Night and the City

Director Jules Dassin

publicity photo with Gene Tierney (left) with Richard Widmark

NIGHT AND THE CITY        A                  

Great Britain  (96 mi)  1950  d:  Jules Dassin

Night and the city.  The night is tonight, tomorrow night... or any night.  The city is London.

—Jules Dassin’s opening narration

While the late 40’s is defined as the Hollywood blacklist era, or the Red Scare, when the witch hunt known as McCarthyism drove the leftist directors out of Hollywood, when fellow directors were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Jules Dassin was named as a Communist sympathizer by both Elia Kazan (working together in Yiddish theater in the 30’s) and Edward Dmytryk (once so close Dassin used to look after his children), two men who saved their own careers at the expense of others, as their testimony effectively ended Dassin’s employment in America.  This historical purge eradicated those voices with a social conscience, where the industry in the 50’s cleaned up their image while making the transition to television, thoroughly whitewashed and cleansed, paving the way for the white flight to the suburbs, where the American Dream became synonymous with manicured lawns and all-white school districts safely out of reach of the inner cities.  One of the unintended consequences of this change was an end to film noir in America, largely viewed as the period between John Huston’s THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), with its emphasis on squalid characters and shadowy underworld figures, where searing social realism and class differences make all the difference, and working class neighborhoods still produced people of interest that massive viewing audiences could identify with, faced with similar moral choices, where money was tight, circumstances bleak, and the criminal temptation for easy money was everpresent and always inviting, having grown up with Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Robert Mitchum, or Robert Ryan as familiar faces.  Instead, 50’s television westerns picked up the slack, often accentuating these dubious moral choices in each weekly episode.  What happened to Jules Dassin is actually surprising, as he was given a heads up from Darryl Zanuck, the head of 20^th Century Fox, actually knocking on his door, aware that subpoenas were about to be handed out, sending Dassin to London to work on his next picture, “Start with the most expensive scenes and they won’t fire you, because it’s probably going to be the last picture you’re ever going to make.”  While it’s a side of a studio executive that’s rarely seen, Zanuck also wanted him to write a part for actress Gene Tierney, after having received shock treatments for depression, hoping to save her career.  The film’s British version is five minutes longer, with an implausible, more upbeat ending, and features a completely different film score, with Dassin endorsing the American version as closer to his own vision.  Sitting at #1 of Top 50 Noirs on two lists at Noir Countdown from Wonders in the Dark, compiled by Maurizio Roca, and listed by Sam Juliano in the comments afterwards, April 28, 2011 at 3:58 pm, listed at #33 here The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time - Slant Magazine, #28 here The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time - Paste - Paste Magazine, listed at #13 from The Independent here 20 best film noirs: From Double Indemnity to Shadow of a ..., and listed at #8 by the founder of the Film Noir Foundation and co-programmer of the Noir City film festival here Top 25 Noir Films - Eddie Muller.  This first film in exile was Dassin’s last US-financed film before the blacklist made him “unemployable,” moving to France afterwards (and eventually Greece) where he couldn’t find work for another 5 years before working on the French heist caper RIFIFI (1955), featuring one of the most brilliant crime scenes in history, a near half-hour scene shot with meticulous detail in near silence, without dialogue or music.  

Dassin was among Hollywood’s more socially conscious artists, including Robert Rossen who directed Body and Soul (1947), Abraham Polonsky who directed Force of Evil (1948), and Joseph Losey who remade M (1951), condemning the meaninglessness and violence of everyday life, where ordinary guys are never given a fair shake, with some having all the luck and advantages that money can buy while others are fed to the sharks.  Showing a healthy skepticism about the American Dream, Dassin always felt sympathetic towards the criminal element, believing impoverished circumstances led them to make the wrong choices, where his films are characterized by moral ambiguity and greater social realism, accentuating the psychological disadvantages of the working class.  Brute Force (1947) is an anarchic prison rebellion against a sadistic warden that stands as a metaphor against fascism, while The Naked City (1948) about a police manhunt, largely influenced by German director Fritz Lang, shot on the streets of New York, with its emphasis on naturalism, accentuates a documentary style, displaying a visual style reminiscent with Italian neorealism, inspiring a television series of the same name that used the film’s infamous concluding line.  Dassin felt Universal re-cut the film, claiming his “humanist” vision and emphasis on class differences had been “ripped out of the film.”  Based on a 1938 novel (not published until 1946 due to the war) by British author Gerald Kersh (which Dassin admitted he never read until afterwards), it’s a film noir crime thriller where the intensity level is off the charts, set against a macabre backdrop of a Dickensian underworld of 1930’s London still struggling to overcome the devastating aftermath of the Great Depression, recalling the German Expressionist imagery of G. W. Pabst’s THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1931), using the burnt out ruins of the war to typify the subterranean world of black market activities and sinful retreats, where it’s hard to believe this was filmed four years before the end of postwar rationing.  Pitted against one another are forgers, petty thieves, smugglers, con men, beggars, and dance hall girls, all set against Soho’s labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys, stairwells, bridges, construction sites, and claustrophobic space that allows no one to breathe, literally a breeding ground of greed and corruption, where everyone’s nerves are on edge, yet at the center of the picture is one perpetually desperate man, Richard Widmark as Harry Fabian, all frenzied energy, like a cornered animal, a habitual liar, a small-time hustler with an obsession to make money, who pursues the dream of making it big, of “being somebody,” and “having it all,” filled with bluster and braggadocio, yet deluding himself at every turn, outmatched and outsmarted, always on the outside trying to claw his way into the limelight, a petty scam artist with million dollar ideas, none of which ever pan out, whose failed schemes have left him broke and downhearted, but he has the survival skills of a river rat.  Borrowing heavily from his girlfriend with a heart of gold, Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney), a nightclub songstress who provides a ready source of petty cash, Fabian is seen racing across the darkened, fog-drenched landscape in the opening, escaping through the alleyways, revealing the one constant in his life — he’s always on the run.  Filling the screen with few, if any, sympathetic characters, the film depicts a grim outlook, drawing parallels to Dassin’s own exiled status, offering an ever dour, despairingly pessimistic future. 

Described as “an artist without an art,” Harry moves from one con game to the next, befriending anyone in the know, hoping to capitalize on that one big score, yet his constant sense of desperation makes him appear to be a fallen anti-hero, literally clawing his way through the cracks.  While trying to con some sap at a wrestling event, he finds himself in the middle of a family squabble, where the elder Gregorius the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko, former world champion wrestler), a veteran Greco-Roman wrestler denounces the unsavory, criminal showmanship associated with the evening’s main event, The Strangler (Mike Mazurki), managed by his own son Kristo (Herbert Lom), a ruthlessly powerful gangster.  Cynically befriending Gregorius, concurring with the tastelessness of the match, Fabian thinks he can control the wrestling business in London by bypassing Kristo, as he has the support of Gregorius, who is considered untouchable, as his son won’t interfere.  Yet this scheme depends upon another, using the investments of his employer to swing the deal, Phil Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan in the Sydney Greenstreet role), who owns the Silver Fox Club, who has a precarious relationship with Harry, as he doesn’t trust him, and would quickly undermine him before being swindled himself.  Thinking Kristo would easily push him aside, he’s surprised when Harry remains a contender.  Like a house of cards, however, it all comes apart in the most surprising manner, and with it Harry’s dreams.  Reminiscent of the hunted down Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), the criminal underworld casts its dragnet over the entire city looking for him, with a large irresistible price on his head, while the police are nowhere to be seen.  Like a city of the damned, Harry has no escape, though the camera captures infamous city landmarks in his epic night journey scrambling across the city, including St Paul’s Cathedral and the Hammersmith Bridge, finding no refuge in the storm, reduced to what he’s always been, a man on the run (not unlike Dassin himself).  Thwarted at every turn, frustrated at the futility of his defeat, realizing the end is near, Harry confesses near dawn that “I just wanted to be somebody,” predating Marlon Brando’s famous line from ON THE WATERFRONT (1954).  Derided at its release, likely the result of the political climate, it performed poorly at the box office both in America and Britain, despised by novelist Gerald Kersh, receiving mostly negative and hostile reviews from the British press, hating an American star while believing the film’s overly grim depiction of rampant crime “insults” London, (yet found nothing wrong with Carol Reed’s depiction of Vienna a year earlier in THE THIRD MAN), the film is now considered Dassin’s masterpiece.  Accentuating the photogenic postwar London landscape, with 54 different city locations used, including Soho, London Bridge, Waterloo, Petticoat Lane, Piccadilly, Mile End Arena, Strand and Regent Street, and the Festival of Britain construction site on the South Bank, German cinematographer Max Greene got his start during the Silent era, but here, as in Dassin’s earlier film shot in New York, his focus is on extensive location shooting in the city streets, much of it shot after midnight, setting the stage for the film’s rediscovery by the French New Wave directors in the 60’s, who copied his low-budget shooting style and doom-laden noir aesthetic, similarly taking their cameras to the streets, using non-professionals, while embracing his appreciation for gangsters and the down-and-out element living on the edge.  A bizarrely stylized thriller where Richard Widmark finds himself stalked by Dassin’s camera along with pursuing mobsters, the ruins of postwar London are transformed by warped angles and expressionistic lighting into a sinister tinderbox of villainy and terror. 

The Naked City

Cameraman William H. Daniels shooting on the rooftops

Actress Dorothy Hart with Howard Duff

THE NAKED CITY           B           

USA  (96 mi)  1948  d:  Jules Dassin

There are eight million stories in the naked city.  This has been one of them.
—Producer/narrator Mark Hellinger

Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee was a photojournalist who worked Manhattan’s Lower East Side as a press photographer in the 30’s and 40’s following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity, with an emphasis on crime, creating starkly realistic images of urban life, publishing a book in 1945 of his press photos of murderers, drunks, and corpses entitled Naked City.  Hollywood producer Mark Hellinger, who for many years had been the highest-paid columnist for the nation’s largest newspaper, The New York Daily News, bought the rights to the title, intending to make a movie using Weegee’s gritty aesthetic, moving away from the Hollywood studio backlots and shooting on location in the city, offering a documentary style realism.  Written by Marvin Wald, known for making government documentaries during the war, he followed the investigatory repercussions of a model’s overnight murder, as well as a drunk thrown into the river, creating a meticulously driven police procedural that was a major source of inspiration behind Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949) and serves as a model for all the popular television police procedurals like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000 – 2015) which ran for 15 years, creating various offshoots in New York and Miami, basically saturating the market with urban cop shows.  The film was co-written for the screen by Albert Maltz, one of the original Hollywood Ten who served jail time, a group of ten writers and directors who were cited for contempt of Congress during the Red Scare for refusing to testify about their alleged Communist activity before the House Un-American Activities Committee, resulting in a Hollywood blacklist instituted on November 25, 1947, four months before the release of the film.  Dassin himself, the brilliant director of Brute Force (1947), refused to name names and was summarily driven out of Hollywood and out of the country in the early 50’s, residing in Europe for the rest of his life.  Having grown up in New York (as did the writers and producer), he was fully aware of the neighborhoods and the impactful photographic appeal of shooting on the city streets, accentuating familiar landmarks, utilizing stunning panoramic views and wide-angle shots, copying the abstract style of a city symphony film, like Walther Ruttman’s BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927) or Dziga Vertov’s THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929), adopting their newsreel style narrations, though offering a fictionalized depiction onscreen, with a musical score written by Frank Skinner and Miklós Rózsa, creating what amounts to a docudrama that could only marginally be described as film noir.  What’s missing, however, are street noise and city sounds matching the visual artistry.  Winning two Academy Awards for editing and cinematography, the success of the film led to a long-running television series, Naked City (1958 – 63), having significant impact on later TV shows like Hill Street Blues (1981 – 87) and Law & Order (1990 – 2010), with more than half a dozen spinoffs.  The narration, spoken by Mark Hellinger, is a curious aspect of the film, actually commenting on and interacting with the characters as they appear onscreen, offering Brechtian sarcasm and dark humor, even mocking them occasionally, a deliberately cynical style that taken to its extreme produced Lars von Trier’s DOGVILLE (2003).  This is reflective of the times, as there was a postwar weariness and cynicism producing memorable film noirs with darkened themes, troubled protagonists, femme fatales, and exposed criminal activity.  In the Atomic Age, with the bomb grown out of government secrets, the Cold War was just beginning, with heightened suspicions about Communist activity, as citizens were growing paranoid and openly suspicious about their futures.  

Something of a love letter to the city of New York, there are no credits, no title, no lettering of any kind — just an aerial shot of the island of Manhattan at dawn, shot in black and white by William H. Daniels, the principal cinematographer for von Stroheim’s silent film Greed (1924) and Garbo’s personal favorite, including an empty Wall Street still in the shadows and shots of workers at night, among the most potent images of the entire film, with Hellinger’s narration identifying himself as the film’s producer, voicing many of the credits, offering the story of a city.  “This is the city as it is – hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup…There is a pulse to the city and it never stops beating.”  Viewing the city as a living, breathing organism, various night staff are introduced at work, one by one, offering their own comments, leading to an outdoor shot of a still lit apartment window where the blinds are open, with the narrator identifying ex-fashion model Jean Dexter “at the close of her life,” showing two killers suffocating her, turning on the faucets and throwing her into the bathtub, subsequently described in the newspapers as “The Bathtub Murder.”  This story is drawn from the unsolved murder of Dot King in 1923, a famous model (The Butterfly Murders | - The Malefactor's Register), where Hellinger was one of the newspapermen arriving to the murder scene and allegedly knew the victim, so the story stuck with him.  Hellinger was always associated with New York, where his columns specialized in celebrity gossip along with lurid crime reports, developing an excellent rapport with the New York police department, which was the source of much of his material.  Hellinger was so impressed with Dassin that he granted him the right to final approval of the screenplay, while the director’s interest, fueled by his fascination with Rossellini’s ROME, OPEN CITY (1945), lay in applying documentary approaches to Hollywood films, a vision shared by screenwriter Albert Maltz, who urged Dassin (unsuccessfully) to make the natural sounds of the city part of the film and to capture “the architectural beauty and squalor that exist side by side,” revealing a city in stark economic contrasts.  A variety of guerilla filming techniques were utilized to capture the spontaneity of the streets, such as hidden cameras in moving vehicles, a fake sidewalk newsstand with a hidden camera inside, hiring a juggler as a distraction to move large groups of people to a different location, even hiring a man to climb a light post to give a patriotic speech while waving an American flag to get the crowd’s attention, while the police were also involved in crowd control.  Of interest, a young Stanley Kubrick was taking photographs on the set for Look magazine.  While Hellinger promised to give Dassin the final cut he desired, there was blacklist talk in the air, with Universal executives unhappy with early screenings, describing the film as a mere travelogue, threatening to alter the final product.  When Hellinger, only 44 at the time, died of a heart attack a month after the blacklist pronouncement, the final version is significantly altered, enough that Dassin felt it was no longer his film, as any reference to poverty, poor people, or to the human struggle was eliminated, as was any social commentary on the underlying conditions of crime provided by the lead police detective.  At the New York premiere, when the Mayor called Dassin to the stage to take a bow, he walked out, shocked by what was omitted.  Instead, what was printed in the press about the film came largely from studio press releases, with few, if any, comparisons to Italian Neo-Realism.  For Dassin, who went on the make a dozen more films overseas, finally settling in Greece, the most depressing aspect of Hollywood and the American film tradition was the director’s lack of control over the final product, something he did not encounter in Europe.   

With such strict guidelines to produce the film’s realist aesthetic, the same scrutiny does not exist with the performances, much of which is stereotypical and melodramatic, almost as if existing in another film altogether.  While the look of the film is a meticulously staged documentary, supposedly portraying real people in real places, in stark contrast, however, the people onscreen appear anything but real, revealing the artificial limits of realism from a Hollywood studio system.  Starting at home with nice guy Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) at home with his family, a younger, inexperienced war veteran still wet behind his ears, recently transferred to homicide, working with his senior partner, Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald), a stereotypical Irish cop singing Irish songs in his tiny kitchen as he readies himself for work, arriving at the 10th precinct which still stands today serving Chelsea, Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen South and the Hudson Yards, both notified of the apparent suicide of Ms. Dexter, supposedly drowning in her bathtub.  Their investigation, initially slow to develop, reveals otherwise, suggesting she was knocked out with chloroform and drowned alive.  The film unravels through a series of daily routines, narrated throughout, following suspects, witnesses, acquaintances, family members, and anyone else connected to the case, with Halloran doing all the footwork, which is considerable, while Muldoon sticks with the important stuff, questioning Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a professional liar with an ability to create endless smokescreens, but also an acquaintance of the deceased, along with another model Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart) who worked with her, and a doctor who prescribed her sleeping pills, Dr. Stoneman (House Jameson).  Their testimony leads them to two nefarious men who remain at large, Philip Henderson, an apparent lover of the deceased, and Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia in his initial major role), a wrestler with a talent for playing harmonica.  Halloran’s economically stable home life resembles how suburban America was depicted in 50’s television dramas for the next decade, a sunny contrast to the more downtrodden parents of the deceased, including Mr. Batory (Grover Burgess), a gardener from New Jersey who remains in muted silence, and Paula Batory (Adelaide Klein) who has no love lost for her daughter, consumed by disappointment, ashamed of her and letting everyone around her know it, yet reduced to tears once the body has been identified, a couple that has perhaps never known a moment of happiness in their entire lives.  The ritual of the investigation takes us through the dynamic neighborhoods of New York, visiting doctors in Midtown, talent agents in the Bowery, taking the subway out to Queens, to the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side, through dark alleys, police stations, crowded playgrounds, and busy storefronts, always overflowing with the bustling street activity of Manhattan, leading to a spectacular final chase sequence on the Williamsburg Bridge over the East River, chased down in all directions, eventually climbing up to the top of the bridge where he remains perched in isolation holding a gun, offering a bird’s eye view of the city.  Hellinger was apparently unhappy with the final sequence, as it breaks from the earlier tone set by the narrator, becoming a Hollywood action sequence, personalizing the point of view of the outlaw, all but evading his place in the social fabric of the city, where everyone is connected.  As the day comes to a close and night falls on the city, the narrator reacquaints us to a claustrophobic city of eight million people, each with their own story to tell.