Night and the City (1950) Jules Dassin’s Great British Neo-Noir (Review)

Renowned and respected in his own time, but outside of the critical fraternity Jules Dassin is teetering on being forgotten in ours. Between Arrow Films, Eureka and now the BFI, the pinnacle of the UK home video market are doing their very best to bring him back into relevance and to date Night and The City is the latest and possibly best part of this joint effort. One of the earlier and better Neo-Noirs shot in a London that became iconic in the Ealing comedies.

Richard Widmark stars as Harry Fabian – a tout for a local club and a hopeless dreamer forever chasing the next fortune making opportunity. The latest of which sees him insidiously collaborate the traditionalist Father of an influential mobster (Kristo (Herbert Lom)) to corner London’s Wrestling market. Getting there won’t be easy with his fellow residents of the London underbelly exhausted with his almost daily visit asking for money in his latest “can’t fail” scheme. Boss Philip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan) Both belittles and takes pity on Fabian, stating that he’ll double it if he can raise £200 making this latest project a reality. Night and the City is incredible in its story density as from this initial set up, Fabian becomes the centrepiece in a chessboard of betrayal.

A sub-genre that operates through well-defined parameters, Dassin adopts a military-like precision that soars above petty contrivance. Using the underworld as a community envelopes London with a massive personality-filled full with yet more characters. There are his co-workers at the club his touts for, the streets upon streets of vividly coloured characters and the score of people Fabian turns up on the door of begging for money, Night and the City’s founded upon layers of texture and character.

Texture and character are nothing without the performances to back them up and with countless familiar faces from British stage and screen, the film is in great hands. The aforementioned Sullivan, Lom and Widmark and rounded out by Googie Withers and noir mainstay Mike Mazurki. Remarkably, Widmark plays this exact same role in American Neo-Noir Pickup on South Street, making these two films remarkable companions to one another. In Fuller’s film, the sense of community was comparable but Widmark was the street-wise person that Harry Fabian dreamed of, in Dassin’s London Widmark is a naïve and aspirational man in unfamiliar waters, a man consumed by that very ambition.

Upon Fabian wronging the underworld, a precision in pulling together a multi-stranded narrative emerges. Other films that clean themselves up as neatly as this could be accused of overt contrivance, but here Dassin uses deliberate storytelling inherited from Gerald Kersh’s original novel to depict how far-reaching this seedy underbelly is. Community when you are part of it, frightening machine when you are against it. Just as Fabian (Widmark) coveted money to better himself that very same money becomes an instigator in shifting his home into a town out for his blood. A clenching fist leaves no respite and, more importantly, no stones unturned or holes to escape from. Plot holes would tear this neo-noir to shreds, so, good job there isn’t any.

This was produced around the time that Ealing was flying the flag for British cinema. In many Ealing movie, comedy or otherwise, the filmmakers made London feel like a living, breathing entity. Not the megalopolis it is now, but a small place full of character. Having that context for a London which turns the screw on one man elevates this man on the run noir more than it would it was produced in any other city at any other point in cinema history. Looking at it with hindsight it becomes fortuitous, and maybe it was, but looking at it as the perfect storm for a neo-noir turns the Night in the City into the definitive British Neo-Noir, a status that isn’t challenged until the 1980s and Mona Lisa.

On this BFI Blu-ray release, both American & British cuts are featured and both are a masterwork on every conceivable level save for the melodramatic scores by Benjamin Frankel and Franz Waxman. The extras are slim but that affords both versions of the film to co-exist and a 4K mastering that heightens the striking Chiaroscuro cinematography. Hyperbole has no place when discussing Night and the City, it is one of the Great British noir and a towering achievement of 1950s cinema.

Thanks for reading our review of Night and the City

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