333 - Night and the City, United States, 1950. Dir. Jules Dassin.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

333 - Night and the City, United States, 1950.  Dir. Jules Dassin.

Harry Fabian is running.  Running through the streets of London.  Running at night.  Running at night in the city.

He reaches the building of Mary Bristol.  Runs up the stairs.  Runs to her apartment.  Runs inside.

He looks through her purse.  She comes out of the bedroom and catches him.  He smiles and says he was just looking for a cigarette.

She asks him how much money he wants.  He denies it.  She knows better.  She presses him.  He pulls out a brochure.  He has a ground-floor opportunity.  This is their chance.  He can finally make his fortune.  And take care of her.

They are together.  Harry and Mary are dating.  She is angry that he was gone for a few days, and she did not know where he was.  She had horrible images of him lying in a gutter dead somewhere.  And then she comes out to find him going through her purse.

But--and this is the part he is too slow to understand, too slow to understand really--she loves him.  She really loves him.

He is a lucky man to be loved by a woman such as her.  If only he knew it.

Mary works at The Silver Fox.  Her job is to get drunk men drunker.  Her supervisor, Helen Nosseross, trains the girls.  Shows them how to pick men's pockets.

Approach them warmly and offer them company.  Get them to buy you a drink.  Get them to buy a whole bottle of drink.  Whatever cigarettes they are smoking, tell them you smoke a different brand so that they will have to buy a new pack from the bar.  Here are some empty boxes labelled as chocolates.  Get them to buy you a box of chocolates.  Then say you will eat them later, when you are at home.  After we close, when they are at home, we will buy the boxes back from you for a few dollars.  You get your cut.  We get ours.  We recycle the boxes night after night.

Mary does her job and she does it well.  She sings at the club.  Sings the ode "Here's to Champagne."

Raise your elbow.  Down she goes.

Here's to La France.  Here's to champagne.
Empty your glass.  Fill it again.
Here's to the Frenchman who knew
What to do with the grapes that he grew.
Here's to the sun ripening the vine.
Here's to the bottles holding the wine.
Drink till the daylight is dawning.
Here's to tomorrow morning.

Mary sings.  The champagne flows.  The men are happy.  The money flows.  Philip Nosseross gets rich.  He gives his wife Helen a stole.  He always thought the wife of the owner of The Silver Fox should wear a silver fox.

But even though Mary is good at her job, she does not want to have her job.  She wants to settle down with Harry.  In order to do that, Harry will need to settle down from all his hustling.  And all his running.

Harry goes to the fights.  Not boxing but wrestling.  And the opportunity of a lifetime falls into his lap.

Kristo runs all of wrestling in all of London.  He would never allow anyone to try to compete with him.

But his father, Gregorius, a former World Heavyweight Champion in Greco-Roman wrestling, is visiting from out of the country.  Gregorius watches the match for a while and then stands up in protest.  This is not Greco-Roman wrestling.  This is something else.  Greco-Roman wrestling is an art form.  It is beautiful.  It is pure.  And it is more powerful.

Harry overhears the conversation and plays it to his advantage.  He approaches the father and son later outside and praises Gregorius as though he were a lifelong fan.  He repeats the point of view Gregorius had expressed inside to his son, and so insinuates himself into Gregorius' good graces.

Kristo is suspicious of Harry, but he cannot do anything about the fact that his father trusts him and comes to be his friend.

Harry goes to Phil Nosseross for money.  He has Kristo in his pocket!  He could make all of them rich.  Phil does not believe him.  His wife Helen, however, proposes a deal.  If Harry can raise two hundred quid on his own, Phil will match it.  Phil agrees.  Phil is drunk.  Plus, Phil believes Harry could never raise two hundred quid in a hundred years.

Helen gives Harry the money under the table.

Just as we discover that--wait a second--Harry and Helen had a past.  And she threw him over to be the boss's wife.  To get all that money.  And the silver fox.  And one day, The Silver Fox.  Oh, she promises Harry she will return to him.  After bilking Phil for all he is worth.

And we are never quite sure if Harry will be faithful to Mary or go back to Helen.  Or if he knows.  Or if he is even thinking about that.  He seems to be thinking only of his next deal.  And getting the money for it.  His emotions swing back and forth like an alarm clock bell clapper.  And he goes from enthusiasm to shock to anger to despair to enthusiasm again, all depending on what Phil or Helen have just said.  He is like a baby, reacting viscerally to the immediate moment without ever seeming to process it more thoughtfully.

And as such, Richard Widmark turns in an excellent performance.  Yes, it is a bit in the vein of his first role, the one that made him a star, as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947), with his maniacal cackle, but it is also different.  He draws from deeper reservoirs here.  He is more human.  More vulnerable.  More desperate.

Jules Dassin, our American director, films this one in London.  Darryl Zanuck sent him over to avoid the blacklist, and he asked him to get to work quickly, before pressure might be put on the studio to stop it.  Dassin worked so quickly that he made the film without having read the novel, an admission he makes years later in the supplementary interview.  But he follows the script scrupulously, the script that Zanuck gives him when he sends him to England.  It is already finished, written by Jo Eisinger.

Of the four Jules Dassin films we have just watched, it is the first one that can truly be categorized as a film noir, both stylistically and thematically.  It has the expressionistic lighting, with artificial and unusual light sources, the intense framing, including Dutch angles and exaggerated single-point perspective two shots, the high stakes, the love triangle with uncertain trust, the double crosses, the racketeering, the fatal protagonist, the femme fatale, the fatalism, obsession, desperation, and violent forms of death.

Of course Dassin himself knew nothing of the term when he was making these movies.  It was popularized later by the Nouvelle Vague in France.  But retroactively, it fits the pattern.

He shot a long sequence at dawn.

And in so doing, he reveals his genius.  His mastery.  The ending features a long sequence of running, hiding, conversations with multiple characters, interiors and exteriors, a bridge, the riverbank, an old river shack, a sidewalk with houses, and the build-up of tension the leads to the explosive climax.

Because Dassin was shooting at dawn, he had only one hour a day of suitable daylight in which to shoot the exteriors.  After that, he would have to shoot interiors and wait until the next day.

The studio asked him how many days he would need to shoot the sequence.  He said, If you give me a day of rehearsal to prepare for it, I can shoot the whole thing in one day.

He would just need six cameras.

They gave him six cameras.

He rehearsed rigorously.

The next day they finished the shoot.  Not only was it completed in one day.  It was also completed in one take!  Watch the film to appreciate more fully this impressive feat.

"That was quite a day. . . . A lot of shots--interior and exterior.  We were all feeling so triumphant. .  . . It was a nice experience.

Night and the City is a satisfying crime drama.  Featuring some strong filmmaking and solid performances.

Will Harry Fabian make it out in time?

Will he make it at all?


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I think Richard Widmark is one of the best actors who never, never was given the opportunity to show you his range.  He was quite content to make that his life.  I wanted to do Hamlet, because I had this high regard for what this man was capable of.

Zanuck called me, and he said, Do you owe me one?  I said, I sure do owe you one.  He said, I want you to cast Gene Tierney.  She's just had a bad time, a very unhappy love affair, and she's rather suicidal.  Nobody could imagine Zanuck's thinking like that.  So I said, Yeah.  Okay.  So we wrote in a whole love story.

When Rififi came out, they talked about how I was indebted to The Asphalt Jungle by John Huston.  I had not seen the film.  I still cannot see the connection.

It had nothing to do with film noir.  That term became more celebrated by the pre-New Wave movement in France.

I felt a need for a friendship.  Out of that grew characters who have this relationship to each other, dependence upon each other, professionally and in human terms.  I can't explain much more than that.  Sometimes we know not why we do.  It just happens.