RIP Jules Dassin & Richard Widmark

Two significant figures in film noir died recently.  The director Jules Dassin and the actor Richard Widmark only worked together once but the result was an absolute classic.  “Night and the City” (1950), a noir set in the seedy docklands of London,  is one of the genre’s most cynical works.  Widmark is at his low-life best as a down on his luck promoter willing to do absolutely anything to get ahead and, all too predictably, coming to grief.  If the British setting lends a degree of novelty to proceedings and affords the use of some top class acting talent (Francis L Sullivan is particularly effective as a self-loathing fat man) Dassin’s dazzling visual sense and fatalistic tone ensure it still feels like an American production.  Something of his own desperate personal situation, on the run from Hollywood, one step ahead of McCarthy and the black-listing henchmen, is communicated.  Leading lady Gene Tierney had barely recovered from a breakdown and this is also apparent in her performance.

Both Widmark and Dassin had earlier established themselves within the genre.  Widmark’s debut is in many ways the most memorable of any major star.  His giggling psychopath in “Kiss of Death” (1947) forever set the standard for screen violence when he pushed a wheelchair bound little old lady down the stairs.  Like Cagney before him Widmark’s bad guy persona was eventually softened as his roles shifted from the gangster figure to that of the policeman. In Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), for example, his crusading cop is no where near as memorable as Jack Palance’s uncompromising hoodlum.  Yet  in “Night and the City”, and Sam Fuller’s cold war masterpiece “Pick Up on South Street” (1953), Widmark is mesmerising, a minutely detailed study of flawed humanity.

Dassin’s noir reputation rested initially on “The Naked City” (1948), a semi-documentary police thriller which was the first major production shot on location in New York city.  His American career blighted by the McCarthy witch hunts, Dassin fled initially to London, and then France, then, permanantly, to Greece.   His greatest film in exile was “Rififi”(1955), the granddaddy of all heist movies most celebrated (and imitated) for a wordless ten minute robbery sequence.  Dassin later successfully parodied it with a comic inversion, “Topkapi” (1964), but his biggest box office success, which also garnered him a wife and an adopted homeland, was the sex farce “Never on Sunday” (1960).  Arguably though nothing in Dassin’s Greek period compares with his earlier work.

 Some of the above mentioned films may be rented on DVD from Auteur House.