Night and the City: Widmark's London Wrestling Racket

The film opens with a man running. We do not know who he is, who is chasing him, or what he has done, and the film is in no hurry to tell us, because the running is the characterisation. Harry Fabian is always running. He runs through bombed lots and down cobbled alleys and up the stairs of the woman who loves him, and by the time the picture ends you understand that the chase in the first shot was not a specific emergency. It was Tuesday.

Night and the City was released by 20th Century Fox in 1950, shot in London by an American director who had been sent there to get him out of the country. Jules Dassin had made three of the sharpest American crime pictures of the late forties and was about to be named to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Darryl Zanuck put him on a plane, gave him a British production, and — as Dassin told it for the rest of his life — advised him to shoot the expensive material first, so that the studio would find it too costly to shut the film down when the phone call came. It is a film made by a man who knew he was finishing his career.

An artist without an art

Harry Fabian is a tout. He works the tourist trade for the Silver Fox, a Soho club run by the vast, sweating Phil Nosseross and his wife Helen, steering marks through the door for a cut. He has schemes. He has always had schemes, and every one of them has failed, and the film’s great cruelty is that he has enough energy for a genuinely successful life and has decided to spend it all on shortcuts.

Richard Widmark plays him at a pitch that ought to be exhausting and is instead mesmerising. Widmark had arrived three years earlier as the giggling killer in Kiss of Death and spent the following decade being the most interesting nervous system in American cinema — the same jittery intelligence he brought to the pickpocket of Pickup on South Street. Fabian’s tragedy is legible in his face before a word of plot arrives. He is a man perpetually two hours from a triumph he will never have, and Widmark plays the two hours, not the failure.

The scheme this time is wrestling. London’s wrestling racket is controlled by Kristo, a quiet promoter played by Herbert Lom with the stillness of a man who has never needed to shout. Kristo’s father is Gregorius, an old Greco-Roman champion who despises the theatrical grappling his son sells to the halls and believes in the real, classical sport. Fabian spots the gap: get the old man’s name, get the old man’s blessing, and you have a licence to break the monopoly. He is right. This is the horror of it. The scheme is sound, and Fabian will still destroy himself with it, because a plan is only as good as the person carrying it, and he cannot stop lying long enough to execute anything.

Gregorius is played by Stanislaus Zbyszko, who was not an actor. He was a Polish wrestler, a genuine world champion decades earlier, in his seventies by the time Dassin put him in front of a camera. The casting is the film’s masterstroke. Zbyszko does not perform dignity; he simply has it, in the way of a man whose body was once the best in the world at something, and every professional actor in the frame around him suddenly looks like they are pretending.

Why it works: the match that will not end

The film’s centrepiece is a wrestling bout, and it is one of the most punishing sequences in the cycle. Gregorius, old and heavy and slow, is drawn into a fight with The Strangler, a brute played by Mike Mazurki. Dassin shoots it long, close and largely without cutaways to spectators — the standard technique for making screen violence exciting is to cross-cut to a reacting crowd, and he declines it. There is no ringside commentary. There are two bodies in a small hot room, and the camera stays with them until it becomes uncomfortable, then stays longer.

What makes it work is duration. A fight in a crime picture is normally an argument compressed into thirty seconds; Dassin lets this one run past the point where the audience can enjoy it, so that the sequence stops being a set-piece and becomes something we are trapped in. The two men are not choreographed into beauty. They lock, grunt, sag, and rest on each other, and the exhaustion is the drama. By the closing minute of it you are no longer watching a scene about wrestling. You are watching an old man’s life being spent.

Max Greene photographed the film, and his London is the other reason it lasts. Greene — born Mutz Greenbaum, one of the German émigrés who carried expressionist lighting into British cinema — shot a city still full of bomb sites, and Dassin used them. The rubble is not set dressing. Fabian’s flights take him through a landscape of holes where buildings used to be, and a hustler’s dream of easy money reads very differently when the streets he is running down have been physically removed. American noir had to build its shadows; London in 1949 supplied them.

There is a wrinkle for collectors. Two versions exist. The American release carries a score by Franz Waxman; the British one, running longer, has a score by Benjamin Frankel and some divergent material. They are meaningfully different films in tone — Waxman drives Fabian towards doom with a Hollywood urgency, Frankel lets the city do more of the work. If a repertory house offers you the British cut, take it, and then find the other one.

Where it sits in the cabinet

The immediate ancestor is Dassin’s own Thieves’ Highway, made the year before, which had already established his method: a working milieu photographed with documentary attention, and a hero whose competence cannot save him from an economy designed to eat him. Fabian is that film’s Nick Garcos with the work ethic surgically removed.

The descendant everyone points to, correctly, is Rififi, which Dassin made in France five years later, unemployable in his own country. The half-hour silent heist that made that film famous is the wrestling match’s technique applied to a different subject — hold a scene long past its useful length and the audience stops watching the plot and starts watching the people. The blacklist sent Dassin to Europe, and Europe let him do at length what Fox had let him do once.

The film also invented something British cinema would spend thirty years catching up to. A hustler destroying himself against an organised criminal economy that is older, calmer and better capitalised than he is — that is the engine of The Long Good Friday, and of most of the good London gangster films since. Kristo, sitting quietly in a club letting a loud man dig his own hole, is the template.

Gerald Kersh wrote the 1938 novel, and here is the joke: Dassin cheerfully admitted he never read it. Jo Eisinger’s screenplay keeps the title and the milieu and throws away most of Kersh’s book, which was about a pimp. What survives is Kersh’s real subject — Soho as a machine for converting energy into nothing.

The verdict

Night and the City is the most despairing film Dassin made in English, and its despair has a specific shape. Most noir doom arrives from outside: a woman, a debt, a past. Fabian’s arrives from inside, on schedule, entirely self-manufactured, and the film’s pitiless move is to give him a genuinely good idea and then watch him ruin it with the same hands that built it. Widmark makes this exhilarating rather than pathetic, which is a real feat, and Zbyszko gives the film a moral centre it did not strictly need and is much better for having.

It is the last film Dassin made before exile, and it plays like it — a picture with no interest in the future, made by a man who did not have one. Seek out a restored transfer of either cut. The bomb sites alone justify it.

Spoilers below

The scheme collapses because Fabian cannot fund it honestly. He has taken money from Helen Nosseross — who wants a club licence of her own and thinks Fabian can obtain one — and from Phil Nosseross, who backs Fabian’s wrestling venture for reasons that turn out to be entirely malicious: Phil knows the scheme will fail and wants to watch, and he wants his wife to lose her money doing it. The licence Fabian sells Helen is worthless. Everybody in this film is running a confidence trick on everybody else, and the tricks are stacked so densely that they collide.

Gregorius dies after the match. The Strangler is not supposed to be in the ring — the bout Fabian has promoted is meant to be Gregorius’s protégé against Kristo’s man, and the old champion steps in himself when he sees his pupil being mauled. He wins. Then his heart gives out in a dressing room, with his son Kristo arriving in time to hold him and to hear who arranged it. That is the moment the film’s real machinery starts.

Kristo does not have Fabian killed. He does something far more elegant: he puts a price on his head and announces it across the city, and lets London do the work. The last act is Fabian running through a metropolis in which every tout, tart, beggar and barman he has ever conned now has a financial interest in finding him — the whole ecology he spent his life exploiting, turned into a search party. It is the most complete image of consequence in the genre, and it costs Kristo nothing but a phone call.

Mary Bristol, the woman who has loved Fabian throughout and been lied to for all of it, is the film’s last cruelty. Fabian’s final scheme, mounted with the noose already round his neck, is to have Mary turn him in and collect the bounty herself — his one unselfish act, and it arrives as a con, because he has no other grammar. He is killed and dropped in the Thames by a man he once thought of as a friend. The bomb sites at the beginning were the whole review: London is full of holes where something used to stand, and Harry Fabian is one of them.