He Who Must Die

He Who Must Die (aka Celui Qui Doit Mourir)(Jules Dassin, 1957) A French production of a Greek story directed by an ex-patriated (and blacklisted) American, He Who Must Die is based on a story by Nikos Kazantzakis (who also wrote the novels that formed the basis of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ). 

The time is 1921 during the midst of the Greco-Turkish Wars. Turk forces are taking over Greek cities and if there is no cooperation from the populace, they are burned to the ground and its people forced to relocate. Such is the fate of one such nameless town, and its priest, Father Fotis (Jean Servais—the star of Rififi), gathers his flock to make them ready to embark on a journey by foot in the Greek wilderness, to find help and land to restart their devastated community and a new way of life in exile. One old man carries the bones of his father and grandfather in a sack on which to build the foundation of their new imagined town, the church being its center.

As they start their journey, it is a time of celebration in the occupied town of Lycovrisi, overseen by the Turk governor Agha (Gregoire Aslan). Every seven years, they stage their own version of the Passion Play, the participants chosen by the town priest Grigoris (Fernand Ledoux) and the mayor Patriarchos (Gert Frobe): a mendacious peddler Yannakos (Rene LeFevre) is chosen to play the apostle Peter; the mayor's son Michelis (Maurice Ronet) will play the apostle John; Kostandis (Lucien Raimbourgh), the cafe owner is chosen to play James; the town butcher, Panagiotaras (Roger Hanin) will play Judas, a role he rejects but is forced upon him; and the most surprising choices are the town's widow (and prostitute) Katerina (Melina Mercouri) to play Mary Magdalene, and a stuttering, shy shepherd Monolios (Pierre Vaneck) is chosen to play Christ.

At first, the players are unnerved by the heavy responsibility of their roles (especially Manolios, who is afraid to speak in front of crowds), but the authoritarian Grigoris will not change his mind. The Passion Play will go on and the die (and the Play) has been cast. 

But, the arrival of the burned town's refugees changes everything. Flotis implores Grigoris to help his people. They have walked for 21 days and many have died enroute. All they ask is a barren parcel of land and maybe some food to eat until they are established. But, the town priest will have none of it, banishing the refugees, and spreading the idea that the dead among probably didn't die of starvation or exhaustion, but of cholera. The refugees are stunned by the town's lack of charity, but decide to leave—lest they be attacked by the locals—and make their way to an area of the foothills of the mountain Sarakina that overlooks Lycovrisi.

But, their plight, and their priest's harsh attitude toward them, which borders on persecution, stirs something in the Passion players. Yannakos is the first to visit, on a mission from rich townsman Ladas (Dimos Starenios) who has sent him to see if he can take any of the refugees' jewelry in exchange for food or water. But, Yannakos has a crisis of conscience when he goes up the mountain and sees how destitute they are. Michelis soon follows, and then Manolios, who is so moved by the refugees that he finds his voice and implores the people of Lycovrisi to offer charity, despite the derision heaped upon him by Grigoris who tells him that the role of Christ has gone to his head and he's become an anti-Christ. He tells Michelis in private that it is dangerous for a Turk occupied city to help rebels against the Turks.

But, Manolios will not be deterred, and when Michelis, the mayor's son, says that he will help Manolios and the displaced villagers, Grigorios expels him from the village and threatens the shepherd with excommunication. It doesn't even phase Manolios, and Michelis confronts the angry priest with a venomous "If Jesus Christ came back to Earth, he would be crucified again again. And you would be the one to drive the nails in." His fiancee begs him to not go or she'll break off their engagement, but Michelis is steadfast. He will go with Monolios. His betrayal of his father and the town, causes the mayor to fall under ill health. But Michelis will inherit the town, the deeds, everything, when his father dies and such is his convictions that he is willing to give the people in the mountains the deeds to start a new life.

The priest, Grigoris, will not stand for that. His authority has been defied, and Manolios' message already shows the danger of spreading, further undermining his own power. So he goes to the Turk Agha and tells him that if he wants to keep control of the village and, eventually, occupied Greece, that he must quell the rebellion. He demands that Agha bring Manolios to him personally—for what purposes he doesn't say, but it probably won't be Confirmation. Probably more like Last Rites.

Agha takes an armed guard and goes to the compound in the city where Michelis has taken in some of the refugees and Manolios goes over the barricade to talk to him. The Turk tells him that Grigoris just wants to talk, that he (Agha) is a politician, not a fighter, but if Manolios really wants to do some good, he'll come quietly, so that Agha doesn't order his men to fire on the people behind the barricade. Manolios ponders, takes a stick, attacks the soldier manning the mounted machine gun and runs. Volleys fire back and forth—men on either side are killed, and Manolios is taken prisoner.

Dassin is in his element here. His years in Hollywood before the blacklist gave him ample opportunity to hone his craft and purge himself of any indulgences and take a harder edge with his subject matter. His approach is straightforward, unsentimental, but no less, for want of a better term, impassioned. And his work on social issues and the world of film-noir provides a bitter undercurrent to what is a religious film...in Cinemascope, no less.

I'm not sure what the issue is, but it is a tough road to buy a copy of He Who Must Die—you can see a rather dulled, sub-titled version online, slightly cropped of its full Cinemascope width, but at least it's not pan-and-scanned. Maybe the ideas are a little...revolutionary, but that's not stopped films before. It's safe to say that Dassin would later strive to make better films, more far-reaching films, but never one as powerful as this one. It might be his masterpiece.

Two Smart People

Two Smart People (Jules Dassin, 1946) Jules Dassin's last job as a contract director for M-G-M (before tearing up the screen when he moved to B-movies at Universal) is a slight caper movie heavy on the relationship side of things; the tension comes not from the "will they pull it off" aspect so much as the "when does the betrayal happen" question. The screenplay is a collaboration between Ethel Hill (her last credit in a career that started in the silent era) and Leslie Charteris—who's most known for creating "The Saint." There are elements of that, but no halo's.

It follows two con-artists—Ace Connors (John Hodiak—he starred in Hitchcock's Lifeboat) and Ricki Woodner (Lucille Ball) who meet at a swanky Beverly Hill hotel. 

Well, they don't so much as collide; "clash" might be the better term. Both have their sights on a mark (the easily befuddled Lloyd Corrigan—but he had a history of playing con-men, as well) Ace has some oil futures he wants to sell to him, but Ricki has enough smart patter—and a deflecting "master-work"—to lure the investor to her side. That is, until Ace exposes it for a forgery, thus making those oil deeds a bit more tempting.

Make of it what you will two cats fighting over a ball of yarn, or a larcenous tennis match, but it puts Ricki and Ace on the same wavelength—one that has a lot of static on the line, but a certain simpatico frequency. Plus, Ace has a reputation—the rumor that he has half a million dollars in stolen bonds squirreled away somewhere, a nice little dividend if she can get her hands on it. But, there's another reason to get close to Ace—she's being threatened by Ace's former partner "Fly" Feletti (Elisha Cook Jr. in full weasel mode), who has a grudge against Ace and wants the bonds, as well. Already, the relationships, as they say, are "complicated."

And just a little slippery. With this couple of swindlers, you need someone you can depend on, so in walks Detective Bob Simms (Lloyd Nolan) who has absolutely no con to play, but does have have a job to do involving Ace; Simms is the cop investigating the stolen bonds and has the duty of escorting him to Sing Sing as part of the con's plea-deal for turning over evidence against Feletti (but not the bonds, the existence of which Ace won't even acknowledge). Simms is a practical man. He likes Ace (he's not a murderer, after all) and when Ace suggests they take the slow-road to Sing-Sing to visit old haunts and indulge in the finest meals that they don't provide on the menu at The Gray Bar Hotel. Simms is a straight arrow, but practical. An extended train-trip sounds like fun and they're in no hurry.

Trouble is, trains are public transportation; anybody can buy a ticket. So, Ace and Bob are surprised to find that Ricki has come along for the ride (and unbeknownst to them, so has Feletti), which sets up a dynamic where everybody is looking for the bonds that Ace has stashed. He won't betray their location and everybody wants to betray him. What's a con-artist to do? Sit back and enjoy the ride and make the best of it.

Hodiak looks like he's enjoying himself, and Nolan is a trooper. But, Ball, who since denounced the film as "a dog," looks none too happy. Oh, she goes through the motions, but you sense that there's a lip-twisting "Ewwww..." forthcoming in every scene. She had every right to be a bit brittle about it. Like, Dassin, this was going to be her last film before being released from her contract with the prestigious M-G-M. Despite the elaborate costumes she sports throughout the film, there was nothing flattering about the pink slip she'd be getting at the end of it.

I wonder whatever became of her? Well, one of the key technicians on the film was ex-pat cinematography master Karl Freund, who had learned enough from the German Expressionist era to highlight her cheekbones and make her look luminous despite the disadvantage of black-and-white doing nothing for her flaming red hair. Lucy must have taken notice and been appreciative, though. When she and husband Desi Arnaz launched Desilu Productions with their first series idea "I Love Lucy," they hired Freund to apply his same talents behind the camera and enhance the audience-friendly "3-camera technique" that would become of staple of those shows "filmed before a live audience."

Even career set-backs provide valuable lessons. Talk about "smart people."

Topkapi

Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964) Dassin spoofs his earlier crime dramas with this comedy-caper (based on an Eric Ambler novel) set in Istanbul. There an odd assortment of crooks (Melina Mercouri, Maximillian Schell, Robert Morley) recruit an English prat (Peter Ustinov, who replaced a planned Peter Sellers and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role) to take the fall for an elaborate heist—the stealing of a priceless ornamental dagger from the well-alarmed Topkapi museum. Shot in rapturous color—with an opening sequence that seems a precursor to psychedelic films—Dassin uses the local color to spice up the activities of the wily criminals and their elaborate scheme, which involves clambering over the pointed roof-tops, impeding the progress of a beam from a nearby lighthouse, suspending an aerialist over the display, while also precisely elevating its heavy glass case. It's one of those "Mission: Impossble" capers, where what could go wrong probably will, and the precisely planned plot goes out the window and they have to punt, lateral, and do whatever can come to mind to get over the goal line. The escapade is fraught with perils of all sorts, not the least of which is getting caught.

It's a jolly good time, and Dassin has as much fun seriously pulling off the robbery as he does spoofing the characters who fully fulfill the old adage of the best-laid plans of mice and men...and women. Twists and turns abound as much as a silhouette of an Istanbul skyline. Schell and Mercouri have never looked more glamorous—Dassin lovingly channels his Hollywood studio days with M-G-M with a directorial smile—and Ustinov has never looked more sweaty or been more peripatetic; Elizabeth Taylor won a sympathy-Oscar that year, and maybe the Academy did the same for Ustinov, seeing him scramble white-knuckled over high, slippery Istanbul rooftops.

For years, there was talk of a remake under the direction of Paul Verhoeven, with Pierce Brosnan repeating his debonair thief role from The Thomas Crown Affair to be called The Topkapi Affair. As it's been 18 years since that remake hit theaters, interest seems to have waned... at least until some studio head sees a heist film having a good opening weekend and asks if they have anything in the pile.

Never On Sunday

Never On Sunday aka Pote tin Kyriaki (Ποτέ την Κυριακή) (Jules Dassin, 1960) A truly odd film, not the typical Jules Dassin film or the style in which he was accustomed, but is obviously a labor of love for the expatriate blacklisted writer-director who made a new life and career for himself in Greece. If the movie wasn't so openly good-hearted, one would almost think Jules Dassin was thumbing his nose at his detractors in Hollywood by showing off his newly-adopted country and tackling subject matter that the movie capitol wouldn't touch at the time, and do so in such a light-hearted manner. Old detractors like the stodgy Cecil B. DeMille would have simmered (if he hadn't been dead for a year).

Never On Sunday tells the story of a touristing American intellectual and Greek scholar (named Homer, naturally), scribbling away in his notebook about the customs and way of life in modern Greece. His first night, his ebullient inquisitiveness gets him into a barroom brawl; the shiner he receives he'll keep throughout the movie. That Dassin casts himself in the role parallels his own joy of discovering the care-free life in Europe,* and by casting his wife, Melina Mercouri, as the effervescent prostitute Ilya, he was able to give her a show-piece that introduced her to the rest of the world.** And the charming score by Manos Hatzidakis topped popular music charts.

Part travelogue, part home movie, part character study, Never On Sunday would prove to be Dassin's greatest hit, and showed off the gifted director's ability to economically make an audience-grabbing film without having to resort to the pot-boiler crime dramas he had specialized in previously. And the tricks he learned to shoot a film anonymously making The Naked City allowed extensive location work, which inspired a tourism boom that still exists today.

It's a wise little film, too, as tourist Homer falls in love with the land of his expertise, and with Ilya, but finds that his academic's view of Greece doesn't fit the reality. And Ilya? He spends a lot of his time trying to rescue her from her life of prostitution, only to find that she doesn't want to be rescued. As with other learned men who find their Shangri-La, Homer regretfully leaves, tossing away his notes on the philosophy of Greece, and looking back as he sails away from the idyllic life he's not ready to embrace. Just as Homer tosses away his travel notebook at the end of the film, Dassin was able to put aside the past, and create a new life in his adapted Greece, and the fiery actress who would become his Muse, activist partner and lifelong companion.

* Dassin, in a 2004 interview included on the Naked City DVD tells the story of why he cast himself in the film--no money in the budget for a star. Once the film was completed, Dassin had conversations with an interested Jack Lemmon, and convinced the producers to give him more money to re-shoot his scenes if, having seen the film, Lemmon agreed to participate. Dassin screened the film for him, and Lemmon's comments damned with faint praise--he said Dassin was so awful in the role that he was actually charming, and told Dassin he didn't need to re-shoot. End of story. When the subject of his performance came up in the Q & A, Dassin put his head in his hands and said "Oy!"

** Mercouri won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. She had been nominated at Cannes before, as Dassin was nominated that year for Best Director for Rififi. He won. She lost. Spying her later, nursing her disappointment he went up to her and said "An award's just an award, it doesn't take away from the work," to which she replied "Screw you! You won!!" "It was love at first sight," said Dassin.

Brute Force (1947)

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947) Westgate Penitentiary, in the middle on nowhere identifiable—Its "gates only open three times: when you come in, when you've served your time, and when you're dead!" One of the latter is going out now, a 62 year old prisoner forced to work in the prison's most dangerous area, what they call "the drainpipe." His cellmates in Cell R17 crowd around the the barred window of their too-small enclosure to watch. They are Stack (Jeff Corey), Spencer (John Hoyt)-in for gambling and grifting, Kid Coy (John Overman)-ex-boxer in for assault just moved, in taking the place of the guy who died, Becker "the Soldier" (Howard Duff)-in for murder (he took the rap for his lover), Lister (Whit Bissell)-in for embezzlement. Their main interest is because one of their own is coming back: mobster Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) is coming out of solitary after 10 days after a stool pigeon planted a knife on him. The Chief Guard Munsey (Hume Cronyn) talks briefly to him, telling him he needs to show respect, to not be so hard, and to cooperate. Collins tells him what he wants to hear and he goes back to his cell.

The others crowd around him and give him a dry cigarette and a light and updates on the situation, including their plans for taking care of the stoolie who ratted him out (without going into specifics) and tell him that everything is okay. Collins spits out his response (in just the way you can hear Lancaster doing it): "Everything's okay? What's okay? Nothing's okay. It never was, and it never will be. Not till we're out. You get that? Out."

Brute Force may be the Citizen Kane of prison movies. Or at least a "Grand Gray-Bar Hotel." Produced by Mark Hellinger in the same hard-bitten style of his previous movie The Killers and written by a young up-and-coming script-writer named Richard Brooks.* Brute Force is a prison movie on the surface and a life-metaphor once you get below around drainpipe level. And, except for some motivational flashback sequences demanded by Hellinger so he could throw some female exploitation into the mix, it's directed by Jules Dassin with a noir attitude so bleak it approaches hysteria...then burns right through it. At the time, it was remarked for its violence, but it's not so much the violence—there are patches that are arresting—it's the vehemence, the hot and cold anger behind it, that is truly remarkable.

"Ya know, I was just thinkin'. An insurance company could go flat broke in this prison." Beyond the casual cruelty of the guards, the first outbreak of violence is the one that settles all matters about Collins' framing: in the prison work-room, that stoolie (James O'Rear) begins to suspect that a diversionary fight clearing the area of guards is a trap; it is, as he's cornered by Coy, Spencer, and Stack triangulating him with acetylene torches until he backs into a working industrial press. Nobody knows anything. Nobody saw anything. Just bad luck, "falling" into that press.

This makes a bad situation worse for the warden (Roman Bohnen); he's already been called on the carpet by some lackey of the governor threatening the man with his job if there are any more violent incidents; the guy's just a mouth-piece—he doesn't have any more answers than anybody else in the room does. But, threatening the warden with his job stings. He's been doing the job so long he doesn't know what else he would do without it. He's in a similar situation as the prison doctor (Art Smith), who's doing a job he hates (and self-medicates to get through it), but he's too old to do anything else. Everybody at Westgate has their own flavor of prison, it seems.

Except Munsey. The Chief Guard sits back during that bitch-fest with the governor's man and the warden and the doctor and just listens, biding his time, feigning concern, and solicitously acting as a go-between and interpreter ("I think what the doctor is saying..."), but not revealing his hand. That's because he's a spider, waiting for the prey to be weakened before he takes them out. The prison is his web and he has full control of it, pushing the guards, brutalizing the men, using all the methods at his disposal to have absolute power over the facility and anyone unlucky enough to enter its gates. He's not above any torture, physical or psychological, to maintain his control—at one point, he'll even beat information out of a prisoner (Sam Levene) while listening to Wagner on the phonograph (as if the ties to fascism weren't obvious enough)

That's the situation the prisoners of R17 are in. But there's added urgency: Collins is told by his lawyer that the girl who's waiting for him on the outside (Ann Blyth) needs an operation for cancer, but she won't unless Collins is with her. She doesn't know he's in prison and the lawyer is under strict instructions not to tell her. Collins has to work the angles, but his plan is to escape and never look back, and with ideas from his cell-mates, he hatches an idea—but it will mean being assigned to the very duty that killed the prisoner at the beginning of the movie—working "the drainpipe."

It's mean, it's tough, and it's violent and sometimes a little florid in its prison-yard dialog, but the part the filmmakers weren't crazy about (except the producer) was the insistence on interrupting the story with flash-backs involving the women in their lives. Producer Hellinger wanted female appeal and so the characters played by Hoyt, Bissell, Duff, and Lancaster briefly escape the prison walls (cinematiclly, of course) for scenes with the women in their pasts (played by Anita Colby, Ella Raines, Yvonne De Carlo and Blyth). The scenes don't do much as far as back-story—Hoyt's is even done without dialog and simply his voice-over—and the effect is jarring and removes suspense, pacing, and an ever-increasing feeling of doom that permeates the entire movie. Director Dassin had a substitute in mind—a surreal portrait ripped from a magazine in the cell that reminds all of them of "the girl outside." That was as sentimental as they wanted to get. 

When the escape attempt comes, it is filmed with all the energy, desperation, and hopelessness that can be bled out of the material, both visually and viscerally, like an amped-up war movie—the attempt is based on an attack strategy seen by Duff's "Soldier" during the second world war—and it all seems a bit like a suicide mission that quickly turns from gaining freedom to merely getting revenge and taking out as many guards as possible.

It is dark, but once the smoke clears, the fires are put out, and the dead carried through those implacable doors—ultimately, they make it out, ironically, only when they're dead—the film gets even darker, equating life itself with a prison. Jules Dassin was a master of the film-noir—a genre he wasn't that crazy about—but, he was interested in social justice and in making statements—and his turgid prison/war movie is one of the darkest of the type. It's no wonder tough guys in film-noirs wanted to avoid prison—Brute Force shows a world bleaker than bleak.

"Nobody escapes. Nobody ever really escapes."

* Yeah, if you know anything about movies, the name will be familiar: Brooks would go on to direct, starting with 1950's Cary Grant picture Crisis, work with Bogart on Deadline U.S.A. and Battle Circus, break the rock and roll barrier with Blackboard Jungle, and then veer from programmers (Take the High Ground!, The Last Hunt, The Professionals) to high profile prestige pictures (Lord Jim, the Brothers Karamazov, Elmer Gantry, Sweet Bird of Youth), to exploitation films (In Cold Blood, Looking for Mr. Goodbar). His last film was Fever Pitch in 1985.

Thieves Highway

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) A revenge story set in the wild and wooly world of wildcat truckers (also explored in A.I. Bezzerides' similarly themed They Drive By Night). Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) comes home after a big score and showers his family with presents. He's so full of himself that he doesn't notice the obvious: Dad's missing his legs (which makes the slippers he bought him a very poor choice). It seems while Nick was away, Dad got rooked on a vegetable run, taken for a long drunk, and had a bad crash in his dilapidated truck, crippling him. 

Worldly-wise and hardened in combat, Nick decides on an assault on the man who crushed his dad's dreams, one Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), a bad apple who'll spoil the whole bunch right down to the bottom of the barrell.  He partners with the wild-catter who bought Pop's truck (the great Millard Mitchell) to deliver two loads of golden delicious to Figlia's produce wholesaler in San Fran'...if they can get through a gauntlet that includes duplicitous rival wild-catters, a truck with a bad universal (and not much good!), 36 hours straight on the road without any sleep, and worn tires (a sequence that Dassin turns into a thrilling montage of overlapping images).  

Except for the loading of apples, all this takes place at night, and no one could dredge the dark as well as Jules Dassin (as he was always proud to announce, that's pronounced "Da-ssin," from the U.S.). Dassin always had a flair for the street and the twisted culture of film noir, and Thieves Highway is gritty and street-smart: no one in this movie is naive or innocent, everybody has an agenda or an angle, and Nick has to keep his head on straight (tough to do with a neck injury received when a truck collapsed on him while changing a tire), whether negotiating with Figlia or dealing with the street-frail (Valentina Cortese) hired by Figlia to entertain Nick while he works the angles.

It's an education, one that toughens Nick up and makes him see that there's more than what he imagined in his existence before.  Sure, he's earned a living and survived the war, but...  It's one thing to avoid death, it's quite another to embrace life.

The Naked City

The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948) It started with Weegee. The homunculous photographer of New York's gritty, seemy side had published a book of his night-time photos of back-alley rendezvous, police-work, wet and dry, and New York's underbelly (fleas and all) bathed in the harsh glow of neon or Weegee's harsher strobe-flash. The book had the provocative title "Naked City," so, of course, it became a best-seller.

Producer Mark Hellinger bought the rights to make a movie of it with the intention of making a pot-boiler with the city of New York as the focal point and star. No big stars, just character actors would appear in it, and it would reflect Weegee's photography with the story of a police investigation of a lurid murder amid real New York locations. He hired screenwriters Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald for the screenplay, and to direct he brought in director Jules Dassin, whose prison drama Brute Force showed he had an unsentimental flair for that material.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the motion picture you are about to see is called 'The Naked City.' My name is Mark Hellinger. I was in charge of its production. But I may as well tell you frankly that it's a bit different from most films you've ever seen. It was written by Albert Maltz and Alvin Wald, photographed by William Daniels and directed by Jules Dassin. As you see, you're flying over an island. A city. A particular city. And this is the story of a number of people. A story, also, of the city itself. It was not photographed in a studio. Quite the contrary, Barry Fitzgerald our star, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Ted deCorsia and the other actors played out their roles in the streets, in the apartment houses, in the sky-scrapers of New York itself. And along with them a great many thousand New Yorkers played out their roles, also. This is the city as it is. Hot city pavements. Children at play. The building in its naked stone. People without make-up."

And for the most part, they succeeded.

Dassin can be quite "arty" in his direction, but restricted to real locations in the New York area in the middle of the day, he sometimes had to get what shot he could any way he could—hiding the camera in trucks, newsstands, anything that would keep from drawing a sizable crowd. A gawking clutch of citizenry would ruin the effect of a real story being played out. With the exception of a couple of process shots inside cars, the film pretty much keeps its promise.

But there is a disconnect. Despite the verisimilitude of the staging, the actors are still very much acting. The script, especially in its dialogue, is a bit too clever, and follows the conventions of Hollywood story construction exactly to code. This type of film had been done before with The House on 92nd Street directed by Henry Hathaway, during the noir/cost-cutting days of the studios, and would be done again with Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan. The city may be New York in 1948, but the story takes place somewhere between reality and artifice.

Hellinger, who also narrates the film (in a grand-standing display of ego that would only be equalled by Cecil B. DeMille, and less so, by John Huston and Orson Welles), succumbed to a heart attack when the film was being previewed, at the age of 44, ending a colorful career as newspaperman, screenwriter, producer, film executive, and New York gad-about. Despite the number of classic films with his name attached, Hellinger may be best remembered for the last line of his last film, which has endured and entered the pop culture.

"It is one o'clock in the morning again and this is the city. And these are the lights a child born to the name of Petori hungered for. Her passion has been played out now. Her name, her face, her history were worth five cents a day for six days. Tomorrow, a new case will hit the headlines. Yet some will remember Jean Dexter. She won't be entirely forgotten. Not entirely. Not altogether. There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them."

In 2007, The Naked City was chosen by the Library of Congress to be a part of the National Film Registry.

There are 700 movies in the Film Registry.* The Naked City is one of them.

Keeping tabs on the Naked City filming are Weegee and a pal,
a young photographer for Look magazine named Stanley Kubrick.

* They're listed here. This year's films will be announced at the end of the year.

Night and the City (1950)

Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950) Frenetic film noir directed by Jules Dassin two steps ahead of the HUAC that was trying to get him to name names. Dassin fled to London under the auspices of Darryl F. Zanuck to direct this turgid Film-Noir-in-London about a Charlie Hustle tout, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), exploiting people's passions trying to make a big score any way he can, this time through wrestling tournaments, encroaching on the turf of Kristo (Herbert Lom), who'll do anything to stop him. Everything that is, except cross his father, who just happens to be Fabian's new business partner.

The first time we see Fabian, he's running. He spends a lot of time running in the film, trying to out-pace his creditors, or the next guy who wants to kill him, or dashing after The Next Big Thing, but the line between him running to something or from is a bit blurred now. And there's not much difference between the patter he spins his long-suffering girlfriend (Gene Tierney, whose small role belies her second billing placement) or any of the marks he's trying to hustle. Fabian's sincerity is veneer-thick, just enough to make you think he's on somebody's side besides his own. When he stands helplessly on the sidelines while his meal-ticket fights for his life (a brutal sequence amazingly staged by Dassin and the two wrestlers involved), you get the sense that he's distraught because his future could go up in smoke.

The thing is, Fabian's a rat in a trap, which is visually communicated by Dassin's many shots of him stuck in place, or running the maze-like side-streets and ruins of London, as well as the cages that substitute for offices in the sleazy back-world the denizens inhabit. Despite the squalor, the film is beautiful to look at, with Dassin and his cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum bending the shadows into Gothic patterns that rival those of Citizen Kane.

Night and the City is a fascinating film, with an animated (perhaps too animated) Widmark performance-probably to make his character a bit more sympathetic; the British actors have their emotions checked in reserve and come off best, while Tierney's performance is all Fox-ingenue. And the desperate, frantic sense feels like it was made by a man on the run. Dassin stayed in Europe, continuing his career, which hit an international career-peak with Never On Sunday in 1960. He died March 31st this year in his adopted home of Greece.

Night and the City was remade in 1992, starring Robert DeNiro and Jessica Lange. It was not improved on.