A few words about my favorite
Criterion Blu-ray of 2015 so far... This is a fantastic upgrade from the old
Criterion DVD.
Harry Fabian, played with frenzied exuberance by Richard Widmark, is a small-time hustler with dreams of grandeur that enable him to blast his way from one hopeless scheme to another in postwar London. Fabian's beautiful romantic interest, played by the one and only Gene Tierney, is exasperated with her futile attempts to keep him grounded and steer him into a life of honest hard work, but she continues to bail him out, despite the cautionary advice of her protective neighbor, Adam, who describes Fabian as "an artist without an art" whose quest for the big time could prove to be dangerous.
One night, as Fabian is pulling cons to lure customers into a nightclub run by his sometime partners, Philip (Francis L. Sullivan) and Philip's scheming wife, Helen (Googie Withers), he senses a golden opportunity when he witnesses an argument at a wrestling match between a prominent gangster, Kristo (Herbert Lom) and Kristo's father, Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko), who wishes to keep the wrestling free from the "clowns" who have turned the integrity and art of the sport into a circus. Fabian devises a plan to earn a fortune as a wrestling host, but the particulars of his new enterprise threaten to drag everyone else down with him.
Film noir, a term coined by a French critic and translated as "black film", finds one of its blackest examples in Jules Dassin's 1950 entry, Night and the City. The bombed-out Soho district of London is a shadowy villain in itself, and a handful of chase sequences stand up to Carol Reed's dark vision of Vienna in The Third Man, which was released the previous year. The characters of this seedy setting have few redeeming qualities, and one of the movie's dark charms is its ability to keep us viewers fascinated while the figurative walls close in around these people as they each lose control and become tired of running from their inevitable fates.
This
Criterion Blu-ray of Night and the City includes the bleak American version, which was Dassin's preferred cut and my own personal favorite cut, and an alternate British version, which utilizes different sequence edits and a different score to present a slightly less cynical incarnation of the story. To watch both of these versions is to gain an appreciation of how music and editing can significantly alter the tone of a movie.
The picture quality of this Blu-ray is exceptional, and I consider Night and the City to be another shining example of how
Criterion can bring a new life to black-and-white classics with their high definition presentations. The audio quality is also impressive, and we get the best of both the Franz Waxman score in the American version and the Benjamin Frankel score in the British version.
The commentary from DVD Savant critic, Glenn Erickson, is informative and fun. A handful of supplements, namely a 2004 interview with Jules Dassin and a comparison of the American and British versions of the film, are also engaging.
This
Criterion presentation of Night and the City has my highest recommendation. It's a tough sell to interest people in the plight of a lowlife schemer who ends up in waters that go over his head, but the role of Harry Fabian is one of Richard Widmark's finest roles and his magnetic abilities draw us in, especially during the final moments, when the character makes a heartbreaking attempt at redemption.
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