Night and the City (Dassin, 1950)

Night and the City (Dassin, 1950) - DTC #1066

An ambitious night-club hustler tries to make it big by setting up his own wrestling show. But his incessant cheating and the ruling mob make his plans fall apart. Only his faithful girl stays at his side.

Widmark plays a very convincing small-timer, and he gets to show off - at one or two moments he's quite over the top, but still enjoyable. He manages to keep the character likeable, somewhere in between childish naivete and ruthless egomaniac. His character, Fabian, runs into trouble with pretty much everyone in a pretty small universe of the London underworld.

Favorite scenes: The wrestling match between the two brutes is amazing to watch, especially knowing that whatever the outcome might be, Fabian would have had it.

Another great scene is the exchange between Fabian and the night club owner that he tried to con out of money. (Actually, he is the only one, Fabian didn't con) - Best use of a drumkit in a scene, ever.

Good script to look at.

Kommentare

Beliebte Posts aus diesem Blog

Odd Man Out (Reed, 1947) #TSPDT #469

An underground rebel is wounded during a heist and tries to evade the manhunt in Belfast. The story is of a steady decline towards the unsurprising end of terrible consequences. James Mason is quite astonishing as the soft-spoken hero, whom you just cannot imagine of doing anything as bad as scaring a child, let alone a robbery. Obviously, he does both in the film and much more. His endless odyssey which is much less about him than the various Belfastian characters towards him and - although explicitly denied by the filmmaker in a bizarre opening title card - ultimately about the struggle for independence in Northern Ireland (or any similar situation) There were two or three moments in the film that didn't hold up for me as well as they should, but the crazy painter and his bizarre co-inhabitant made it all up - a bold selection of outright frightening men from the fringes of society. There is no need to decipher the symbolism (payoff might be even bigger) - it's simply e...

Time of the Gypsies / Dom Za Vesanje (Emir Kusturica, 1988)

A supernaturally gifted boy from a Gypsy community is forced to survive in the world of crime. The intriguing qualities of Kusturica's films I've seen is his relentless depiction of basically crazy communities. Not just agreeably potty, they're usually outright interstellar-nuts. Here, he follows the fate of the rather harmless boy Perhan, that leaves for Italy in hope of a better future for him and his loved ones. There are some enormously interesting images in the film that kept ringing long after. The ritual in the river and the last scene in the church ruin (with a horse standing somewhere far back in the image...). After sketchily mapping out the scenes it is surprising how rigorously three-acty the screenplay is constructed. The first act seems quite long in terms of time and number of scenes, but there is also a lot of imagery spent on depicting life in this crazy universe, which makes the second part in Italy much more believable. And there is a certa...

Scarface (de Palma, 1982) - TSPDT #490

A cuban refugee wreaks havoc on Miamis drug industry and realizes his version of the American Dream. The main character is really something - the acting is great and the character suffers from the most fatal of all flaws: He cannot lie - although in a practical sense he does exactly that. So his attacks on the american society he has worked so hard to become a part of work really great - he has a deep insight but at the same time he is hypocrite enough to fall in the same trap in a way. The only time when I felt that the script had to "pull" a little to take the story where it wanted it is when Tony's mother calls to ask about his sister. Her character was a little too much on hating Tony.

Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

Dieses Blog durchsuchen