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Dassin stages this tale in a postwar capital not of glories past, but of detritus, of moral refuse and human waste. London here is a necropolis of ambition, a decaying space filled with overripe gangsters, sleazy impresarios, and idle dreamers. Shadows cloak narrow alleyways, and each lamplit corridor seems to double as a funereal procession route. There is no daylight in Night and the City; even its fleeting intimations of hope arrive shrouded in mist.
Richard Widmark's Fabian is no mastermind, no orchestrator of clever machinations. He is a creature of fervor, perpetually perspiring from the weight of his delusions. He is introduced in mid-flight, not from the law but from mediocrity. Unlike the classic noir protagonist who falls from a perch of stability, Fabian begins at the bottom and digs lower. His fate is not to be punished by an external moral force, but to implode under the centrifugal pull of his own schemes. This self-undoing mirrors a world where honesty is an obsolete currency, and every handshake masks a transaction of treachery.
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The film’s thematic nucleus lies in Fabian’s attempt to manipulate the schism between a dignified past and a grotesque present. Gregorius the Great, played by actual wrestling legend Stanislaus Zbyszko, is a hulking relic of Greco-Roman purism, a bearded Homeric vestige in an era that now clamors for theatricality and cruelty. His son Kristo (Herbert Lom), suave and glacial, manages the new spectacle: modern wrestling as performance, not contest. Fabian, in his frenetic idiocy, seeks to broker their familial strife into entrepreneurial ascension. It is this miscalculation—to meddle in the agon between nobility and profit—that becomes his fatal wager.
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| Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney in Night and the City (1950) |
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Night and the City is profoundly shaped by its historical context. Filmed in the months following Dassin’s blacklisting in the United States, the picture is a study in political exile and personal entrapment. The film’s moral climate—opaque, paranoid, and lethal—echoes the atmosphere of the HUAC trials. It is a portrait of men hunted not for crimes but for affiliations, for suspicion itself. Dassin, filming in London with the foreknowledge that he would not work in Hollywood again, imbues every scene with the bleak finality of a closing curtain. The film is an unintentional self-elegy.
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Feminine agency in the film is sharply circumscribed, yet it is worth dwelling on the women of Night and the City. While Mary embodies sentimental orthodoxy, Helen Nosseross is the real locus of feminine will. .png)
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Her failure to extricate herself from her grotesque marriage, despite her cunning, illustrates the limited exits available to women even in moments of self-assertion. Dassin does not exalt or condemn her, but allows her desperation a tragic dignity. The film’s gender dynamics reflect the brittle latticework of postwar patriarchy, in which women must operate not through power but through shadowed influence.
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| Stanislaus Zbyszko in Night and the City (1950) |
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| Mike Mazurki in Night and the City (1950) |
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| Gene Tierney in Night and the City (1950) |
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The visual vocabulary of the film is an encyclopedia of noir tropes, but rendered with unusual ferocity. Mutz Greenbaum's cinematography etches each street and alleyway with spectral chiaroscuro. London becomes a psychic maze, a metropolis of the subconscious. The river, omnipresent, hints at mythic overtones—the Styx for a damned soul, perhaps. Franz Waxman’s score is alternately operatic and menacing, underscoring the grandiloquent futility of Fabian’s designs.
As noir, the film is less a crime narrative than a metaphysical exploration. There is no heist, no single act of evil, but rather a gradual erosion of spirit under unrelenting conditions. The noir tradition, often tied to American disillusionment, finds in Night and the City a uniquely European inflection: its fatalism is older, its tragedies more classical than pulp. This is noir not merely as a genre but as worldview, wherein light does not illuminate but blinds.
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Fabian's demise is operatic. Betrayed, hunted, and finally cornered like a rat in the sprawling labyrinth of the docks, he offers up his own location for a bounty in the hope that his death will give Mary some reprieve. It is a hollow gesture, one too late, too maudlin to function as redemption. He dies as he lived: running. Yet in that final act, we glimpse a flicker of lucidity. Whether it is absolution or theatricality is left to the audience.
The film’s influence has echoed across the decades. Its DNA can be found in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, in the breathless chaos of the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, and in the grim fatalism of postmodern noir. But it remains singular. Not simply because of Dassin’s exile or Widmark’s tremulous brilliance, but because it dares to present a world in which all exits are false, and all roads lead to negation.
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| Mike Mazurki in Night and the City (1950) |
Released in 1950, Night and the City emerged during a period of geopolitical instability and ideological fracture. The Korean War had begun. The Cold War was calcifying. In the United Kingdom, the shadows of war still cloaked the buildings, and rationing continued. The film, though fictional, captures this malaise with uncanny precision. Its characters, scavengers all, operate in a world without certainties, without futures.
Ultimately, Night and the City is a film without reprieve. It offers no catharsis, no justice. Instead, it unspools like a fevered dream, hallucinatory and relentless. Fabian is dead. The city, indifferent, continues to pulse. And night remains, unbroken.
An article from 1975 by Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema argues that although masculinity may be the normative from which femininity is described, masculinity in itself may not be one simple and unchallenged construction.
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Masculinity in the movies still revolves around some pretty basic ideals — heroism — toughness — dominance — and in the body of the mainstream (superhero films, crime films, sci-fi, fantasy and comedy etc) the men will always outnumber women substantially. The industry in fact prefers to remain stereotypical in its gender portrayal, and tends to be demeaning of women, giving them secondary roles, and usually the kind of tropes that feminists have highlighted in decades of criticism.
While this may be the case in the present day, the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s shows us that this was a time of crisis in the Hollywood representation of the male.
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Often, commentators point to the sense of loss felt by men as they returned from World War 2 to find that women had left the home and were now running the workplace. This is one reason why in film noir, we just about always see what is called the weakened male lead.
All this means is that the men in film noir, are somehow diminished in terms of that normative portrayal. In Hollywood before film noir, and pretty much after the film noir era also, men engineer the happy ending, triumph over the baddies, and as it happens, the story told in most films, over most genres, is that the man gets the woman at the end, and that the whole thing has been one long mating ritual. It's rarely the other way around.
Here I shall look at a few versions of the weakened male lead in film noir, and do so through the film noir work of Richard Widmark.
First though, here are some common male tropes in film noir.
We have:
- The cynical private eye
- The narcissist
- The psychopath
- The loser
- The heel
- The haunted man
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Richard Widmark in Night and the City (1950)
Men in film noir tend have a fatal flaw in their character. One such fault is narcissism, so in film noir we sometimes have lead males who are dreamers, a person whose grip on the realities of life is so flimsy that trouble is inevitable.
Such is masculinity in the neighbourhood of noir.
Such is masculinity in the neighbourhood of noir.
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| A man in love with hismelf and a dream of success. |
Consider Richard Widmark’s role in Night and the City (1950), in which he plays Harry Fabian, an American conman and hustler operating in post war London. Of course, the person that Harry Fabian cons the most is himself.
As is common in film noir, the word hero isn’t applicable, and here, as in many other films in the noir cycle of the 40s and 50s, the hero of the piece is a criminal, although not necessarily a villain. In fact, excepting Gene Tierney's character, Mary Bristol, and the artsy neighbour Adam, an incidental part, probably every character in Night and The City is a criminal, or at least an exemplar of poor morals.
The storyline and plot twists in Night and The City are not great, but they are helped by excellent filmmaking and acting. The city as backdrop is exceptional, as is the photography and all of these elements combine to produce a film that will remain fascinating for all time.
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| The woman as realist ... but not a saviour |
At the conclusion of Night And The City it is Gene Tierney, the only decent character in the drama, to tell the narcissist that ‘he could have been anything’, and that he could do anything and be whomever he wanted to be.
Even in her role as realist, however, the female character cannot save this doomed man.
Implicit in this dramatic unfolding is the suggestion that Richard Widmark's film noir character Harry Fabian is never going to succed on his own terms. This is despite him momentarily achieveing what he craves, when he becomes briefly at least, what amounts in his eyes to a successful wrestling promoter. This is all a fantasy however, and the one moment of his triumph is to be tempered by an almighty fall.
They key to the narcissit trope is the immense ignorance of the protagonist. He's not lazy, and although he is ambitious, it is his belief as a fantasist that powers the story and makes it so uncomfortable. As viewers we know the narcissit is doomed to failure, and Richard Widmark plays this so well, exaggerating the enthusiasm of this ill-fated though likeable man.
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| A man among men ... face off at the gym in Night and The City (1950) |
This is not how the world is to be rebuilt after the war, it appears, and although dreamers and visionaries are traditionally rewarded in Hollywood stories, in film noir they are punished. This is because the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s takes place in a world where people have no control, despite their energies and ambitions. Once again, it is possible to feel the shadow of the mushroom cloud, because World War Two didn't just wreck the lives and hopes of much of the planet, but introduced a genuinely existential threat.
And film noir also points out, as it does here, that holding fast to these dreams is a form of error, and that self-belief is a kind of narcissism from which there is no return.
Possibly most incredible is Harry Fabian's final action in Night and the City, in which he tries to make his girlfirend rich by having her cash in on the reward the underworld boss has put on his own head.
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| Begging his way to the top ... only to be laughed at. |
He has begged and borrowed his way to the top, and charmed his way through a villainous world, and it has not been enough. And what it points to is a typically down-to-earth and noirish lesson: if you think the dream is real, you are in for a rough awakening.
Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) is a work of suffocating fatalism, an infernal parable of ambition, deception, and doom. Shot in the postwar fog of London, it is a transatlantic anomaly: an American noir expatriated to a wounded European city, and yet it retains the acidic core of the genre even as it sheds its usual national attire.
Dassin, himself freshly marked by the House Un-American Activities Committee, conjures a world in which every gesture of hope becomes a betrayal, every scheme a slow dance toward ruin. His protagonist, Harry Fabian, is not a gangster, detective, or war-weary veteran, but a hustler, a creature of delusion and improvisation. The film is not concerned with the machinery of crime but with its moral gravity. Fabian does not kill anyone. But he ruins everything.
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| Francis L. Sullivan in Night and the City (1950) |
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| Googie Withers in Night and the City (1950) |
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| Richard Widmark in Night and the City (1950) |
At the heart of this vision is Richard Widmark's electric performance as Fabian. Widmark does not inhabit the role so much as rupture it from within, producing a man at once vile and curiously tender. This is not the stoic noir hero with clenched jaw and laconic wit.
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Fabian is manic, hungry, a man who chirps and capers like a desperate clown, selling dreams that no one believes—not even himself. He is the architect of his own downfall, a man who insists on running even when he has nowhere to go. From the opening frames—a breathless chase through the shadowy alleys of London—to his final, ignoble demise by the river, Fabian is always in flight. But as the city reminds him, and us, repeatedly: you can run, but you cannot escape your own nature.
London, as captured by cinematographer Max Greene, is a study in chiaroscuro rot. Dassin's camera prowls through derelict yards, smoky nightclubs, and dank wrestling gyms, always seeking the human wreckage behind the facade.
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The postwar city is not just a setting; it is a character, and a cruel one. Like the bombed-out Vienna of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), this London offers no redemption. It is a city still nursing its wounds, a place where old men remember glory days of Greco-Roman wrestling, and younger men turn the sport into a spectacle of brutality for quick profit. Wrestling here is not metaphor; it is the literal terrain of exploitation, tradition, and betrayal.
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Fabian, ever the grifter, believes he can manipulate the city's underworld by seizing control of its wrestling scene. He allies himself with the venerable Gregorius, played by real-life champion Stanislaus Zbyszko in a performance of tragic dignity. Gregorius represents honor, strength, and an archaic moral code—everything Fabian lacks.
The old man's belief in the purity of the sport is pitifully out of place in Fabian's world of backstage deals and moral squalor. Their alliance is Fabian's last chance to make something of himself, and his betrayal of Gregorius is the turning point in his own descent. The long, agonizing wrestling match between Gregorius and the brutish Strangler (Mike Mazurki) is the film's physical and spiritual fulcrum. There is no score to accompany the scene. Only breath, grunts, and the awful crescendo of mortality.
Gregorius dies. The dream dies. Fabian has nothing left to sell.
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The film, adapted from Gerald Kersh's novel, deviates from its source material in key ways, most notably in softening Fabian's depravity. The literary Fabian is irredeemable, almost sociopathic. The cinematic Fabian, as channeled through Widmark, is pathetic, even sympathetic. He is a man who believes that he can will himself into becoming someone, as though ambition alone were enough to transform reality.
In this, he joins a lineage of doomed American strivers: Willy Loman, Jay Gatsby, and the like. But Fabian is even more alone than they. He has no children, no illusions of romance. Only Mary Bristol, played by Gene Tierney, offers him something resembling human connection. But even she cannot save him. Tierney, luminous even in weary resignation, is wasted in a thankless role, her brilliance flickering at the margins of Fabian's frenzy.
Tierney's Mary is one of the few women in the film not steeped in manipulation or entrapment. Her love for Fabian is genuine, and therefore tragic. Googie Withers, in contrast, delivers a masterclass in controlled desperation as Helen Nosseross.
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| Googie Withers in Night and the City (1950) |
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Indeed, the film's vision of gender is one of unrelenting disillusionment. The men are either brutes, schemers, or decaying patriarchs. The women, when not casualties of male ambition, are themselves calculating, trapped by the roles assigned to them in a postwar world that has no space for reinvention.
Helen is perhaps the most modern figure in the film, but her aspirations are thwarted, her cleverness punished. Mary survives, but at the cost of everything she values. The narrative does not permit its female characters to escape the gravitational pull of male failure. Their function, like the city itself, is to absorb the consequences.
Night and the City was released in 1950, a year already steeped in political paranoia. The Second Red Scare was in full swing in the United States. The Korean War loomed on the horizon. In Britain, rationing persisted, and London remained a city in recovery, its skyline still marked by Luftwaffe destruction.
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The American version of the film differs significantly from its British counterpart. Dassin, already persona non grata in Hollywood, had no control over the final cut. The U.S. version, edited by Twentieth Century Fox, removes key scenes, reshuffles the narrative arc, and overlays a Bernard Herrmann score. The British cut, longer and more nuanced, includes an early domestic scene between Fabian and Mary that humanizes their relationship.
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| Super grimy limey industrial London noir-scapes from Jules Dassin in Night and the City (1950) |
Both versions possess merit, but their divergence underscores the very themes of betrayal and loss that the film dramatizes. Even the film itself, like its hero, was mutilated by forces beyond its control.
The film's place within American history is complex. Though shot in London, Night and the City is deeply American in its sensibility. It tells the story of a man who believes, against all evidence, that he can reinvent himself.
This is the myth of the frontier, transposed to the alleys of Europe. Fabian is an emigrant of the American Dream, a spiritual cousin to the GI-turned-smuggler of The Third Man and the itinerant salesman of Death of a Salesman. But where those characters seek meaning or redemption, Fabian seeks only victory. And he fails. The myth collapses. In this sense, the film is not merely about Fabian's downfall but about the exhaustion of the American ideal itself.
That Dassin would go on to direct Rififi (1955), perhaps the definitive French heist film, only deepens the poignancy of Night and the City. It is the hinge between American noir and European existentialism, a film made in exile that enacts its own exile. Dassin never made another American film. The blacklist, like the city, did not forgive.
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They are articulations of a worldview in which causality is rigged, morality is fungible, and fate is not a metaphysical abstraction but a social outcome. Fabian's every decision is wrong, but not because he is stupid. He is clever. He is imaginative. He is doomed because he is a character in a world that does not permit transformation. This is noir at its most pitiless: not a mystery to be solved, but a condition to be endured.
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| Herbert Lom in Night and the City (1950) |
Night and the City is a film populated by outcasts, losers, and ghosts. There are no innocents. There are only degrees of complicity. London, in Dassin's vision, is a city of lost causes, a place where light exists only to accentuate the darkness.
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| Gene Tierney in Night and the City (1950) |
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| Richard Widmark in Night and the City (1950) |
The final scenes, with Fabian fleeing across the city's derelict topography, evoke the wandering of a damned soul. Even his attempt at atonement—trying to use his death as a way to secure a reward for Mary—fails. The reward is rejected. His death is meaningless. His life, even more so.
The film ends not with catharsis, but with silence.
And yet, this silence is not empty. It is loaded with the weight of all that has been lost: honor, ambition, hope. There are no lessons here, no redemptive arcs. Only the echo of footsteps, retreating into the night.
This is not merely a film noir. It is a noir of the soul.
Dassin’s London is no less noirish than Chandler’s Los Angeles or Huston’s San Francisco. If anything, its decay is more palpable, its desperation more plausible. Here, the architecture leans in. The buildings collapse on the characters. The geography traps them. Light is not salvation but interrogation.
In the end, Night and the City emerges not just as a landmark of the noir genre but as one of its final laments. The noir hero was always doomed. But never so pitifully. Never so believably. Fabian is not a myth. He is the man you pass in the street, making a call, making a promise, making it up.
He is not dead when the film begins. But he is already finished.
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| Herbert Lom in Night and the City (1950) |
One might object that the film is too relentless, too downbeat. But this is precisely its achievement. It does not blink. It does not soften. Even its most lyrical moments—a glance from Mary, a sigh from Helen, a pause in Gregorius's speech—are weighted with inevitability. Night and the City does not ask for your sympathy. It demands your recognition.
It remains, seventy-five years later, a peerless evocation of a world where dreams are debts, and the only thing heavier than the night is the city itself.
Some Links:
- Night and the City at Wikipedia
- Night and the City on YouTube - this Richard Widmark classic appears to be available on YouTube with Greek subtitles.
- Jules Dassin on Wikipedia
- Richard Widmark on Wikipedia
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| Night and the City (1950) |
