fact that she is surrounded by much bigger criminals than her is neither here nor there.

After the film, we are left with images of Harry Fabian running for his life. The tragedy, as Mary Bristol points out at the end, is that we admire Harry’s enthusiasm, his wish to make good, but we are appalled by his inability to reflect on what he is doing.

Mary Bristol: Harry. Harry. You could have been anything. Anything. You had brains ... ambition. You worked harder than any 10 men. But the wrong things. Always the wrong things ...