Night and the City

Andrew Pulver

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Night and the City (1950), directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark, is the compelling story of a hoodlum on the make in postwar London. Andrew Pulver's study of the film traces the film's production history and places it in the context of British film noir and the urban mythology of its West End setting.

1 The Film

Story

In the most familiar version of Night and the City, the film begins with a characteristically noir-ish voiceover, a 24-syllable line too lyrical not to be quoted in full:

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

The suggestion is that director Jules Dassin himself spoke these lines, a move perhaps modelled on Carol Reed’s opening lines for The Third Man, released in the UK while Night and the City was being shot. (Dassin is not credited, though, and another version – the ‘British’ one, which we will come to later – has a different voice.) His protagonist, Harry Fabian, first seen dashing past St Paul’s Cathedral, is a man in a hurry – literally so, in the manner of Sammy Glick, the hero of Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?. (Glick was the literary icon of American aspirationalism; Schulberg returned the compliment, unconsciously or not, by reproducing Fabian’s line ‘I just want to be somebody’ in his celebrated script for On the Waterfront, 1954.)

Fabian is a Soho hoodlum, a ducker and diver, and the place he is dashing to is the walk-up flat belonging to his girl Mary. He’s in need of money and is not above sneaking a look in her purse to see if there’s any there. But Mary catches him in the act, and the pair clash over his endlessly elaborate schemes for raising cash – but in the end, she pops downstairs to her poloneck-jumpered neighbour Adam to borrow the fiver that will get Fabian off the hook.

Fabian then puts in an appearance at the Silver Fox nightclub, a hostess clip joint run by husband and wife team Phil and Helen Nosseross, where he collects some more money. Next it’s down to the Café Anglais ‘American Bar’ in Leicester Square, where he puts the moves on a trio of hapless American tourists. (His play is to pretend he’s found a wallet – in reality his own – and then use the attempt to ‘restore’ it to its owner to recommend that the marks go to the Silver Fox.)

Fabian struts confidently through Goodwin Court in Covent Garden, on his way to the Silver Fox nightclub

A couple of points: first, Fabian is American, like the actor portraying him, and there’s no attempt to investigate or justify what an American is doing grubbing around Soho clubland. (The same is true of Mary and Adam.) Second, even though the most perfunctory analysis of the film would conclude that Fabian is a classic example of a post-war spiv, the word is not used anywhere in the script. Instead, Fabian is twice referred to as a ‘tout’. This is surely due in part to the source material: Kersh’s novel was written before the war when ‘spiv’ was not a widely used term. It is presumably also due to simple ignorance on the (American) scriptwriter Jo Eisinger’s part.

Inside the American Bar, Fabian lines up his marks

Fabian’s fondness for the old wallet switcheroo affords him an unexpected opportunity in a wrestling hall. As he is thrown out for trying it on with the punters, he runs into retired wrestling legend Gregorius – who has just denounced fixed-bout grappling in front of his own son Kristo, a powerful hoodlum who has a lock on London’s wrestling promotions. Sensing an opportunity, Fabian ingratiates himself with Gregorius, persuading the elderly fighter that he too has a yen for the purists’ favourite, Greco-Roman wrestling. (Greco-Roman, an Olympic sport, only allows holds above the waist, and has never been associated with the tainted ‘worked show’ that still dominates professional catch wrestling.)

Fabian pitches his big idea to Phil Nosseross: a promotions outfit that Gregorius’s participation means will be protected from Kristo. The Nosserosses ridicule his ambitions, and sneeringly promise to match his money if he can raise £200. Fabian tries all his shifty contacts – beggar ‘king’ Figler, the forger Googin, black marketeer Anna O’Leary – but draws a blank until he is unexpectedly approached by Helen Nosseross herself, who, it turns out, has been nursing a secret yen for him. She has her own plan to ditch her husband and open her own club: she will use Fabian, she says, to get seed money from Phil. She gives Fabian the £200, in return for him getting the licence for her club. (Kristo and Nosseross, with their Greek-sounding names, are no doubt intended to evoke the Maltese element in the London underworld at the time, led by the Messina brothers who dominated the Soho vice racket during and after the war.)

But Fabian’s plans unravel. One of Kristo’s goons, the Strangler, picks a fight with Gregorius in Fabian’s gym, even though he has been matched against Gregorius’s protégé, Nikolas. After a violent physical confrontation, witnessed by Fabian as well as Kristo, Gregorius collapses and dies. Appalled by the death of his father, Kristo declares open season on Fabian, offering a thousand pounds to the man who brings him in. Meanwhile, Helen realises Fabian has let her down, and sold her a fake licence. She returns to Phil, only to find that he has shot himself.

Kristo comforts his dying father, Gregorius

Fabian is forced to dash across London as he’s pursued by the entire criminal fraternity (‘the East End, Soho, the Embankment’, in Kristo’s words). He is eventually run to earth in Anna O’Leary’s Chiswick boathouse. ‘It’s no good coming to me,’ she says. ‘I can’t help you. Nobody can help you.’ Fabian has no more running left in him – except when he’s seized by a final inspiration to pay back his most significant debt. He tries to pass Mary off as the person who’s fingered him to Kristo, so she can collect his thousand pounds. But Fabian is grabbed by the Strangler, who breaks his neck and throws the body in the river.

Production

On 5 July 1949, the Daily Mail reported that ‘tomorrow’ the American actor Richard Widmark would start work on a new film, called Night and the City. He was to be paid $400 per week (£100 at the time; some £7,600 in today’s equivalent) and was given a flat in Mayfair and a cottage in the country. By his own admission, Widmark then spent ‘30 nights running around London’.⁴ In fact, according to a Twentieth Century-Fox end-of-shoot press release issued in November 1949 as some of the principal cast embarked on the SS American for the homeward trip, Night and the City had shot for seventy-five days, of which Widmark had worked fifty-three, including twenty-seven nights.

The road to production was a typically tortuous one. Although Kersh’s third novel was originally published in 1938, the war meant that America was deprived of it until 1946. Film producers were electrically attracted to what Tim Pulleine memorably calls its ‘reverberant title’⁵.

Paul Duncan, the foremost researcher on Kersh’s life,⁶ reveals in the audio commentary to the recently released DVD that agent-turned-producer Charles K. Feldman – who would soon go on to make The Glass Menagerie (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Seven Year Itch (1955) – paid Kersh $45,000 for the rights in 1946, and immediately set about putting it into production; and after going through a number of writers, he finally hired former police reporter Jo Eisinger to hammer out a script. Though largely forgotten now, Eisinger was a hot name in the mid-1940s, thanks to his credit for writing the screen adaptation of Columbia Studios’ Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (1946), as well as authoring the mystery novel The Walls Came Tumbling Down, which was itself adapted into a Lee Bowman film for Columbia in 1946. Despite attaching Jacques Tourneur – director of Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947) among others – Feldman failed to get a production off the ground, and sold the rights (and script) on to Darryl F. Zanuck, the powerful vice-president of Twentieth Century-Fox. To get around British post-war currency regulations, Zanuck handed over production to Fox’s UK office. The Anglo-American Film Agreement, negotiated by Board of Trade president Harold Wilson in 1948, set a strict limit on the amount of money the US could take out of Britain in box-office receipts; the remainder had to be spent on production, rights and facilities in the UK.⁷ (Protectionist as this may seem, it actually ended a boycott imposed by the Motion Picture Export Association of America [MPEA] after the Labour government imposed a 75 per cent import duty on films in 1947.)

Fabian embraces his doom, sprinting along the Thames embankment

This consideration for the UK film industry did not, however, extend to the principal figures assigned to make the film. Zanuck’s pick to direct was Jules Dassin, who had run foul of the Hollywood blacklist as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) strengthened its grip on the film industry. Zanuck knew that Dassin, a Communist Party member until 1939, was about to be called to testify before the Committee, so dispatched him overseas out of their reach.⁸ In Dassin’s own words: ‘Zanuck pushed this book in my hand, and said, you’re leaving, you’re getting out of here. You’re going to London and you’re going to make this, because this is probably the last picture you’re ever going to make.’ Dassin denied that he fled the US to escape testifying before HUAC:

As a matter of fact, when I was accused of being a subversive, I was abroad negotiating with the Italians to make a Fernandel film, Il Camillo. When I read about it, I went back to the US. I wanted to face the committee, but no one called me before it.⁹

However, Night and the City was the last film he would make for a Hollywood studio for almost fifteen years. After Night and the City was finished and released, Dassin’s career was spectacularly crippled by the McCarthy witch-hunt, following testimony by fellow directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle in 1951. Their identification of Dassin as a communist was enough to scupper any prospects of future employment. (Not surprisingly, many critics have subsequently seen Night and the City as channelling Dassin’s own trauma of paranoia and flight.)

Dassin’s early career revolved around radical theatre. He spent six years as part of a communist-inspired Yiddish troupe, Artef, in New York, under its legendary director Benno Schneider, an exile from the Zionist Habima theatre company in Moscow. (‘We did Sholem Aleicheim. It had a political tint.’¹⁰) Dassin was radicalised by Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, which he saw in 1935, and immediately joined the American Communist Party.¹¹ He also worked for the state-funded Federal Theater Project (set up by the New Deal agency Works Progress Administration), and the FTP’s activities – such as the long-running Living Newspapers project, or the 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock – were regularly accused of left-wing political bias. It was only after the FTP’s funding was cancelled by its political enemies in Congress in 1939 that Dassin looked for work in the film industry. He was offered a contract with RKO, and became a ‘watcher’ – observing other directors at work. One of these was Alfred Hitchcock; Dassin ‘watched’ on Mr and Mrs Smith (1941). ‘I was so intimidated by him. After every scene or take, he would turn around and yell, “Is that all right for you? May I print it?”’¹² RKO fired Dassin, but he found a job at MGM, who gave him his break, allowing him to direct a 20-minute adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1941). He graduated to features with the wartime spy thriller Nazi Agent (1942) starring exiled actor Conrad Veidt, and was put to work in MGM’s B department, resulting in a wide variety of work, including an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (1944) and the Lubitsch-esque romance Two Smart People (1946).

But Dassin fiercely resented the seven-year MGM contract, and ended up being fired again after a massive row with studio head, Louis B. Mayer. (Mayer reportedly yelled at him: ‘Get out of here, you dirty Red!’¹³) Fortunately, he found work with independent producer Mark Hellin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Film
• 2. Night
• 3. The City
• Notes
• Credits
• eCopyright