Night and the City (Dassin, 1950): Garden Cinema, 8pm
The latest season of the London Review of Book’s long-running film series continues its exploration of visions of London created by non-British filmmakers throughout 2026. First up for the new year is the golden-age British film noir Night and the City. It was Jules Dassin’s last film before he was blacklisted by Hollywood. He declared that he had not read the novel by the now-cult writer, Gerald Kersh, on which it was based. It follows the attempts of a small-time American con artist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark on definitive, anti-heroic form) to establish himself shattered post-war London’s wrestling rackets. With a production history as vivid as its tangled plot, Night and the City was widely misunderstood upon release, but is now regarded as a classic of the genre: ‘A work of emotional power and existential drama that stands as a paradigm of noir pathos and despair,’ according to the film scholar Andrew Dickos.
Introducing Night and the City, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans, will be the novelist, occasional LRB contributor and screenwriter Ronan Bennett (Top Boy, Public Enemies, The Day of the Jackal).
Time Out review:
Bizarre film noir
with Richard Widmark as a small time nightclub tout trying to hustle his way
into the wrestling rackets, but finding himself the object of a
murderous manhunt when his cons catch up with him. Set in a London
through which Widmark spends much of his time dodging in dark alleyways,
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 Jules Dassin's later - and disastrous - pretensions.
Tom Milne
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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