Avis des critiques

Harry claims he's been on the run all his life, and we believe it – few films from 1950 are as breathlessly paced as Night and the City, and the tightly constructed plot shows how Harry's desperate activities ruin various folks willingly or unwillingly involved with him.

Dassin's approach to this material is more dramatically pungent than is customary for the genre, and less rooted in German Expressionism. Imposing shadows are kept to a minimum, and Widmark makes Harry a sweaty, grasping loser, rather than the sort of cool customer exemplified by the likes of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum. He seems to be forever trapped in a metaphorical headlock, straining to free himself.

Lest Night and the City receive too much credit for starting a (failed) revolution, maybe it's more appropriate to simply state how Dassin's prescient vision of impending, neoliberal demise is the most imperative and enduring economics lesson an American studio has ever devised.

Dassin's sensationalism sustains itself best in 1950's Night and the City, where his energy is matched by Richard Widmark's brat Yankee hustler in shadow-and-fog London.

In Harry Fabian, the scroungy small-time wrestling tout of Jules Dassin's great 1950 noir Night and the City (August 26), Widmark has his best role, one that shows how supple and emotionally versatile an actor he really was... Widmark skids from elation into desperation at ramming speed. His performance is pure jazz: drumming with his hands, rehearsing his cons, improvising wheedled entreaties to suckers and creditors.

From its definitive title, which succinctly encapsulates the genre's fundamental gloominess and urbanity, to the inevitably cataclysmic end for its enterprising protagonist, Night and the City is no less than the archetypal film noir.

Along with common associations of mystery and moral ambiguity, darkness takes on a specifically urban coloration. Indeed, film noir caps a long-standing cultural tradition in which cities are cast as a dominion of shadows and corruption. And perhaps no noir city is quite so hellish, so imbued with the stench of mortality, as the London depicted in Night and the City.

However defined, the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.

Before he met Melina Mercouri and became an Artist, Jules Dassin made a number of worthwhile thrillers as a Hollywood contract director.

It attempts to present the city in neo-expressionist terms as a grotesque, terrifyingly anonymous trap. Fascinating, even though the stylised characterisations (like Francis L Sullivan's obesely outsized nightclub king) remain theoretically interesting rather than convincing. Inclined to go over the top, it all too clearly contains the seeds of Dassin's later - and disastrous - pretensions.