Night and the City (20th Century-Fox, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 10) my husband Charles and I watched an interesting if rather messy film noir on Turner Classic Movies as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” expansion from his usual Saturday night redoubt to Fridays as well. It was a 1950 film called Night and the City, directed by Jules Dassin from a script by Jo Eisinger based on a 1938 crime novel by British writer Gerald Kersh. According to Muller’s introduction, Kersh’s novel, also called Night and the City, was a loosely constructed set of anecdotes about criminal life in London built around the character of Harry Fabian (played by Richard Widmark in the movie), described on the novel’s Wikipedia page as “a morally reprehensible pimp determined to become the top wrestling promoter in London.” The film rights were bought by 20th Century-Fox with the intent of relocating the story from London to New York, but plans changed after World War II. During the 1930’s Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi’s finance minister and the only member of Hitler’s inner circle who was actually acquitted at Nuremberg, had pioneered the concept of “frozen funds.” Essentially he told companies that had earned money in Germany that they couldn’t take those funds out of the country; they had to spend them in Germany to benefit the German economy. (Sir Thomas Beecham made his 1938 recording of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Berlin because his bosses at EMI needed a project they could do there to take advantage of the frozen funds.) After the war the Allied countries paid Schacht the compliment of imitating him and slapping controls on their currencies, with the result that Hollywood studios had to make films in Britain and continental Europe to take advantage of their accumulated earnings. So Zanuck and line producer Samuel G. Engel simply moved Night and the City back to London and filmed it on location there.

Night and the City is a peculiar movie because at one level it’s an old-style gangster movie along the lines of Little Caesar or Public Enemy dealing with the rise and fall of a particularly nasty criminal. I’ve long suspected that 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck signed Richard Widmark in the late 1940’s because he saw him as another James Cagney (whom Zanuck had signed to Warner Bros. when he was head of production there), capable of playing both villains and, if not outright heroes, at least sympathetic characters. Zanuck’s first assignment for Widmark was to play the sadistic contract killer Tommy Udo in the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death, in which he pushed a wheelchair-bound grandmother (Mildred Dunnock) down a flight of stairs to kill her. That haunted him for the rest of his life; he once said that little old ladies kept coming up to him and hitting him with their umbrellas to get back at him. Widmark reluctantly accepted the role of Harry Fabian even though he wanted to play more heroic parts – which he did in his next movie, as a Public Health Service doctor tracing a potential plague epidemic through the New Orleans criminal underworld in Panic in the Streets. Fox also sent another American star to be in Night and the City: Gene Tierney, playing Mary Bristol (yet another instance of Hollywood during the classic era telling us we’re supposed to like someone by naming her after the Virgin Mother of God), a cabaret entertainer and Fabian’s much-abused girlfriend. According to the Wikipedia page on the film, “Dassin recalled 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.” (Tierney did indeed have a nine-year battle with mental illness that only ended in 1964, when she finished her last contracted film at Fox, married a rich oil man from Texas, and retired.)

Aside from Hugh Marlowe, there to play Adam Dunn, the good-guy rival to Fabian for Mary’s affections (and who’s shown as so hapless in the kitchen he actually burns a whole pot of spaghetti), the rest of the cast was filled with those marvelous British actors, including Francis L. Sullivan, Googie Withers, Herbert Lom, and professional wrestlers Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki. The plot casts Fabian as a hustler and con artist who hangs around sporting events and bars determined to latch on to potential suckers he and his associates can fleece. Fabian is also dreaming of creating a more or less legitimate sports business in between all the cons and using them to finance his operations. Previously he palmed off his previous girlfriend, Helen Nosseross (Googie Withers), on a fat and repulsive letch named Philip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), who married her and gave her a fur coat, expecting her to “put out” to him for it. The wrestling scene in London is monopolized by Hermes Kristo (Herbert Lom), who puts on staged matches that draw in major crowds. Kristo’s father Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko) is appalled at the putrid spectacle his son has turned wrestling into, and when Fabian watches as father and son have an argument, Fabian swoops in and offers to promote matches between wrestlers in the historically authentic Greco-Roman style. What Fabian doesn’t realize is that just about all his supposed friends and potential financial backers are really in Hermes Kristo’s pocket. Philip Nosseross offers to invest 200 pounds in Fabian’s scheme if Fabian can come up with another investor to match it. Helen secretly sells her fur coat to give Fabian the money in hopes of opening her own nightclub instead of having to settle for working for her husband at the Silver Fox, where not coincidentally Mary works as a singer. (Gene Tierney’s voice was doubled by Maudie Edwards, a British name if there ever was one.) Fabian attempts to play off his various associates against each other, promising Helen help in getting a city license for her club (in fact he gets one from a forger he knows, only the ink on its paper runs when Helen offers a drink to a police officer who stops by to make sure she has the license) while also promising Gregorius he will only stage legitimate wrestling matches.

But when Gregorius and Hermes Kristo’s star wrestler, “The Strangler,” get into a real-life fight at the gym where Fabian is running his bouts (under a grand new sign he’s ordered reading “Fabian Enterprises”), Fabian sees the box-office potential of a bout between old- and new-style wrestlers and sets about paying whatever it will take to get The Strangler into the ring with Gregorius’s protégé, Nikolas of Athens (Ken Richmond). For the first few reels we’re not sure whether to be rooting for Widmark’s character as a lovable con artist fleecing only people more crooked than he is or to loathe him as an amoral creep. Pretty quickly “amoral creep” wins out and the film ends up with Fabian literally running for his life as Hermes Kristo has put out a 1,000-pound offer to anyone who will kill Fabian for him. (Widmark said later he’d lost a lot of weight during the filming from all the running he’d had to do.) The film ends with Fabian pleading with Mary to turn him in, not to the law but to Kristo, so she can get his 1,000-pound reward and pair up with Adam at the end (though the alternate version released in Britain, which was seven minutes longer, made that a good deal clearer than the 96-minute U.S. version we were watching). Night and the City was made at a particularly perilous point in the career of its director, Jules Dassin. Zanuck had got word that Dassin was about to be named as a Hollywood Communist by Edward Dmytryk (one of the original Hollywood Ten who while serving his one-year prison sentence for contempt of Congress decided he shouldn’t throw his career away for a cause he no longer believed in anyway) and blacklisted as a result. So he assigned Dassin to this British-set and British-shot film to get him out of the country and allow him to work on the film undisturbed. Alas, the ploy didn’t work: Dassin was duly named as a Communist and blacklisted, and after Night and the City he didn’t make another film for five years; he later said he’d been reduced to couch-surfing at his friends’ places in Paris until he got a job offer from a French producer to direct a “caper” movie called Rififi (1955), which was a major European hit and re-established Dassin’s career at least on the other side of the Atlantic.

One thing that fascinates me about Night and the City is that Dassin made it two years after The Naked City, a New York-set police procedural that likewise was shot largely on location and took advantage of real-life locales in the city where it took place. According to Fox’s publicity at the time, Night and the City used 54 different London locations and only 14 interior sets. Dassin also said he’d never read Gerald Kerch’s novel until after he completed the film, and he also hadn’t seen John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) before he shot Night and the City even though he was often accused of stealing ideas from Huston’s film. Night and the City got poor to mixed reviews when it came out. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times slammed it; he wrote, “[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 mélange 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.” That actually makes Night and the City seem ahead of its time in that all too many modern films seem to glory in giving us only unlikable characters, and one of the most cynical aspects of it is that Hermes Kristo and the gangsters in his thrall all end up getting away with everything and continuing to pursue their lives of crime without that no-good American (in Kerch’s novel he was British and merely posing as an American) getting in their way. Night and the City is an odd movie in several ways; when I first saw it I couldn’t get the important plot point about the different styles of wrestling and how crucial they were. But it’s a quite good movie even though it’s also a rather lumpy one; Kerch’s original intent to do a kaleidoscopic portrait of the extent of London’s criminal activity survives at least vestigially in the film, and while some of the characters outside the main part of the plot (notably the drunken hag Philip Nosseross wills his entire enterprise to when he commits suicide after Helen leaves him, and the forger who refuses to shelter Fabian after he knows Kristo is bound and determined to kill him) add to the movie’s appeal, most of the vignettes aren’t that interesting or important. Still, Night and the City is a good movie and a well-done example of film noir.