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It's like being followed by an invisible man
Dark City (1950) bears the distinction of lending its name as a metonym for the world of film noir, which must be nice for it since taken strictly as a movie, it's kind of a mess.
Taken strictly as half a movie, it's a taut little entry in the lowlife's nightmare, setting the clock ticking like its six-month predecessor and near-namesake Night and the City (1950) on a no-good's race against a self-inflicted fate. Through its darkened studio streets, the proto-slasher simplicity of the plot tracks the body count of a rigged poker game which left its mark dead and his hustlers at the mercy of his vengeful brother, tracked down in turn to be strangled and hanged in awful reenactment of a cleaned-out sucker's suicide by a stranger who never tips his hand until it's too late. "Any man in this room might be Sidney Winant. He knows us. He can see us . . . We can't see him." It's lean, it's lurid, and the cast assembled to tighten its screws is superb. Making his professional film debut as far from Biblical heroes as you could throw him, Charlton Heston stars as Danny Haley, two-bit card shark and proprietor of a bookie joint no amount of payola can prevent the vice squad from raiding in time for a virtuous Easter. His tight, down-and-out look works nicely against his varsity shoulders, but there's some wound beneath his wolfish philosophy which he refuses like a penitence to disclose to the girl he buys odd, offhand little presents for and insists he can't love, reserving his time-killing for late nights with his bickering, unofficial crew—Ed Begley Sr.'s Barney who has a bellyache for every occasion and the antacid-coated ulcers to back them up, Jack Webb's Augie not helping as the kind of putz who still thinks dribble glasses are funny, and Harry Morgan continuing his run of mid-century weirdos with Soldier, a damaged ex-pug who really isn't the dummy his slow, furrowed speech can let him be taken for. He has the beleaguered air of a silent clown when, confronted with a counterful of phones all ringing unanswerably, he scrambles them all off the hook like a flustered cat, but he delivers the film's moral knockout when he somberly tells his erstwhile employer, "You're worse than the rest of them, Danny. They don't know no better. You're worse than all of them." He's speaking of the fleecing of Arthur Winant, a 24-karat maroon played by Don DeFore with such guileless out-of-town-ness that just hooking him for a game should have been a crime, never mind actually rooking him for the cashier's check for $5000 that properly belonged to a sports club in L.A. One of the nicer, by which I mean nastier points of the screenplay by John Meredyth Lucas and Larry Marcus is the suggestion that while no one knew about the homicidal bruiser played by Mike Mazurki, Danny might still have risked it for the score. It almost succeeds in distracting the viewer from the conspicuous waste of Lizabeth Scott in the role of Fran Garland, effectively reprising her steadfast chanteuse from I Walk Alone (1947) in a needier, more submissive key. Whatever spirit she shows when she rebukes Danny, "A girl walked out on you and you couldn't take it. But you'd take it out on me," doesn't last longer than it takes him to turn a night walk by the skeletally fog-wrapped cranes of the river into a grim meditation on the Styx. The inevitable law rounds out the story in the laconically amused person of Dean Jagger's Captain Garvey, but its real fuels are sleaze and paranoia, the audience sweating it out with its doomed characters. We can see for ourselves the onyx ring which is the signature of the killer, unnoticed in the play of spotlights across the club floor where every other man's face pops out to Danny as a potential assassin. The murders themselves are staged with trapdoor spider shock, as inescapable as if the death of one brother really conjured the other like some tulpa of revenge. With this setup chewing its nails off, Dark City doesn't need anything beyond the commitment to run its payoff unflinchingly to ground. Wherever the second-act turn toward romantic melodrama came from, it should have stayed there.
The dark city of the title is never named. A single process shot and a line of dialogue suggest that it may be Chicago, but for all intents and purposes it is one of those uncanny spaces with neither joy nor love nor light, the slight, persistent artificiality of its dirt-sprayed sidewalks and redressed storefronts and hotel rooms hard-lit as black boxes only adding to its dreamlike sense of every and nowhere and the minute the plot relocates itself to the more realistically identifiable climes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, it collapses like a soufflé. It's not just another world, it's another story as Danny in his desperation to put a face to the name of his stalker ingratiates himself with Arthur's widow in the guise of an insurance investigator and finds himself touched by another person's troubles for the first time since his wartime disillusion and disgrace. It is not the fault of Viveca Lindfors, whose Victoria Winant bears the insupportable burden of regenerating a selfish operator through sheer innocent niceness; it is not even the fault of the roller coasters of Ocean Park Pier or the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory, its harvester-legged old-school Zeiss projector rotating like science fiction through the night sky. The Capture (1950) managed a similar trick of guilt-edged bonding, but crucially it didn't try to keep its protagonist's secret from the woman falling for him across her husband's ghost. "The way you used me to save your own skin was bad enough, but to come here and make friends with Billy—after murdering his father—" Especially since the whole heart-twisting imposture doesn't even pan out except to confirm that the faceless Sidney Winant is a psycho, which could perhaps have been hypothesized from his serial killer's flair for the ritual, it feels like even more of a digression than the average love angle, the stuff of a film in its own right or a cute spitball that should have been excised in draft. Even changing the scenery for the neon frontage of the Las Vegas Strip does not straighten out the narrative, as much of a relief as it is to discover the diminutive, newly dapper Soldier thriving as the pit boss for an old pal from his welterweight days—after he slyly arranges an audition for Fran, Danny grants him the rueful compliment, "Soldier's the most practical Cupid I've ever met." None of this material is unwatchable, especially as it edges its way back from sun-kissed suburbia toward the fringes of the underworld, but neither does it ever regain the grip and momentum of its opening scenes. The poker game that killed Arthur Winant is played in traditional stages, the build-up, the convincer, the blow-off, his fresh-faced confidence slowly dissolving in flop sweat as his breezy win of the night before slips through his fingers with the rest of his life. The stakes-setting murder which follows draws itself out like shudder pulp, complete with the decoy of a spring-loaded cat before the real horror erupts into the failed, banal protective circle of paperbacks and whiskey. Captain Garvey does his best to impress the danger of his situation on Danny with a remarkably sick little parable about the industrial slaughtering of sheep. I don't need all of my noir to be full-blown creepshows, but Dark City starts with such determination to fulfill its title, any deviation from its dead-ahead premise almost immediately dissipates all of its tension, the very tight plot uncoiling into frayed ends. In fairness, it sticks the landing of a deep-shadowed, bone-crunching fight scene in which Heston holds about as much of his own as can be expected against one-time professional wrestler and real-life whip-smart Mazurki, but it still feels as though it shouldn't have taken so many detours to get its antihero to the brink of redemption if it kills him.
Thanks to the photography of Victor Milner and the direction of William Dieterle, Dark City never looks negligible even in its literally lighter passages, but it really shines in the shadows, the translucent half-world of the id come out to play. It's hard to argue with its stated moral, "You can't live without getting involved," but more of its best lines are brush-offs like Danny's "Playing cards with you two is like washing your feet with your socks on," or the simple way that Soldier with a hammer in his hand from rechaining the front door looks at Augie who keeps calling him—mean, motor-mouthed, no sense of self-preservation—"Punchy." Given a star-making introduction under the titles, Heston has to run his part more on charisma than sympathy and does so well by its weak, abrasive spots, he might have been wasted on heroes. Also glimpsed intriguingly in the credits is Ketti Frings, though I like to think the women of Dark City would have been at least two-and-a-half-dimensional if the writer of The Accused (1949) and The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) had had more of a hand in the proceedings than "Adaptation by." If nothing else, it offers the novelty of a Hal Wallis Paramount noir without Wendell Corey—he must have been off at MGM shooting Harriet Craig (1950). It can be streamed through the usual suspects, but frankly I went with the Internet Archive and do not feel cheated that I recognized some of its urban topography from other noirs of the same vintage. It's the blinds in the office and the bend of the street. "It's a big city." – "It's a dirty mess." This card brought to you by my practical backers at Patreon.
Taken strictly as half a movie, it's a taut little entry in the lowlife's nightmare, setting the clock ticking like its six-month predecessor and near-namesake Night and the City (1950) on a no-good's race against a self-inflicted fate. Through its darkened studio streets, the proto-slasher simplicity of the plot tracks the body count of a rigged poker game which left its mark dead and his hustlers at the mercy of his vengeful brother, tracked down in turn to be strangled and hanged in awful reenactment of a cleaned-out sucker's suicide by a stranger who never tips his hand until it's too late. "Any man in this room might be Sidney Winant. He knows us. He can see us . . . We can't see him." It's lean, it's lurid, and the cast assembled to tighten its screws is superb. Making his professional film debut as far from Biblical heroes as you could throw him, Charlton Heston stars as Danny Haley, two-bit card shark and proprietor of a bookie joint no amount of payola can prevent the vice squad from raiding in time for a virtuous Easter. His tight, down-and-out look works nicely against his varsity shoulders, but there's some wound beneath his wolfish philosophy which he refuses like a penitence to disclose to the girl he buys odd, offhand little presents for and insists he can't love, reserving his time-killing for late nights with his bickering, unofficial crew—Ed Begley Sr.'s Barney who has a bellyache for every occasion and the antacid-coated ulcers to back them up, Jack Webb's Augie not helping as the kind of putz who still thinks dribble glasses are funny, and Harry Morgan continuing his run of mid-century weirdos with Soldier, a damaged ex-pug who really isn't the dummy his slow, furrowed speech can let him be taken for. He has the beleaguered air of a silent clown when, confronted with a counterful of phones all ringing unanswerably, he scrambles them all off the hook like a flustered cat, but he delivers the film's moral knockout when he somberly tells his erstwhile employer, "You're worse than the rest of them, Danny. They don't know no better. You're worse than all of them." He's speaking of the fleecing of Arthur Winant, a 24-karat maroon played by Don DeFore with such guileless out-of-town-ness that just hooking him for a game should have been a crime, never mind actually rooking him for the cashier's check for $5000 that properly belonged to a sports club in L.A. One of the nicer, by which I mean nastier points of the screenplay by John Meredyth Lucas and Larry Marcus is the suggestion that while no one knew about the homicidal bruiser played by Mike Mazurki, Danny might still have risked it for the score. It almost succeeds in distracting the viewer from the conspicuous waste of Lizabeth Scott in the role of Fran Garland, effectively reprising her steadfast chanteuse from I Walk Alone (1947) in a needier, more submissive key. Whatever spirit she shows when she rebukes Danny, "A girl walked out on you and you couldn't take it. But you'd take it out on me," doesn't last longer than it takes him to turn a night walk by the skeletally fog-wrapped cranes of the river into a grim meditation on the Styx. The inevitable law rounds out the story in the laconically amused person of Dean Jagger's Captain Garvey, but its real fuels are sleaze and paranoia, the audience sweating it out with its doomed characters. We can see for ourselves the onyx ring which is the signature of the killer, unnoticed in the play of spotlights across the club floor where every other man's face pops out to Danny as a potential assassin. The murders themselves are staged with trapdoor spider shock, as inescapable as if the death of one brother really conjured the other like some tulpa of revenge. With this setup chewing its nails off, Dark City doesn't need anything beyond the commitment to run its payoff unflinchingly to ground. Wherever the second-act turn toward romantic melodrama came from, it should have stayed there.
The dark city of the title is never named. A single process shot and a line of dialogue suggest that it may be Chicago, but for all intents and purposes it is one of those uncanny spaces with neither joy nor love nor light, the slight, persistent artificiality of its dirt-sprayed sidewalks and redressed storefronts and hotel rooms hard-lit as black boxes only adding to its dreamlike sense of every and nowhere and the minute the plot relocates itself to the more realistically identifiable climes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, it collapses like a soufflé. It's not just another world, it's another story as Danny in his desperation to put a face to the name of his stalker ingratiates himself with Arthur's widow in the guise of an insurance investigator and finds himself touched by another person's troubles for the first time since his wartime disillusion and disgrace. It is not the fault of Viveca Lindfors, whose Victoria Winant bears the insupportable burden of regenerating a selfish operator through sheer innocent niceness; it is not even the fault of the roller coasters of Ocean Park Pier or the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory, its harvester-legged old-school Zeiss projector rotating like science fiction through the night sky. The Capture (1950) managed a similar trick of guilt-edged bonding, but crucially it didn't try to keep its protagonist's secret from the woman falling for him across her husband's ghost. "The way you used me to save your own skin was bad enough, but to come here and make friends with Billy—after murdering his father—" Especially since the whole heart-twisting imposture doesn't even pan out except to confirm that the faceless Sidney Winant is a psycho, which could perhaps have been hypothesized from his serial killer's flair for the ritual, it feels like even more of a digression than the average love angle, the stuff of a film in its own right or a cute spitball that should have been excised in draft. Even changing the scenery for the neon frontage of the Las Vegas Strip does not straighten out the narrative, as much of a relief as it is to discover the diminutive, newly dapper Soldier thriving as the pit boss for an old pal from his welterweight days—after he slyly arranges an audition for Fran, Danny grants him the rueful compliment, "Soldier's the most practical Cupid I've ever met." None of this material is unwatchable, especially as it edges its way back from sun-kissed suburbia toward the fringes of the underworld, but neither does it ever regain the grip and momentum of its opening scenes. The poker game that killed Arthur Winant is played in traditional stages, the build-up, the convincer, the blow-off, his fresh-faced confidence slowly dissolving in flop sweat as his breezy win of the night before slips through his fingers with the rest of his life. The stakes-setting murder which follows draws itself out like shudder pulp, complete with the decoy of a spring-loaded cat before the real horror erupts into the failed, banal protective circle of paperbacks and whiskey. Captain Garvey does his best to impress the danger of his situation on Danny with a remarkably sick little parable about the industrial slaughtering of sheep. I don't need all of my noir to be full-blown creepshows, but Dark City starts with such determination to fulfill its title, any deviation from its dead-ahead premise almost immediately dissipates all of its tension, the very tight plot uncoiling into frayed ends. In fairness, it sticks the landing of a deep-shadowed, bone-crunching fight scene in which Heston holds about as much of his own as can be expected against one-time professional wrestler and real-life whip-smart Mazurki, but it still feels as though it shouldn't have taken so many detours to get its antihero to the brink of redemption if it kills him.
Thanks to the photography of Victor Milner and the direction of William Dieterle, Dark City never looks negligible even in its literally lighter passages, but it really shines in the shadows, the translucent half-world of the id come out to play. It's hard to argue with its stated moral, "You can't live without getting involved," but more of its best lines are brush-offs like Danny's "Playing cards with you two is like washing your feet with your socks on," or the simple way that Soldier with a hammer in his hand from rechaining the front door looks at Augie who keeps calling him—mean, motor-mouthed, no sense of self-preservation—"Punchy." Given a star-making introduction under the titles, Heston has to run his part more on charisma than sympathy and does so well by its weak, abrasive spots, he might have been wasted on heroes. Also glimpsed intriguingly in the credits is Ketti Frings, though I like to think the women of Dark City would have been at least two-and-a-half-dimensional if the writer of The Accused (1949) and The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) had had more of a hand in the proceedings than "Adaptation by." If nothing else, it offers the novelty of a Hal Wallis Paramount noir without Wendell Corey—he must have been off at MGM shooting Harriet Craig (1950). It can be streamed through the usual suspects, but frankly I went with the Internet Archive and do not feel cheated that I recognized some of its urban topography from other noirs of the same vintage. It's the blinds in the office and the bend of the street. "It's a big city." – "It's a dirty mess." This card brought to you by my practical backers at Patreon.
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It's just such a baffling swerve, to the point where if I discovered the film had actually been composited from two different stories, I would be shocked, shocked like Captain Renault. I looked for the PCA file to see if I could find any hints of explanation, but it is unfortunately not part of the archive online. It could have been one of these incredible little noirs, fast and scary and startling for their era. I gather it is remembered for introducing Charlton Heston, although I watched it, honestly (a) because I am tracking the Paramount noirs now that they are finally on my radar (b) for Harry Morgan.
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Nine
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Thank you! It's still more like visiting than I would like, but we are working toward something more permanent.
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What a film, though, sounds like! There are so many tales that really Do Not benefit from wandering-romance monsters, and this sounds like one. "Wherever the second-act turn toward romantic melodrama came from, it should have stayed there."--THERE ARE MANY SUCH CASES.
Does Soldier make it out alive? I liked this description you gave of him: "he scrambles [the telephones] all off the hook like a flustered cat."
I felt bad for the actress you described as reprising her role "in a needier, more submissive key"--and then I guess anyway she's sidelined as Charlton Heston goes after the dead man's widow? Wow.
Victoria Winant bears the insupportable burden of regenerating a selfish operator through sheer innocent niceness --Yeah, if niceness could cure things, the world would not today be the way it is.
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I like comments whenever they arrive! I am glad you came back for this review. It was the first one written on the current, post-Bertie machine.
What a film, though, sounds like! There are so many tales that really Do Not benefit from wandering-romance monsters, and this sounds like one.
I love the image of the romance as a natural hazard with a territorial range, not quite the local apex predator but definitely not something whose path you want to stray into. Some of my favorite romances are in film noir, which doesn't mean it needs to be a regular ingredient.
Does Soldier make it out alive? I liked this description you gave of him: "he scrambles [the telephones] all off the hook like a flustered cat."
He does! I loved him, slightly screwed up and sound. He gets a gesture so randomly sweet, I wondered if the actors improvised it: when Fran comes offstage from her first performance at Swede's, Soldier is waiting to congratulate her, and somehow his handshake ends up with the two of them walking over to the bar, just holding hands. They don't look like a couple, but they look a lot better for one another than Danny with Fran.
I felt bad for the actress you described as reprising her role "in a needier, more submissive key"--and then I guess anyway she's sidelined as Charlton Heston goes after the dead man's widow? Wow.
She is technically re-lined after everything predictably blows up with Viveca Lindfors, but come on. Lizabeth Scott could eat Dan Duryea for breakfast. What does she need Charlton Heston for?
--Yeah, if niceness could cure things, the world would not today be the way it is.
It's very annoying.