Sunday night’s movie this week was another classic noir Night and The City, starring, Richard Widmark, and Gene Tierney with a standout support-role performance by Herbert Lom.

An ambitious but two-bit street con man, Harry Fabian (Widmark) dreams of making a name for himself, of becoming someone respected and admired but his life is one of running from debtors and hustling tourists for unscrupulous nightclubs that drain wallets with watered-down drinks and women hired to keep them drinking. Harry’s girlfriend Mary (Tierney) is dubious of Harry’s constantly failing get-rich-quick schemes but remains hopelessly in love with him. A chance encounter while hustling for nightclub clients leads harry to believe that he can launch an enterprise to control wrestling entertainment in all of London while neutralizing Kristo (Lom) the organized crime figure currently behind the exhibitions. when things inevitably begin to go wrong Harry’s skills at fast-talk and quick thinking are the only factors between his success and Kristo’s vengeance.

With its lack of sympathetic or moral characters, save for the ineffectual Mary, Night and The City is a perfect example of the dark, cynical tones found in true film noir. While not as depraved as Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff, Harry is a morally compromised character not unlike Squid Game’sprotagonist Gi-hun who steals from his own mother to fuel his gambling addiction. Unlike Gi-hun Harry has no redemptive arc but instead as he struggles against fate and fortune sinks ever deeper into his own immoral quicksand.

I’ve seen Richard Widmark give stellar performances and I’ve seen him ‘phone them in’ when he has no respect for the material he is in, here he is at his best form, always charming, always fully committed to the character, managing to invoke empathy for a character that in actual life it would be best to avoid. That said the standout performance to me was Herbert Lom as the respectable gangster Kristo. My principle cinematic experience with Lom has been his work with Blake Edwards in various comedies where Lom player broad exaggerated characters seeing this early turn as a nearly sociopathic heavy is quite a revelation. Kristo is a cold and precise character with only room in his heart for his beloved father and when he turns to revenge there can be no doubt that with Kristo is will be achieved.

Night and The City, while not well received upon its release has claimed its well-deserved place among the best of noirs from the classic period. The film is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their Fox Noir collection.

Please consider purchasing My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge which is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

Before I get into my thoughts on this classic noir just a note that as this is the busy season for my day-job with loads of overtime my posting here will be sparser and erratic and after the new year.

Nightmare Alley, adapted from the novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, is the relatively rare noir that boasts a cast of top studio leads, A-picture budgeting, and promotion, unlike most noirs that were either studio B-pictures, that is they played the second half of a double bills, or produced independently of the major studios. Tyrone Power, looking to expand his roles beyond dashing heroic types, plays Stan Carlisle, an amoral carnival worker willing to use and discard people in his quest for money and fame. From lowly beginnings in a second-rate travelling carnival, complete with an off-screen geek biting the heads of chickens, Stanton cons, charms, and connives his way to the top of the nightclub circuit as a ‘mentalist’ but like Icarus the higher he flies his danger grows.

Nightmare Alley is a dark and cynical film even for the genre of film noir. While there are ‘good’ characters in the story their effects are limited, and Stanton uses them as ruthlessly as anyone else he encounters. It is perhaps a fault of the film that a few early scenes telegraph the films ending a little too precisely or perhaps that is simply the danger of a writer watching the filmmakers palm the card because we know the tricks played on the rubes. Either way Nightmare Alley, with is impressive cast and excellent production values combined with a thematically compelling story about the cost of an ambition is a classic noir worth watching.

In December of 2021, next month as I write this, Guillermo del Torro, reportedly inspired by the novel and not the classic film, will release his adaptation for theatrical distribution starring Bradley Cooper as Stan Carlisle.

Nightmare Alley (1947) is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

After hearing it praised and discussed on the Junkfood Cinema podcast and knowing it was part of the Criterion Channel’s current Neo-Noir I decided to 1973’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye a viewing.

In the film Marlow is awakened in the middle of the night by his friend who needs an emergency car ride to Mexico from Los Angeles following a fight with his wife. Marlow, apparently a very good friend, complies and later when the wife turns up dead finds himself considered a co-conspirator in her murder kicking off the plot.

Sadly, I can’t say the film was an overwhelming success for me. Elliot Gould’s mumbling and seeming distracted take on P.I. Philip Marlow never fully engaged me as a character but only as an affectation. In addition to that Marlow in the script jumps to correct conclusions for the next stage of the mystery but seemingly without have seen or discovered the clues that would actually lead to such a leap of logic. For example, he asks a woman if she knew a particular couple that lives in the same gated community as she. She answers that she vaguely knew them and later he’s asking the woman’s husband if his wife was having an affair with the husband of the pervious couple and nothing in the film established or hinted at such a relationship. Marlow simply knew somehow. The gangster sub-plot, apparently an invention of the screenplay, is jarring both tonally and logically to story. It’s odd and absurdist but never fully explored or explained.

Directed by hailed filmmaker Robert Altman with a screenplay by the legendary Leigh Bracket, The Long Goodbye should have been a film I loved but instead it slots in as a piece of film history I can now say I have watched but I have desire to see again.

Noir Review: Kiss of Death

It was difficult to find a copy of Kiss of Death to watch but I eventually managed the task. The film, starring Victor Mature, is particularly notable for as the first screen appearance of one
Richard Widmark as the vicious and psychopathic Tommy Udo a screen debut that scored
Widmark an Oscar nomination.

Mature plays Nick Bianco a thief nabbed in an armed robbery that goes wrong and rather than cooperate with the district attorney’s office takes his hard time sentence rather than squeal. However, when events intervene Nick has a change of heart and begin working for the state which brings him into conflict with Udo who has an intense hatred of those who turn on their criminal brothers. There is a romantic sub-plot between Mature and a younger woman, Coleen Gray, but the film’s real focus is Bianco and Udo.

This is one of Mature’s best performances and the conflict Nick suffers as his world crumbles if evident on his feature but without a doubt the standout performance is Widmark’s Udo. If you have watched any documentaries about the film noir movement, you have undoubtedly seen the clip of Udo sending a helpless woman tumbling down a long flight of stairs. While this capture the cruelty of his character the performance is much more than acts of wonton violence. Widmark manipulates every muscle in his face, creates a perverse curl to his upper lip, and give a joker-like grin as Udo that radiates that this person has no empathy for anyone.

Kiss of Death plot wise is fairly standard and the voiceover narration could have been dropped to improve the movie, but it should not be missed for the performances.