Great flick. One of Widmark's best.
Posted on 08/13/2023 7:13:07 PM PDT by Rummyfan
Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) begins and ends with a man running through darkened streets. When we first see the man it looks like he's in the kind of trouble you can't escape, and by the end of the film we know it for certain. There isn't a moment when we don't know we're watching a film noir, though Dassin insists that he didn't have a clue what that was when he made it, or the three very noir films that preceded Night and the City – Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Thieves' Highway (1949). Even the title boils the essence of noir down to four simple words.
Dassin was in exile when he made the film after being blacklisted in Hollywood, named in testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He'd been sent to London by Daryl F. Zanuck with a copy of Night and the City, a novel by British writer Gerald Kersh, though he admits in a video interview included with the Criterion reissue of the film that he wrote the script without ever reading Kersh's book.
It really doesn't matter, as the story that both Kersh and Dassin tell is solid tragedy – a man with ambition undone by his character, with the added misfortune of setting about his desperate plans in a hard, unforgiving place. This would usually be some big American city, but Dassin's movie takes place in London, an ancient city whose pitfalls and traps seem all the more deadly as they've been in place for many more centuries.
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Great flick. One of Widmark's best.
Fine flick though as far as Widmark is concerned I’ve always been a fan of Tommy Udo. One other thing, I’ve never considered Naked City to be film noir. More a really good police procedural. You don’t meet the bad guy Ted deCorsia until the last half hour. But you do meet some sleaze balls like Howard Duff’s character along the way.
Widmark's Tommy Udo is one of the all-time best baddies.
Great movie featured this month on the Criterion Channel, a great streaming channel for classic movies.
I have seen Rififi many times and never relized it was a Dassin movie. It is one of the best ever.
BRUTE FORCE with Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn (a gritty prison picture, 1947) and THE NAKED CITY (1948) are also on there this month. Both directed by Dassin.
The second one I’m a little vague on but I clearly remember Burt Lancaster in BF. it was his second picture.
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