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Richard Widmark delivers yet another one of his sympathetic-if-shifty hustlers in Jules Dassin’s London-set 1950 noir. Harry (Widmark, all calculating eyes and distrustful forehead) is already fleeing from somebody when Night opens, and he pretty much spends the entire flick in flight. When Harry runs into a wrestler, Gregorious (Stanislaus Zbyszko), he divines a promotion angle to land a bigger payoff than his usual petty score. True to Harry’s luck, while the event goes off as planned, it plays out angering London’s entire wrestling netherworld, which puts a price on Harry’s head. It’s way too easy to project Dassin’s own struggles onto this story of an outsider caged in from all sides—Dassin was in the process of being blacklisted as a communist at the time—but don’t just see Night and the City as yet another by-product of the House on Un-American Activities Committee. Instead, come for Mutz Greenbaum’s supple cinematography that is as alive as a graphic novel, the colorful London crime figures that wouldn’t be equaled until the late 1960s, and, in Gene Tierney, a bombshell on par with Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner.

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