Review of Night and the City (1950) by Edith N — 04 Jul 2012

Even Then, Everyone Knew Wrestling Was Fake.

Part of the problem, I guess, is that I can't get into the idea that all the wrestling promotion in London is controlled by one guy. He goes on a trip to Liverpool at one point, and that implies he controls Liverpool, too. It just doesn't work for me. It is estimated that nearly nine million people lived in London in 1950. The implication this movie gives us is that London is basically a small town, maybe something relative in population to the big cities of Ohio. It had about the same population, in fact, as New York City. What's more, all these people seem to know each other personally. It's not even like the underworld of Chicago in the 1920s; it isn't implied that dozens of people work for any given boss and that it's really only the bosses who know each other. It's that everyone knows everyone, that there is only a tiny underworld. I just can't get into that.

Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is going to be somebody. I think his plan is to borrow money from Phillip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan) to become a wrestling promoter, though I'm not entirely sure. At any rate, he first asks Phillip's wife, Helen (Googie Withers), but what she really wants is to be a nightclub owner. Anyway, Harry has been told that he is not allowed to be a wrestling promoter in London. Only Kristo (Herbert Lom) is in control of All the Wrestling in London. So Harry pairs up with Kristo's father, Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko, actually a wrestler and not an actor), and claims he will only do pure Greco-Roman wrestling. Kristo is okay with that, because Greco-Roman wrestling doesn't make any money. Only it's all a ploy, and somehow, Harry is planning to take down Kristo when he least expects it, which involves getting The Strangler (Mike Mazurki), to really want to get into a fight with Gregorius. And Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney) ties into the whole thing somehow.

I really had a hard time keeping track of what was going on. I suspect I am not alone in this. Okay, at least part of the problem is that it's summer, and I have a hard time watching movies with plots in the summer. However, the plot on this was awfully convoluted. I'm still not entirely sure how promoting his own wrestling match was going to let Harry triumph over Kristo. I suppose it would prove that Kristo can't control the entirety of his chosen racket, but I really don't think he could anyway. I don't see how he could; the way it works in real life generally take more than the three guys Kristo seems to have working for him. It may well be that part of the problem was that they didn't have a big enough thug budget for the film, but whatever it was, the movie just didn't come together for me. That's leaving aside that I was having a hard time keeping track of what was happening in the first place. I'm sure everybody in the movie had plans, but I'm not sure everybody's plans made sense.

The acting also got a little histrionic in places. I've looked over Richard Widmark's page on IMDb, and I realize that I'm not sure I've ever seen him in anything where I really thought he had to act and did. I guess he wasn't bad as Mike King in [i]How the West Was Won[/i], but it's a small role in a movie where no one much has to carry the picture. I love Gene Tierney, and I've seen her act several times. However, this film really called to mind the [i]Mystery Science Theater 3000[/i]-featured film [i]The Beatniks[/i]. In that I was waiting for someone to scream to us that they'd killed that fat barkeep. It was just jarring. Especially in the last few minutes of the picture. Oh, and the scene where there is actually wrestling, which goes on far too long. The sad thing is that, although Stanislaus Zbyszko was not an actor, he gives one of the best performances in the film. He doesn't like what has happened to what he thinks is a great art, and he laments it beautifully.

Yeah, the film is heavy and ponderous. The plot is rambling and makes no sense. I had a hard time keeping track of which character was who unless I already knew the performer's name. (As in, I never had any doubt who Gene Tierney was playing, just with what she had to do with anything.) There's a certain charm to it, though, and certainly it's better than a lot of other movies I've seen. However, I would not put it on the list of Classic Noir where most people seem to have stuck it. If you're going to watch Gene Tierney in noir, do yourself a favour and watch [i]Laura[/i] instead. Hugh Marlowe was in [i]All About Eve[/i]. And for once, maybe it would have been a good idea to read the book first, because I might have followed the plot better if I'd done that. Besides, it can't be any farther away from the book than the 1992 remake, which is set in New York and features boxing, presumably because, by 1992, no one was even pretending to take professional wrestling seriously anymore.