While the U.S. was riding “high” off the post-war economic boom in 1950, some Americans chose to stay behind in Europe (though most are aware that the United Kingdom considers itself its own thing). Seeing an opportunity to be had where others didn’t…or, more to the point, seeing a market to be hustled. That’s certainly the case for Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City. Adapted by Jo Eisinger from Gerald Kersh’s 1938 novel of the same name, the film, in typical Hollywood (by way of London) fashion, sanitizes certain aspects of the source material—including the fact that Harry is a pimp in addition to a con man.
What’s more, the book focuses on the post-Great Depression angle, while the film version clearly intends to offer a more modern take on things in the wake of WWII. Eisinger also plays up the presence of Harry’s “girlfriend type,” the virtuously-named Mary (Gene Tierney), who lives with him in a cramped abode. One that Mary often spends days and nights at a time waiting for Harry to return to. At the beginning of the story, he’s just returned from a three-day disappearance into the London underworld, having returned with the “scheme of the week”: “one pill the size of a baby’s fingernail—dropped into the tank of your motorcar, it triples your mileage!” The pill in question is something he lights on fire to demonstrate how it works to Mary so she’ll “invest” the three hundred quid he needs to get it off the ground. Of course, this isn’t the first time he’s asked Mary for a bit of “scratch” to help give his various schemes some wings (or at least some legs)—indeed, one gets the sense that he’s only really with her because he relies on her to loosen the purse strings (she also happens to have a title: duchess). But this is one scheme she puts her foot down on.
When Harry retorts to her firm “no”, “You’ve got the money. You know you’ve got it,” Mary tells him in earnest, “…not for a mad, get-rich-quick scheme. The money’s there for the day you come to your senses… A grocer’s, a tobacco shop—anything done in the light of day.” But that’s the thing about Harry: he’s a sleazy creature of the night. Someone who can’t stop fantasizing about money, power, glory—that’s grabbed the “American way”: quickly and with brass balls. He doesn’t want to be some middling grocer or tobacconist, and he says as much to Mary when he declares, “I wanna be somebody.” Mary tries to subdue this notion by placating, “Oh darling, you’re so unhappy. Always running, always in the sweat… Don’t you see? It isn’t important just to be somebody. The important thing is to be with somebody. Somebody who wants nothing better than to live and work by your side…quietly, peacefully.” But Harry has by now become a wall of impenetrability, his wheels still turning about how to get the dough, to furnish the next scheme. For him, it’s like a drug—a fix he can’t live without: plotting. “Dreaming” to the point of sheer delusion, a practice that’s long been the hallmark of the American mindset. For it is a nation (even still) conditioned to believe that anything is possible. That everyone can be “destined for greatness.” Of course, by the same token, if “everyone” is destined for it, then no one is.
Harry also suffers the misfortune of operating in a country and city that favors an established “pedigree” over the American-sanctioned idea of being able to get your foot in the door with nothing more than gumption and confidence. “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” as it were. In London, however, you’re only as good as the name and legacy you were born under. Which is part of why fewer and fewer people are buying what Harry is selling. Even his own “special lady,” who continues to stay with him despite the overt romantic interest expressed by her fellow American neighbor, Adam Dunne (Hugh Marlowe). It is he who laments the most over how much Mary is suffering for her commitment to a man who only really cares about his own end game—and who will stop at nothing to strong-arm his way to the top. Indeed, it’s Adam who tells her of Harry’s fatal flaw, “[He’s] an artist without an art…that’s something that can make a man very unhappy, Mary, groping for the right lever, the means with which to express himself.”
And, because this was over a decade before Andy Warhol would come along to declare business as “the best art” (like the non-artist he was), there wasn’t much in the way of “appreciation” for Harry’s rabid “head for business.” One that leads him to try competing with the “lord of London wrestling,” Kristo (Herbert Lom). While at one of his matches, Harry overhears a disagreement between him and his Greek father, Gregorius the Great (Stanislaus Zbyszko), over what constitutes “real” wrestling, Harry clocks his “in” to start his own brand of promoting via the wrestling game with Gregorius on his side. After all, Kristo isn’t going to come after his own father (though that would be very Greek of him).
As Harry keeps begging and borrowing to get the cash he needs for his “startup” business, he continues to alienate more and more people. Or rather, make more and more enemies. Including his own employer, of sorts, Phil Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), the owner of the Silver Fox nightclub. Harry’s role “within the enterprise” is to direct big-spending clientele to the club using one his many con man tricks of the trade. But that line of work has become beyond odious to him, and he sees wrestling promotion as his ticket to “being somebody” as he always wanted to. Even if it means going along with a bit of seduction from his wife, Helen (Googie Withers), who has her own “climbing the ladder” machinations at play, too. Both characters represent the tragedy of how capitalism’s alluring promises inculcate so many with this false ideal of “ascension”—particularly in the United States.
By the end, Mary is the one still convinced of Harry’s greatness (for, as they say, “Love is blind”), warbling, “You could’ve been anything, anything. You had brains, ambition. You worked harder than any ten men. But the wrong things. Always the wrong things.” It is here that the underlying message of Eisinger’s script is one that suits the American agenda: have ambition, sure, but only the “right” kind. The kind that reflects one’s innate sense of their own “place” in the proverbial food chain. The same goes for UK living. After all, it’s no coincidence that both countries have so often been politically aligned throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Especially in terms of being designed to keep the “born poor” person perennially down at heel.
With Night and the City, Dassin and Eisinger reaffirm the idea that to have “light ambition” is fine—nay, is what makes you a “productive member of society”—but that to try “reaching for the stars” will only send one right back down into the gutter. A place where, as Wilde once noted, you can still look at the stars, just not touch them. No longer bothering to try reaching at all. Humbled by social realism, as it were.
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