Night and the City, adapted from Gerald Kersh's novel, is the supreme example of London noir
It's the title that gets you first – so elemental and sinewy. In four short words it yokes together two key 20th-century fetishes: the black swamp of the night (with the moral terrors it summons up) and the concretised urban jungle that has taken on a brutal life of its own. As a pairing, it is definitively modern and anti-pastoral. And with the careful positioning of a definite article, it becomes a phrase of pure, hard poetry of authentically modernist intent. Would The Night and the City have worked so well? Or The Night and City? Or even City and the Night? No chance.
The writer who came up with it, Gerald Kersh, attached it to his third novel. Published in 1938, Night and the City is a high-minded pulp thriller containing a fantastically vivid creation: Soho pimp (or "ponce", as the term was then) Harry Fabian. A dapper dresser armed with a fake American accent, and a tenacious finagler in all corners of the W1 petty-crime universe, Fabian is arguably the most finely drawn sharp-suited hoodlum of inter-war England. (The main rivals? Graham Greene's Pinkie in Brighton Rock, or maybe James Curtis's Kennedy in The Gilt Kid.) And though it's never fully spelled out in Kersh's effusive prose, Fabian is an ethnically radical character too: with a name like that, we know he's supposed to be Jewish. But Fabian is a long way from the earnest, poverty-stricken, fresh-off-the-boat characters in books such as Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto.
Fabian's background makes him a potent icon. From the 1880s, Soho had its own Jewish community – any aspiring protection-racketeer needed solid ethnic turf to prey on. (I know this because my grandfather Alf Pulver ran a tailor's workshop in Poland Street just after the war; his brother, Sid, commandeered a room for his unsuccessful bookie operation.) Fabian had plenty of real-life counterparts in the 1930s and 40s: street toughs like the Distelman brothers, Morris "Moishe Blue Boy" Goldstein, or Jack "Spot" Comer. By the end of the 40s, Comer could viably contend to be a major underworld figure as he "took over" the West End and carried out turf-war feuds with Italian roughnecks such as Albert Dimes. Earlier, at the turn of the century, Jewish Whitechapel had seen the gang known as the "Bessarabian Tigers", led by Max Moses aka Kid McCoy.
The novel was a great success and Kersh was fending off Hollywood even before it was published in America. (Simon & Schuster, delayed by the war, didn't put it out there until 1946.) The 1950 film that eventually emerged – set up by Darryl F Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, directed by McCarthy blacklistee Jules Dassin, led by Hollywood heavy Richard Widmark, and shot in London – is not the only noir made in Britain, but it's the only one in the high Hollywood manner, with its cinematic stylebook imported virtually in its entirety along with the director and leads.
Two distinct versions were completed: one for release in Britain and its empire, and one for the US and the rest of the world. Book and movie(s) don't bear a huge relation to each other, apart from Fabian and his predilection for bone-splintering wrestling promotions, but Night and the City is a kind of prism that refracts a number of fascinating subjects, including noir, British pulp cinema, communist crime novels and the mythology of Soho.
The film has suffered a shifting reputation, but its stature has grown sharply in recent years, thanks largely to the ascension of a new generation of cinematic tastemakers, led by the Coen brothers andQuentin Tarantino – a generation who prized pulp cinema (and novels) for their own sake. Both the Coens and Tarantino specialised in creating pastiche-oriented crime dramas that sparked scores of imitators, and simultaneously precipitated a shift in audience and critics' positions. In the UK we had our own watered-down version of this, with the 1998 success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which triggered a nostalgic interest in British crime cinema. Lock, Stock is clearly less astute about its forebears than Reservoir Dogs or Miller's Crossing, but we have to give it its due in popularising previously little-regarded areas of British film.
Kersh's novel eventually joined other examples of "lowlife" writing in bargain bins across the land. Urban archaeologists and psychogeographers, however, never lost sight of it, and in recent yearsNight and the City has joined a flotilla of defiantly indigenous novels as a treasured, and marketable, corner of the cult publishing world. Kersh's current standing owes much to frequent mention in the work of Iain Sinclair, whose interest in east London novelists has led him naturally to Jewish writers such as Alexander Baron (The Lowlife), Emanuel Litvinoff (Journey Through a Small Planet) and Simon Blumenfeld (Jew Boy) and onwards towards Kersh. But Kersh is not of the school of Hackney and Bethnal Green, and Night and the City has little in common with other Jewish immigrant chronicles of rage and despair; it has much more affinity with British pulp literature of the 30s and 40s. James Curtis, Richard Llewellyn and Graham Greene in his "entertainment" phase are Kersh's closest cousins, delineating an argot-heavy world of petty crime, class conflict and bruising, street-smart morality. The novel becomes a gateway into that much-mythicised landscape of modern London: the Soho of sex shops and gang wars.
As John King, author of The Football Factory, puts it in the foreword to a recent edition of the novel: "Night and the City is set in the Soho of legend, itself a focus for the glitz of the West End. The book recreates a trail of pubs and clubs and Italian-run cafés from back in the days when a bowl of spaghetti was still exotic. Kersh knew this world and his sentences shine bright, his locations peopled by a nutty bunch of fluorescent characters with nuttier, more fluorescent names."
It is entirely fitting, then, that the film adaptation of Kersh's novel should go on to become the supreme example of London noir: nothing else comes close. Its genesis meant that it became the meeting-point of distinct cinematic pathways: the American studio system, the ideological crisis of the McCarthy blacklist, the British pulp-thriller tradition in both book and film, and the overarching influence of the wider film noir style. As a result, Night and the City is a cinematic hybrid of quite exceptional quality.
Night and the City by Andrew Pulver is published by BFI/Palgrave.
No comments:
Post a Comment