A Film Canon

To an even greater extent than Where The Sidewalk Ends, Night And The City fulfils noir's attempt to transform topography into topology, and nocturnal cityscape into tortured mindscape, most explicitly by relocating the genre from L.A. to London, which is thoroughly defamiliarised, its racial homogeneity tempered by an uncanny Greek presence, and its historical and cultural co-ordinates replaced by those of hustler Harry Fabian's (Richard Widmark) ceaseless flight through a spectrum of underworld figures. These, in turn, radiate from the wrestling racket - and, more specifically, from the conflict between Greco-Roman and contemporary wrestling that Fabian exploits, to his downfall - providing a series of grotesque bodily topographies that are enhanced by Dassin's taste for disorienting close- ups, as well as by the glariness that the ring takes on in comparison to the rest of the film, clarifying Fabian's trajectory as so many tumbling attempts to avoid being pinned down by his nemeses. That said, Dassin and cinematographer Max Greene's innovation lies more in their handling of darkness, pairing long takes and extended sequences with on-location night shooting in such a way as to gradually gesture towards the arrival of some disastrous, stillborn dawn, as if the true, unbearable noir topos were the morning city, its sins and voids here mercilessly exposed both by one of the quietest, most solemn denouements in the genre, as well as one of the most astonishing, disheartening betrayals.